Hacker News Reader

Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

We've learned that better tools doesn't actually create more productivity. Lots of people talk about how they dread email. A singular mega tool like Facebook or Evernote isn't great. Lots of disparate little tools isn't much better.

We've learned that data is unreliable. The highest click through rates come from nudity, or totally gross things like gore and trypophobia triggering holes. The highest CTR on text comes from well, clickbait. At this point everyone realizes this but some still don't notice that data-driven decisions optimizes for weird things.

IOT doesn't scale as well as we thought, because hardware doesn't scale at the rate of web software that we're used to. So hardware companies do more poorly than expected. Replace "hardware" with anything else that's hard to upgrade, and you get software-other hybrids like Uber and WeWork which didn't scale as well as anticipated.

View on HN

> We've learned that better tools doesn't actually create more productivity. Lots of people talk about how they dread email. A singular mega tool like Facebook or Evernote isn't great. Lots of disparate little tools isn't much better.

I'm struggling to figure out what you mean by this.

Obviously it's not literally true (I've saved my colleagues thousands of hours with some of the tools I've made), but I can't figure out what else you could mean.

I think it's more like some people walk in the office, comment and tag on Trello, reply emails, deal with messages on Slack, convert and forward files on Dropbox. Then it's lunch.

After lunch, they reply to some more emails, take a meeting on Zoom (waiting half an hour for that one guy to fix his microphone). Then they have 1 hour of work before the evening scrum stand-up, which is done on Slack or Zoom because half the team is remote.

But the CEO doesn't use Slack and his inbox is always full, so we forward him a report on WhatsApp, which has to be converted to PDF, which he then manually puts in his Prezi presentation for a client meeting tonight.

This doesn't match any officd I've worked in, nor any office anyone I know has worked in.

Then you're an exceptional person among exceptional people. While it's a no-brainer that tech tools bring us utility, there is a nontrivial time, thought, and effort cost to engaging with nearly any tool. Sometimes that cost outweighs the advantage of the tool or feeds behaviors that are counterproductive. A great example of this. The younger half of my ad agency is on Slack. The older half tried it but it just wouldn't take. The young people are productive together, but their habitual Slacking becomes a distraction when they have teams with more seniors than juniors. The tool unintentionally created a divide. Every solution has costs and benefits like anything else. Iatrogenesis. I've definitely seen offices get so overtooled that they resemble what the above person was saying.

I think of it as a type of supply-side vs demand-side economics.

I think most employers assumed that employees with a 2x faster computer would send 2x the emails (or whatever task) in the same amount of time. In reality, they might send the same number of emails in half the time, then go home early.

In my experience, hardware scales exponentially. Until business figures out a "need" for all the extra data they have they tend to under value IOT and use it counter productively - like monitoring employees in draconian ways.

There are lots of efficiencies that only show up once you monitor equipment for a couple of years but project leads don't really have that kind of time to show benefits

Reply on news.ycombinator.com