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Comment by dan_mctree | Hacker News Reader

>but the catastrophist discourse that there's a deep slowdown in productivity compared to the previous decades and that today we're mostly relying on things we already did in the past maps pretty well with my perception.

Mine too. Any ideas why productivity has slowed down so much? Is this a software online observation, or more of a wider pattern

With software I guess part of the problem is that there's a lot of diminishing returns, with it being much easier to just crank out some initial prototype that does a lot, then it is to adjust some spaghetti mess that users deeply rely on. But that should only really affect individual projects, not necessarily the industry as a whole

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> Mine too. Any ideas why productivity has slowed down so much?

It's not exactly a new idea:

> The term "software crisis" was coined by some attendees at the first NATO Software Engineering Conference in 1968 at Garmisch, Germany. [1]

As you can see, people have had the perception that it's harder to crank out software than before for a long time now. The reality is that we're collectively vastly better at it than we used to be, and that what we're trying to do gets harder and harder. No one is paying for the kind of productivity software dev had in the 2000's, and no one will be paying us 20 years from now for doing what we do now. Except if maintaining older software that yields value - in which case, well, maintaining and expanding a brownfield is always harder than greenfield.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_crisis

>Mine too. Any ideas why productivity has slowed down so much? Is this a software online observation, or more of a wider pattern

It's a wider pattern in fact:

"The productivity paradox, also referred to as the Solow paradox, could refer either to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s despite rapid development in the field of information technology (IT) over the same period, or to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States and developed countries from the 2000s to 2020s; sometimes the newer slowdown is referred to as the productivity slowdown, the productivity puzzle, or the productivity paradox 2.0."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

this compares apples to vitamins in a way -- what is possible and what is expected have changed so much in thirty years for office and information work, that reducing it to a pair of numbers seems ridiculous

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