Is software reducing our productivity? | Hacker News Reader

Is software reducing our productivity?

2 pointsmorpheos1372 comments

Every year it seems software becomes more complex and slower. Is over investment in (bloated) software actually reducing productivity and economic growth potential. For example, Slack, a program I have not personally used but have read about on HN. What is the point. It seems like it is a glorified chat client. Shouldn't employees be working instead of chatting? If collaboration is required is a bloated chat client that consumes hundreds of megabytes of ram at idle really necessary? Is it better than video conference? A phone call? An email? How much time is wasted per day checking slack? Is it possible asynchronous Communication is actually better after a certain point? Do we really need to check our Slack or email every 15 minutes? What are the barriers to entry if Slack is actually a valuable technology. Can we design a chat client that uses less than 20 MB of ram? They did it in the 1990s with similar functionality. What is the point in Git and Docker and Kubernetes? Why do we need all these tools just to manage churn and dependency hell? Maybe less churn and more modularity would be preferable. I believe we could have similar functions with much simpler software...

As factorio players have said, "the factory is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding factory", the answer is nowadays the software that is developed is also much more complex, need higher availability and involve more parties than in the past.

Nowadays systems are integrated between divisions / departments, unlike 20 years ago, so to communicate we need many channels and thus ms team / slack.

Nowadays system need to have 24/7 availability and downtime is bad, hence kubernetes.

Nowadays we use more service tools, such as redis, elastic, grafana, etc. There are many more version of php and sql than in the past. Hence the need to use docker.

Performing ajax call is a big thing in the past, now it's a basic requirement.

Having worked back in the old days of mail and phone calls, the biggest change is people leaving it to the last minute to commit.

So you want to organise an event on weekend months away, I could phone someone and they would say there and then 'yes I'll turn up' and I would trust them to actually turn up on the day without any further communication.

Now no one will commit to anything until Thursday night before because they can more easily assess all the other available options.

Perhaps this optimises the final chosen activity based on how the person is feeling on the day or the weather, but it's the 'unseen' effect that events that require some forward planning, aren't attempted.

Software has dramatically increased the productivity of a lot of activities. We can now do things we wouldn't think of attempting. Munging a whole countries data rather than breaking it down into provinces. But I think there are a lot of human behavioural changes that we're still experimenting with.

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