Ask HN: Is it feasible to increase your productivity by 30% a year for 60 years? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it feasible to increase your productivity by 30% a year for 60 years?

    >>> productivity = 1
    >>> for i in range(60):
    ...     productivity *= 1.3
    ... 
    >>> productivity
    6864377.17274471

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Why iteration?

http://www.google.com/search?q=1.3**60

Good point. I guess iteration comes more intuitively (to me at least).

well, you need to measure productivity. One way to measure it is income. I've had close to 30% or so on average if you say I started working at 15 for $4/hr, and I'm 29 now; I can get $150/hr for some short-term work that is within my core skillset. Of course, I'm about half that for longer-term work. still, if you only count my 'long term' work rate, I've got 15%, and I imagine it's not that difficult to be twice as good at improving as I am.

Now, most of my efforts are focused on my business... from here, it's quite possible that I will have another few 'good years' where my income shoots up a lot. (the last 100% year I remember was when I got my first programmer/SysAdmin gig at 17.)

So yeah, I think 30% is possible. I think it's going to be hard, and would require an exceptional person, but I think it's possible.

The issue is not with making 30% Y/Y gains for a while, it's the mathematical challenge of doing it for a sustained 60 years.

indeed. I didn't do the math much past now, and the income curve supports the '30% productivity growth, compounded yearly is unsustainable for 60 years' thesis, even for bill gates.

If you made $4/hour at age 15. 30% Y/Y growth would have you making over $21,000,000 PER HOUR at age 74, 60 years later.

You really think you could command that kind of pay increase, not adjusted for inflation?

Not a chance.

yup, I'm on crack. Ignore me.

It might depend on what you produce?

You do not follow Moore's law, so no.

Well, what if you created tools to make yourself more productive? And then used those tools to make better tools, and so on?

How about this logic? Consider the strides one makes between the ages of 0-5 years old; that's certainly 30% or greater year over year. Or the strides one makes between 15 and 20 years old; maybe 30% or greater year over year. But then consider how little people change beyond say 25 or 30 years old. Someone from 40 to 45 has hardly changed at all, let alone 30% annually. So that's why I don't think one could do it for 60 years. Maybe a for a few in your early and formative years.

edit: my point is that as I age, I become more focused on improving the things that I want to (and that I think I can) improve. I'm no longer spending time learning what others think i should learn. I don't know how many hours I wasted on handwriting, or learning how to play the piano, or other things that parents or others wanted for me as a child.

I'm a rather different person than I was at 25. I'm starting to get the hang of bending my environment to suit my needs rather than bending myself to the environment. My crazy ideas are 'ramen profitable' now. That's a big step up from just talking about and occasionally implementing crazy ideas, then getting bored and doing something else. My income between 25 and 29 went up almost 30% a year. Now, part of that was that my income barely changed at all from 21-25, see, I was born in '80. Few people in our industry did well those years.

I mean, right now I'm starting to learn some of the social skills and "responsibility" I skipped when I blew off school to play in the .com boom. Massive productivity increases there (maybe not in terms of coding, but in terms of getting things done, it's definitely worth something.)

I still feel unfinished, like I'm still a child. There is a lot left to learn. My body has begun to go downhill, I mean, I can't stay up all night drinking mtn dew like I used to, but that presents it's own, possibly productivity enhancing challenges. Apparently the retna in one eye is detaching. I mean, the doctor did something with a laser, and it's under control, but from what I understand, if you've got one eye with a detaching retna, it's much more likely that your other eye is going to fail same way. So one of my next projects is to learn how to use audio output from a computer as a blind person does. I figure if my eyes don't fail it, well, I've got another output device, and possibly the beginnings of a discrete wearable computer. And if they do, if I can still use a computer, I'll get a driver and carry on as usual.

(ugh, I actually spent a bunch of time over the last two days going over my backups trying to find one of those abandoned projects from when I was 25. I've got some email from the era, but I don't seem to have the code.)

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