Why is technology not making us more productive?
Why is technology not making us more productive?
We are in the midst of a technological revolution, but productivity has not improved.
Because technology doesn't fix upper management flaws
Whenever I work with non-engineers, it's baffling to me how impractical they are. They don't measure things. They don't test things. They don't try new ways of doing things. It's like work is just a place to hang out and push some paper.
I get that we ideally don't want to work, but I would be so bored being so ineffective. I think the article is trying to distinguish between these two kinds of people with respect to IT. With IT, you need to measure. You need to test. You need to plan. You need to experiment. A new idea or implementation can start an entire industry. So many people just don't get that.
The great part is that if you create a good environment, the shit is fun. During good times, I fucking love my job. At bad companies, every day is a living hell.
If we could fix the bugs in modern capitalism, we could see real competition kill off these boring, ineffective companies, ideally in favor of driven but balanced places where people can do cool stuff. Plus, with a good social welfare system, if people wanted to fuck off for a few years, there would definitely be enough surplus production to support that (there probably is now, but it's all hoarded...)
Because their performance matrices are evaluated by how closely they follow their SOP. They are forced to follow it even if it's brain dead. It is up to the ones setting the policies and procedures (the management) to make sure that their SOP and workflow they put in actually works.
If the management don't give a shit, keep giving bullshit orders and setting bullshit targets, workers with common sense will leave from all the frustration, leaving only the kinds of people you met running the department.
It does, however the result is that the small group of assholes that "own" the company get insanely rich. Workers rarely benefit from increased productivity.
Productivity is just measured differently. Every major company has a hand full of process engineers and PPI teams whos only task is to speed up processes and save the company money. The money saved is thrown into a bucket called productivity but its expected YoY for the various different groups. If they stop to use whatever changes its not measured negatively which is confusing.
There is also another side to this: a lot of these "tech companies" are not really built to provide meaningful products and services, instead their aim is for speculative valuation in the stock market.
There is also the use of tech in bussiness that is inherently unproductive economically. Like all the shops on Amazon, they are mostly selling the very same thing out of Amazon's warehouse bins. These "online business entrepreneurs" aren't actually adding anything new to the market.
Then there is also tech companies "cannibalising" on existing markets. For every tech companies rapidly rising, there are tens to hundreds of brick and mortar businesses going under. Added together the total sum of resultant economic growth will of course be very much smaller than expected.