
Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago? - dvanwag
Just wondering how many other people are feeling overwhelmed by technological &quot;tools&quot; thst are supposed to save us time and headache. Especially from those that are older, I am wondering if completing tasks was easier in the past than it is today.
======
bsenftner
I started professionally developing in '82\. I'm 52 now. A major part of being
an engineer is filtering out the noise generated by the marketing arms of our
industry. As tech development grew, the number of available tools and
platforms exploded, with an exponential growth in the marketing noise
generated by all these tools trying succeed.

Since web development "matured", the number of disposable tools and the hype
machine surrounding them has convinced a good population of programmers (who
seem to be mostly young) that they are "not cool" if they are using older tool
chains.

I see so many 20 and 30 something developers caught up trying new frameworks,
trying new languages, and experimenting with their dev setup WHILE ON A PAYING
CLIENT'S JOB, basically just fucking over their productivity, and needlessly
generating self-stress.

I am super-uber productive. I am lead developer of 3 libraries, and 2 of the 3
flagship products of the facial recognition company I work. My background
includes VFX production as a developer and digital artist for 9 major release
feature films, lead 3D game console developer for 15 years, and OS developer
of the original PlayStation. Through ALL that, I still use the same "make" I
used back in the 80's, I hand write my make files, just give me a text editor
and a compiler. That is ALL I need, that and to be left alone.

No slack/chat app bullshit, no trying out of tools, just doing the job with
the tools I know very well. Delivering early, or over delivering on time, with
100% certainty of what I'm delivering because I know the libs and tool chain
from years of experience with them.

~~~
dpweb
I’d second that, for web devs too, a text editor is all you need.

After 20+ years but I try out most new tools. Just in case it turns out to be
something great.

In webdev in 20 years Id say ONLY Github/Git, and the cloud Linux VPS, have
met the standard of Great Adds to the toolchain.

~~~
dvddgld
React w/ Babel is undoubtably over hyped and yet surely its still a fairly
significant value add over vanilla JS (when applicable) for how simple it can
make state management and putting together UI.

Evergreen browsers, ES6 and etc are also make development significantly
smoother in my experience, and I didn't even experience much before IE9.

------
nickjj
I started programming (mainly web development) about 20 years ago.

I think the lack of current day productivity is due to there being so much
more input available. 15-20 years ago you were forced to get into the mix of
things and try things out because there weren't 800 blog posts and 227 youtube
videos on the topic you're trying to learn.

Nowadays it's too easy to research yourself to death without trying anything
because you're making decisions based on no experience, but instead
experiences of others.

In attempts to find the perfect solution, you often do nothing. Always
remember that you can get a lot done without it being perfect.

I look back at some old PHP projects I did in the early 2000s. Projects that
have 7,500 line PHP files with mixed in HTML, JS, PHP, SQL, etc., but the
funny thing is, some of those projects are still running today, unmaintained
for 10+ years but work flawlessly on some old crappy shared host. Drag / drop
FTP deploys with no version control of course.

~~~
bitexploder
That was part of Slack's reason for choosing PHP for their backend. Use a
fancy language like Java or Node if you want to do "modern" development. PHP
is for getting shit done.

[https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-
cf7a60065329?...](https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-
cf7a60065329?gi=77d38e6fa36f)

~~~
gkya
That's a silly blogpost, to be honest. Any language provides what he descirbes
under "State" if you run a script through some sort of CGI interface (I'm not
very well informed on all the variations like FastCGI or httpd mod_<lang>
stuff), which is roughly what PHP is doing too. Many languages (among which
PHP too) have some web frameworks written in them which do complicate the
applications, but for good: it's easier to write secure applications (at least
against the most common attacks out there) with them. And then if you're gonna
use PHP with some framework, then why bother the stupid language and not use a
more proper one with a nice framework/library?

~~~
bitexploder
I think it is just the immediate mode, do a thing in a familiar environment
and start making a web app. No dealing with tooling. No `pip install flask`.
Nothing. Just write PHP and you have a web app. I was probably memeing a bit
much there, but I think there were several solid points in the article. I
would not reduce PHP to "run a script through some sort of CGI interface". I
don't use PHP any more. Only Python so I pretty much agree on using a nice
framework/library, but I still see this kind of casual dismissal of PHP. I
think it has progressed enough to not be a toy language. It is no worse than
JavaScript in terms of idiosyncrasies. It (PHP) has plenty of decent features
these days and runs fast thanks to things like HHVM.

------
grecht
As a young person who was 11 years old 10 years ago, I can't really answer
that question. But I believe that most people don't know how to handle today's
distractions, and it takes a toll on their productivity.

Growing up in midst of the rise of smartphones, I just now realized how much
time I spent staring at a screen, being distracted by the constant flow of
information and the constant need to communicate. And I still am, although I
am cutting back on phone usage and senseless browsing. I just made the
decision to subscribe to a weekly printed newspaper instead of fanatically
checking the news every day (or sometimes every hour).

Now I don't have any data on this, but I'm observing that people start
noticing the downsides of digital things and their interfaces, and start going
back to well-tried "analog" stuff. So many blog posts about when to turn your
phone off, apps that let you plant trees for not being on your phone
([https://www.forestapp.cc/en/](https://www.forestapp.cc/en/)), products like
the bullet journal ([https://bulletjournal.com/](https://bulletjournal.com/))
and feature reduced "dumbphones", etc.

It seems to me that this hype of making everything digital, from blackboards
and car interfaces to home automation systems and coffee machines, happened
without ever paying any thoughts to the real world profits gained by this. A
prime example: Teachers use maybe 10% of the functions on an "ActiveBoard"
(digital blackboards you can "write" on), spend a lot of time trying to get
basic functions to work or calibrating the pen, and their writing looks
crooked. Chalk on a blackboard worked just fine before that, the "interface"
is intuitive, and the writing (depending on the teacher) more readable, and it
didn't cost a couple thousand € of taxpayer money. I'd argue that for the most
part ActiveBoards resulted in a big productivity loss in schools.

~~~
bachmeier
> But I believe that most people don't know how to handle today's
> distractions, and it takes a toll on their productivity.

When I'm teaching, I'd love to bring a hammer and smash phones students check
them. They're doing it as a way to avoid thinking, as a way to always have
someone entertain them. They're addicted and don't know it.

> I'd argue that for the most part ActiveBoards resulted in a big productivity
> loss in schools.

We don't use them here, but not that long ago, "dedicated" teachers used
PowerPoint. I've visited universities where they'd put faculty in classrooms
where the only way to "teach" was to use PowerPoint. No amount of technology
changes the fact that you have to communicate.

~~~
falcolas
Eh, before powerpoint, there were printed overhead transparencies. Before
transparencies, there were teachers who spent their entire lecture writing
directly from notes to the blackboard.

Rote teachers are rote teachers.

~~~
gkya
I LOVED transparencies. The teacher brought it to the classroom if was not
already there, and plugged it in. And there you have the presentation. Sit and
wait while a humanities professor is dabbling with the computer corpse
installed in the classroom and the projector that projects nearly a diamond
shaped image onto a random place on the wall, until they just give up after
some dozen of minutes. Or they set up edmodo and send you PPTXs instead of
proper notes, and you need to watch stupid animations until you can get to see
that 64th page with the paragraph you need to read, hopefully not coloured
stupidly or not illegible in another way due to an incompatibility with the
thing on the phone that renders those files, so that you don't have to wait
until you go back home to look at the thing on the computer.

------
shortoncash
No. Git is better, GitHub is better, most package managers for finding things
are better, stack overflow is better, help forums are better, tools are often
free, cloud access and compute power is better, instructional videos on
youtube are better, online classes are better.

I don't want to go back to 10 years ago and definitely not 20 years ago. I
have never been more productive than now.

~~~
greysteil
+1 for package managers. Hard to imagine programming without them, and they're
_much_ better now than 10 years ago.

~~~
shortoncash
The maintainers of package managers and individual packages probably save
humanity so many hours and probably are propelling our entire civilization
forward in ways they probably don't even comprehend. The days before
widespread package managers were really dark and terrible, and arguably the
developer dark ages.

~~~
toomuchtodo
And those package manager maintainers (all the way from distros to software
libraries) don’t see a dime of compensation for it, while companies use open
source tooling to create enormous valuations. It’s a shame.

We salute you package maintainers!

------
e12e
I'm 39, and I've never been more productive. I do think there are some
challenges today, that stems from more people being productive; we see fewer
projects with great, in-depth documentation.

We tend to get decent tutorials, and not very useful machine generated
reference material.

Think react vs "the c programming language". Or docker vs the man pages for
bsd jails.

I think this makes it harder to fully grasp new technologies - there's often
lack of clearly stated vision, or a problem statement (this tools makes x y
and z easier with the following trade-off based on experience with a, b and
c).

In The case of projects like docker, mongodb and puppet - I think we can blame
marketing quite a bit for this.

As for distractions; just turn the stuff off at work, check in your free time.
Hopefully as an adult you've formed some real and lasting relashionships;
people will be there even if you take a day to get back to them...

[ed: as for that related trend of "keeping up to date" (used to mean reading
byte and Dr dobbs etc, then the Web started to dominate with Slashdot, now
it's here and reddit etc - I've found I'm much more comfortable taking a step
back; the hype isn't interesting - what shakes out is.

It's a sad trend that news in general has become very much tabloid, real news
agencies that pay for and do real analysis has been waning for a long time.
Thankfully, technology is more powerful than ever, and enables things like the
intercept or citizen reporting like [http://www.raqqa-
sl.com/](http://www.raqqa-sl.com/) ]

------
neogodless
Your task is to keep your house at a steady 70F when you're there, and 55F
when you're not. Can you do this task more quickly now than you could 20 years
ago?

Your task is to assess your bills and financial health, including outstanding
balances, account balances, interest rates and dividends returned.

Your task is to determine the weather forecast for this afternoon.

Your task is to turn on your computer and download a full-length film.

Your task is to design, implement and deploy a data-driven application with a
web UI. You must find and allocate hosting. The UI must validate user entries
and provide feedback.

Can you give some examples of tasks that take longer to do today?

~~~
swasheck
Your task is to create a lasting representation of the struggle and beauty and
plight of the human race.

Your task is to bring meaningful, sustainable, and relevant hope and quality
of life improvement to society.

We can get more low-value tasks per unit of time now, thanks to technology.
Unfortunately, there's something of our essential humanity that tech has
robbed.

We pay lip service to the fact that tech has made these tasks easier and
faster to do and that we are now freed to use more time engaging meaningful
life. Instead, we are either so information weary, addicted to tech, or just
disconnected from that essence that we don't use this free time well.

We're tired, lazy, disconnected, and addicted. Our ability to think critically
across a range of disciplines has been broadly compromised.

So I'd rather just keep my thermostat at 67, balance my ledgers manually, plan
for seasonally appropriate weather and adapt to change, go to the theater with
my family and/or friends, and maybe write a book.

The only compelling application of technology is synchronizing financial
assessments. Otherwise, I think I'd be happier if I wasn't addicted.

~~~
sertorius
> Your task is to create a lasting representation of the struggle and beauty
> and plight of the human race. > Your task is to bring meaningful,
> sustainable, and relevant hope and quality of life improvement to society.

I'd be curious as to your opinion on the shape of this curve in history. Did
we peak at some date in history? Perpetual downward slope? Perpetual upward
slope?

------
d--b
Finance guy here: the productivity in finance has sky rocketed compared to 20
years ago. More computing power means quicker and better decision making.
Higher level programming languages has translated into much quicker deliveries
of new stuff. Quality tools has reduced a lot the needs of relying on other
people.

~~~
dvddgld
I think this is the reality for most areas, it's never been simpler to
actually get projects doing something useful in the wild

------
payne92
It's very difficult to say: "productivity" has changed because the "products"
that we work toward have changed.

You spend an hour screwing around with a software problem while editing your
video, but you're editing 4K shot on a consumer camera, not 8mm black and
white film with no sound.

You lose an hour to some stupid router firmware problem, but a 30 min later,
you are Facetime-ing with a friend and her new baby (not even possible for
most people 10 years ago).

You reboot your phone to clear a weird Wifi problem, but 10 minutes later
you're driving straight to the store that has your product in stock, while
getting routed around a huge traffic jam. While listening to the radio show
(er, podcast) you missed last week.

I think tech is really changing social interactions (and not entirely in a
good way), but the time and headaches of life are still there -- they're just
further up the abstraction stack.

------
mattybrennan
No, we weren't. This is something carefully measured by economists. The
workforce is consistently becoming more productive, albeit at a slower rate

[https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-
pro...](https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-productivity-
slowdown-since-the-great-recession.htm)

------
juandazapata
I remember that if you wanted to do Windows programming in the pre-internet
era, you'd have to buy some manuals via phone, then wait for about 3 weeks to
get them delivered and then start hacking. You could also buy an MSDN
subscription for several thousand dollars.

Nowadays you're just one google search away. Definitely more productive.

------
blitmap
_puts on tinfoil hat_

We are convinced we are not productive - to the point we aren't recognizing
when we are accomplishing more than 10, 15, 20 years ago.

------
adventured
I'm in the started 20x years ago boat. The last few years, with the explosion
in the number of tools, I've made a consciously aggressive decision to make
the tools be my servant whenever possible. It was easier in the past, because
there were fewer tools to choose from, and in line with that a lot fewer
unnecessary tools to make the mistake of wasting time on. We've hit an
inflection, where simplicity explodes into vast specialization. That is likely
to get worse before it gets better. People that used to be able to do it all,
are now drowning in a wave of tools & increased specialization in an attempt
to hold on to that ability. Most likely, if you're one of those people (I am),
you'll either have to let go of trying to be able to use every tool, or you'll
have to choose to specialize more.

It probably clicks at a different point for everyone, whether 5, 10, 20 years
- eventually the thing you'll find that's always going to end up being more
valuable than learning a dozen new tools, is your time. Your time is an
extremely scarce resource. I'd like to emphasize that 407 times in a row here.

Tools aren't really tools if they don't make you more productive in some
manner. What would be the point of a fancy new hammer that caused you 5x more
work and accomplished the exact same result as a traditional hammer?

To answer your question. In my opinion, yes, five or more years ago it was
easier and faster to complete routine tasks when it comes to building
Web/Internet services & product. You can counter the growing complexity by
refusing to do unnecessary things. If you don't need to use a tool, do not use
it just because it's the latest fad.

Python/PHP/equivalent + Postgres/MySQL/equivalent + vanilla JavaScript =
90-95% of what you'll ever need. If you're building the next juggernaut Web
service, then sure, use more tools if you have to, the emphasis though goes on
the have to part.

------
andrewl-hn
No, I wasn't. About 15 years ago I've read about older "neckbeard" developers
who allegedly could solve complex problems with a few lines of concise clear
code in a very Shir amount of time. At the time I thought that was a myth, but
now I realize I'm becoming one.

Tooling can be overwhelming, but one don't have to master every single tool
they encounter. To this day I use only a few shortcuts in my editor, I don't
remember every command line switch that exists for ls, cp, or git. I launch
the Dec tools in my browser using a mouse, etc.

But it doesn't matter. These days I make fewer mistakes, and when there's a
bug I can accurately predict where its source is.

~~~
leetcrew
do you mean "greybeard"? unless the meaning has shifted a lot over time, you
probably don't want to call yourself a "neckbeard".

~~~
jrs95
But isn’t calling yourself a neckbeard instead of a greybeard kind of a
neckbeard thing to do? Maybe we should just leave it alone? ;)

~~~
leetcrew
I mean yeah, but I just don't want the poor fellow going around announcing
himself as a neckbeard irl.

------
themarkn
Having dabbled in web development for 15+ years, I feel like there can be a
lot of pain involved in getting a dev environment set up and configured
correctly for a project these days. But to me it is worth it: the resulting
workflow becomes as simple as it used to be in the old days, except there is
now much more power and flexibility available to me as I work. I sure hate
debugging some BS related to a nested dependency in some random package, but I
like having my code linted and compiled to ES5 meaning I can use modern
conveniences without too much panic on the cross-browser front. I think over
all I'm a lot more productive with the new tools.

------
tofflos
We can be more productive but the bar keeps being been raised as our
productivity goes up. Customers expect more in terms of non-functional
requirements such as usability, performance, maintainability and security.
This in turn fuels an arms race in tools and technologies which a lot of
developers are struggling to keep up with.

Some of these productivity gains are insignificant but developers have to
follow them anyway or risk being left behind. This means we're spending more
of our day learning and less of our day developing.

As a developer it has become more important to find a comfort zone with a few
well chosen tools and keeping an eye open for incremental improvements.

------
foepys
What do you mean by "task"? It has never been easier (and cheaper) to write
fault-tolerant software and deploy it on a global scale to thousands or
millions of users.

Or do you mean things like shopping and cleaning?

------
kod
10 years ago I had a private office, a small team, no scheduled meetings.

Really hard to find a workplace like that anymore, and it sure as hell was
more productive than open offices and agile cargo culting.

------
matt4077
No, absolutely not. It’s myopic to even entertain the possibility. At least in
web dev, which I have experienced.

For some reason people still love to criticize browsers, even though they have
improved dramatically. Around 2000, every UI required two or three versions.
Once you got it done in Firefox, you would start on the IE version, which
would take almost as much time as the first implementation. Then, you’d repeat
the process for each point release of IE.

On the server, rails was the big revolution. The big achievement of DHH wasn’t
so much techical as social: here, you had an extremely well-curated set of
best practices, smuggled into your project under the guise of a framework.
Before, you’d join a team and find the database password was in a switch block
three levels deep in config/real/colors.inc.php3.~bac.php. Suddenly, you could
join any team and know your way around the codebase on the second day.

Many other things that used to be major work items have become trivially easy.
It would routinely take me a day or so just to get somewhat recent versions of
Apache, php, and MySQL (and all their libraries) to compile on a new server.
You’d encounter all sorts of difficult-to-debug networking problems when
moving to production. There were certain tasks that seem like they should be
trivial, but were actually terribly difficult to pull off in the web stack,
such as chats.

------
jorge-fundido
Yes? I think we get more done in the short-to-mid-term but the fruits of our
labor are less likely to survive long-term. There's no value judgement there -
there are pro's & con's. At 40 years around the sun, I've got one leg in the
"Get off my lawn!" and the other leg in the "Damn, these kids are wicked
smart!" camp. I find that people over-focus on the seemingly "attention
deficit" critiques of modern day, but even if that is the case, I think it's a
small price to pay for having orders of magnitude more people in the space -
there will be a lot of failures but there will be more successes relative to
prior generations.

If we want to blame younger generations for not "thinking deeper" or "solving
the hard problems", then we should shift our focus towards the economic
drivers that are favoring quick/quantity over quality. I know how to develop
software but if an employer is given the choice of fixing a buggy tool at the
cost of maintaining a fork (GASP!) vs spending unbounded man-hours working
around said buggy tool, my money's on that they will choose the latter since
maintaining tool X is not a core competency. Meanwhile, tool X is hemoraging
production data or producing buggy results and nobody flinches.

------
raarts
I am 57. And 40 years in software development. And I would say yes, but with
some caveats.

First, the speed with which new frameworks and tools come out, definitely
slows things down, because of the need to learn them all over again. Second,
part of my past productivity was thanks to me writing on top of what existed.
Example: 20 years ago I wrote a new product in PHP/HTML etc. Had both realtime
and CRUD. I predicted that in the end it would need a lot of screens, so I
started with writing an extensive, data-driven screen library. This was the
main reason we could crank out new features like crazy. 2 years ago I picked
up Laravel, the 'best of breed' these days, and was surprised that it did not
include anything that.

On the other hand, the field has advanced considerably: concepts gaining
traction like immutability, functional programming, CI/CD, containerization,
really helped moving everything forward. So I'm not an old grumpy greybeard
that claims there's nothing new under the sun, and am really exited about a
lot of the new stuff. Which I am happy to use.

I started out with mainframe assembler and C, and am now in Elixir, Docker,
React Native. Higher level languages really help general productivity. So my
answer is yes, we have become more productive.

------
conan_fr
I think yes and we were more focused on the task to achieve but on the other
hand, computers were dead slower than today's ones. I remember launching tasks
for a whole night (for example generating a mandelbrot 720×348 MDA picture
near 1984 on IBM PC) and checking the result the following day. Now we can
code (IDE with watch mode) and see the result in realtime as we can see on
Live Coding session video on YouTube.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Heh. I remember getting a 68000 to increment a (32-bit) zero until it was zero
again. It took it 8 hours. Nowadays, it's a second (if the compiler doesn't
optimize it out completely).

What's that? We're discussing _productivity_? Oh. Carry on...

------
tonyedgecombe
Yes, there is a lot more choice and some of those choices are questionable,
especially if you aren't working at Google/Facebook scale.

From a productivity point of view you can ignore a lot of it and that is
largely what I have done. However if you intend to have a long career in this
industry that might not be a good idea.

------
ralphc
I recently gave a software engineering talk at a high school's career day, and
a student asked how the industry has changed, and it caused me to think about
this. In a lot of ways I think it's a wash. We could do less with the tools
back then but we were expected to do less. In the 80's we had Borland C++ or
VC++ to write our text-based screens and BTrieve-based databases on the same
machine. The tools have expanded considerably but we're expected to spin up
databases, code for them, handle multi-user, multithreaded (or async) coding,
GUIs or mobile web-based UIs, use different languages for each part of the
puzzle.

------
lotsofpulp
The ability to communicate with anyone around the world within seconds surely
helped in getting things done. I don’t know if it created even more tasks, but
I would rather have this ability than not.

------
zerostar07
There is an overabundance of tools becausd there are less original ideas that
can lead to profitable business. In other words people cant stay idle so they
made too many tools while researching business. You can browse HN from 10years
ago to see that people discussed tools far less.

I think programmers were always equally productive at any time, because their
job is to constantly automate the non-productive parts, so sooner rather than
later they are eliminated.

------
w_t_payne
I felt that I had better tools 10 years ago...

------
quickthrower2
Comparing apples with apples - what we produce today on the WWW and could we
have done the same stuff faster 20 years ago? Absolutely not. We are much more
productive today. BUT... so it all of the competition, so in terms of winning
rat races, no.

------
gilles82
What I see is that a lot of people feel the need to always look for new tools
and technology to fix their problems, often causing them to get in a big loop
of constantly finding new issues and challenges.

My biggest challenge these days if finding the just right amount of "new tools
/ solutions" that I can get control over, without losing focus on the problem
I'm actually solving. I often find myself "too deep down the rabbit hole", and
am getting more and more comfortable with just cutting all the "cool new
stuff" and find another angle to get things done. 9 out of 10 times you can
find a very nice solution within the technology you master, and it's best to
ignore that "I need to use cool new stuff"-itch.

~~~
gilles82
Kind of forgot the answer the question: Not at all!

The power you have these days over the complete spectrum of software is just
magic! You can build a whole new platform / application in days! It's a
wonderful time to be in this industry and I love it!

------
lkrubner
This is why a simplicity of style is something we should celebrate. My best
known essay is "Object Oriented Programming Is An Expensive Disaster Which
Must End" and I think one reason that essay remains so popular is because
there are many of us who feel the way dvanwag feels: that we actually become
less productive when weighed down with too many frameworks, too many tools,
too many abstractions.

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/object-oriented-
progr...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/object-oriented-programming-
is-an-expensive-disaster-which-must-end)

But it is important to realize that this has nothing to do with time passing.
The most expensive failed software project ever was the attempt to the
modernize the FAA, in the USA, from 1982 to 1994, a project which cost $3.7
billion and which failed completely. And there, too, the problem was too many
tools, too much abstraction, too many experiments with options:

" _The project was handed over to human factor pundits, who then drove the
design. Requirements became synonymous with preferences. Thousands of labor-
months were spent designing, discussing, and demonstrating the possibilities:
colors, fonts, overlays, reversals, serpentine lists, toggling, zooming,
opaque windows, the list is huge. It was something to see. (Virtually all of
the marketing brochures – produced prematurely and in large numbers – sparkled
with some rendition or other of the new controller console.) It just wasn’t
usable… The cost of what turned out to be a 14-year human factors study did
not pay off. Shortly before the project was terminated a controller on the CBS
evening news said: “It takes me 12 commands to do what I used to do with one.”
I believe he spoke for everyone with common sense._ "

[http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-worst-software-
proj...](http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-worst-software-project-
failure-ever)

So we would be wrong to think that software developers were productive in the
past, whereas now they are not productive. But rather, some paradigms of
development tend towards too much abstraction, and when followed they lead to
failed projects. That was true in the 1980s, and it is true now.

I do think, on the frontend, the desire to take markup languages such as HTML,
and then make them work on all output devices (desktop computers, tablets,
mobile phones) has lead to an era where too much abstraction is the norm on
frontend projects. I tried to imagine an alternative in my essay "The problem
with HTML":

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/the-problem-with-
html](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/the-problem-with-html)

~~~
tdeck
But _feeling_ productive and _being_ productive are not necessarily the same
thing. Sometimes I feel really productive at a task (e.g. writing a nested
data arser in Bash) with a lot of unnecessary drudge work because I can
comfortably plug away at it for a long period of time. But with the drudge
work mitigated (e.g. using a real language with a parser framework) I'm left
focusing on the hard problems, which causes me to become mentally drained more
quickly, procrastinate more, and feel less productive overall.

------
petra
Consider building sites with WordPress. Does anything in the past compares ?

------
gkya
Assuming this is not IT-only, I'll share my thoughts as a humanities student
(and prospective researcher).

For my first year in the uni, after deciding to not pursue programming
professionally, I decided to go low-tech: notebooks and agenda, internet only
when necessary. I definitely read more books and got more of my todo-lists
done.

Then I decided I'd use the computer more, links and images were logical
extensions to notetaking, and being able to hyperlink all my notes and
documents was an unforegoable improvement (thank you Org-mode and Emacs, if
not for these two jewels, I'd not bother using a computer for anything else
than the browser).

Nowadays most of my stuff is digital, and I use some "tools" to interact with
them. I research in the browser, I'm slowly getting the habit of reading
shorter papers with less than 20 or so pages on the computer, almost all my
notes are on the computer (with some waiting to be digitised), I use Emacs and
other tools for processing all sort of data (not in the statistical sense),
version control is used everywhere, from todo lists to orgs to short stories
to research notes, wherever applicable (I use Mercurial or RCS generally,
depending on the task).

Comparing the two ways of working, I definitely have to put up with more
distraction with the digital setup, but I also know and learn more. It's hard
to tame internet to not be invasive (middle finger to content websites which
disable RSS feeds for pageviews, fuck you all), given most actors are actively
trying to be invasive. Recently, for example, I found a reseacher whose work I
wanted to follow. She had a twitter profile and an academia.com one, both
platforms that provide no RSS feeds. No other profiles. Now I either have to
open myself to this sort of invasive websites that are constantly trying to
learn more about me and push stuff all the time, or just not follow her. And I
chose the latter. But that's fucked. The business model of the internet is "we
give you some stuff, often other people's stuff, pay us with your attention,
and moreover we sell you to as much advertisers as we can". That's fucked, but
given the utility of internet, one has to learn to put up with it, and that's
not all that easy.

I do not follow live news, even with RSS. I'm subscribed to some mailing lists
from newspapers and journals, weekly or daily. Other than this, I use RSS
extensively. If your page does not have an RSS feed, I'll probably not follow
you. A newsletter? Only when your thing is really interesting, and you post no
more often than weekly. I follow youtube channels with it, so I don't have to
open YT homepage and be subject to many interesting but distracing links I
might be tempted to click. I do not enable notifications from anything,
including mail, even on mobile phone. I decide when I want to know about the
outer world: check feeds or mail manually, when I want. I use no social media.
I do use Reddit, but I don't subscribe to any sub, instead, I group them into
multis, and check the relevant multi when I think I need to see sth. there
(and to my surprise I spend a fraction of the time I spent there in the past,
even when subscribed to a handful subs, when I have a blank page from
reddit.com).

The biggest distraction with computers is internet. And one needs to learn how
to use it defensively. Maybe we need a "Defensive Internet Users" wiki thing?

------
klit79
Agile sprint with barely no gap does not help

------
cmoscoso
Web dev, yes.

------
tanilama
In what way, can you specify?

------
gaius
_I am wondering if completing tasks was easier in the past than it is today_

Yes definitely. Here's how I used to work back in the day: I would sit down at
my desk on which there would be one monitor, probably a 17" or if I was lucky
a gorgeous 19" Trinitron with the blackest blacks. I would have my main tool
maximised to full screen - Metrowerks CodeWarrior (Mac), Visual C++ (Windows)
or SPARCworks (Sun). On my desk there would be a paper copy of the spec I was
working on and a couple of reference books, all annotated by hand. I would
code in two solid blocks interrupted only by lunch, and often times I would
lose track of time and know it was lunchtime or hometime only when someone
said.

Nowadays I work in little nibbles of 15-30 minutes at a time, and it's not
just me either - everyone used to work like that and now works like this.
Everyone seems busier because they are juggling more things at once, but
studies have shown that multitasking is a myth, we get much less done than we
used to. Modern tooling without modern distractions and interruptions would be
the dream.

------
Froyoh
No doubt about it!

