<story><title>An alternative cause for the Great Stagnation: the cargo cult company</title><url>https://www.shyamsankar.com/p/technology-is-the-problem</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>candiddevmike</author><text>The Costco screenshot is really interesting.  The terminal apps of old were truly works of art and _incredibly_ fast.  A non-technical worker wouldn&amp;#x27;t take long to understand the system and the keys&amp;#x2F;shortcuts to do something quickly.  I remember having to sit with a few folks when we were looking at modernizing an app, watching them with a few key strokes process a record or something and thinking &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;ll never match this speed&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Web or even desktop apps these days really pale in comparison.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nicbou</author><text>I edit text for a living. I&amp;#x27;ve recently moved from a content management system to markdown files on my computer. It&amp;#x27;s insane how fast the latter feels. Everything just works instantly, and the software is built for power users.&lt;p&gt;I wonder how much productivity is lost looking at spinners on single-page apps, and clicking around web interfaces instead of modifying files.&lt;p&gt;I really feel that when I do my accounting. These 1-3 second delays between pages add up to a lot.</text></comment>
<story><title>An alternative cause for the Great Stagnation: the cargo cult company</title><url>https://www.shyamsankar.com/p/technology-is-the-problem</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>candiddevmike</author><text>The Costco screenshot is really interesting.  The terminal apps of old were truly works of art and _incredibly_ fast.  A non-technical worker wouldn&amp;#x27;t take long to understand the system and the keys&amp;#x2F;shortcuts to do something quickly.  I remember having to sit with a few folks when we were looking at modernizing an app, watching them with a few key strokes process a record or something and thinking &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;ll never match this speed&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Web or even desktop apps these days really pale in comparison.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hedora</author><text>There have been systematic studies of this.  UI productivity for people that have had time to learn the software peaked in the mid 1980’s.&lt;p&gt;So, the industry traded being able to walk up and use a thing in the first 30 seconds for having it be painfully bad after the first 30 minutes.&lt;p&gt;People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare”.  That’s only true if you count users that bounce after 29 minutes the same as users that use the software more than once.</text></comment>