I take issue with the basic assumption of the article. Sustained productivity growth is hard and would not have continued without the software revolution.

Let's take a look at agriculture.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2018/march/agricultural...

Mechanization and the widespread adoption and improvement of mechanized farming has lead to staggering productivity / farmer growth over the last 70 years. But there is only so much you can do with "dumb" machines. Today growth is being driven by computerized information gathering, planning, monitoring, and precision planting / soil maintenance.

To maintain a growth curve takes constant innovation. Just because the growth doesn't significantly alter its slope does not mean that there is a missing improvement bump.

If you decomposed slopes like these you would see they are compound sigmoids where growth is driven by one technology and then another, or an adoption of a new process, etc.

So IMO if "software doesn't show up in productivity" you're not looking hard enough.

Quick reminder from your friendly local SRE: never ever issue certificates that expire on weekends. Make certs expire in the middle of the afternoon on a business day wherever your operators live and work. The cert in question expires at May 30 10:48:38 2020 GMT, which smells suspiciously like a fixed time after the cert was generated, rather than at a well-chosen point in time.