Comment by clort | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clort | Hacker News Reader

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I worked ~20 years ago doing this exact job at Royal Mail in UK. The software that they were using was not their own, but being created on contract by Lockheed Martin, who did not write it themselves but subcontracted out to another company. I'm pretty sure that the basics of the software will have been sold again and again to different companies. The end result of the contract was that Royal Mail did not own the software and when the development contract was up, there were several stupid things that could not/would not be fixed without serious money being spent on a new contract.

The issues that we (as keyers) had with the software in development were virtually impossible to address, given that there were several corporate layers between the contacts. The one time that a load of developers came to our data centre to observe keyers in action, one of our quick-thinking lower managers managed to snag a contact detail and for about a month there was an easy option to get small niggles fixed.

oh, btw my tph was 2-3000 so I don't know why the USPS workers are so slow. Actually thats just boasting, I probably do - it is likely that the software is a whole lot better than it was, which means that the quality of the images that it cannot handle has gone right down and takes longer for a human to process as a result.

I did the same job back in the mid-90's at the facility discussed in the article when it first opened. The piece rate was probably higher, though the measure we cared about was keystrokes per hour so I don't know if I ever saw a real statistic for this.

The work-load almost certainly has changed with technological improvement. Back then, my recollection is that we'd see more machine type than handwritten addresses, but only slightly. Also we were only filling in the gaps depending on how well the original OCR worked. Sometimes we'd have to key in the important portions of the whole address (house number, part of a street name, postal code)... sometimes just the postal code, and sometimes only a portion of the postal code. Some of these data entry modes were faster than others; the extended "zip code" data entry only required two numeric keystrokes whereas the full data entry mode required much more time.

I worked on the LM side of this team ~8 years ago, and it sounds like they learned some lessons since you had to deal with them! The ML team was still in house and working on all sorts of projects, and there was a sizeable software team working on the software around this.

One of my most valuable lessons working there as a green engineer - you can figure out more in an hour sitting down with the end user then months of meetings before then.

What does the data entry look like for this job?

The article says, "Our keyers key about a thousand images an hour, so they're spending about 2 seconds on an image".

Are keyers typing whole addresses in that quickly?

No, at least I wasn't. My kph was about 10-12k giving 5-6 keystrokes per task if I recall.

At least in the UK, if we had a postcode then that was enough. Not even required to type the whole thing. The UK postcode is split into two parts, the first part (outcode) designates the sorting office to send to and for newly posted mail on the afternoon shift then thats the main thing they wanted immediately; the image has been taken and the mail item has been tagged and will be in a van for some hours. If no postcode then usually the postal town is enough to get it on its way. When I was there, the second part (incode) was not done but I think these days that is processed by the night shift before the posties came in at 5am to take it for delivery.

Looking at the pictures in the article, they only have one address on the screen at a time. We had two; the one you are keying and the next one stacked above. It doesn't take long to learn to pipeline, so you are looking at the top image all the time but typing the details from the bottom one which was previously up top. There was an indicator to the side saying what it wanted and you generally only had to type that or various rejects.

also, 70 hours a week of that is pretty insane. Our normal was 40 and sometimes (eg xmas) up to 20 hours overtime was available. We worked 60 mins for each 10 minute eye break, and one 30 min meal break during the shift.

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