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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

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It's not the workforce, though I would understand why you might think that.

It is the work. Go do a shift in a kitchen, during rush, on a Friday. The term "in the weeds" will make sudden sense. All the pressure of desk job and product will seem easy.

The system is optimized to use what you have, and can't loose. If you run out of pickles or mayo you fucked up so bad that god help you.

?????

Illiterate or not, with this system, you can "read" the order at a glance rather than having to read a list of items or decoding a set of symbols. That might shave a second per order.

Another point, ink in markers run out and thermal printers frequently run out of paper at inopportune times. I presume condiments are well stocked. No hunting for a new marker or fetching a new roll of receipt paper with this system.

Can I get a kick in the pants along with the old "they work in the [some other] industry instead of in tech, so they are likely to be idiots" nonsense?

Go watch craps dealers in a casino. They use a visual placement system to track 16 players at a time covering dozens of possible bets per player. No letters or writing needed at all. And casino dealers are highly skilled people.

Can also address issues with language barriers and sloppy handwriting. If a person doesn't read a given language, that's not the same as illiteracy.

Rather it's a system for encoding orders and tracking their state through the process using the materials in the process itself. It enables chefs to plow through orders without having to keep state information in their heads, and probably (I've never observed a Waffle House kitchen in action) makes it possible to swap out chefs without having to describe everything or even interrupt the process.

It's genius as it is. Adding writing to it would only slow things down.

What are your thoughts on Reduced Instruction Set Computers?

I'm not the OP, but I'm pretty sure there's a simple, uncontroversial answer here. They were an excellent idea at the time, allowing much more pipelining with the microarchitecture design techniques in use back then. In the time since, the complexity of the instruction set has stopped being such a big deal.

C'mon. Super pretentious viewpoint to think that employees at Waffle House are illiterate enough that they can't assemble orders without symbols.

This stuff can be Googled to level-set the conversation. First search result says:

- 54% of adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level.

- 21% of Americans 18 and older are illiterate in 2022.

We can dig further to find more sources of data and judge how reputable they are. If those numbers are incorrect, correct them and go from there.

These are totally different versions of the concept of "literacy", though. Being able to read/write abbreviations of "eggs, scrambled", or "oatmeal" falls well below sixth-grade reading level. Literacy statistics involve much more comprehension than reading/writing food orders. Plenty of illiterate people do work in restaurants writing food orders. This is just a systemized way to remember orders, one that is used across all Waffle Houses, so that an employee from one restaurant switching to another will be just as effective, with no cross training or cultural difference.

What are you trying to say? That all waffle house employees are functionally illiterate? Because that is not what the data says.

No, I have no idea. It does seem that overall US literacy rates are much lower than you’d guess though. Certainly 2x worse than I thought before doing a single Google search.

So it seems wise for companies in general to make their processes accessible to the illiterate, especially if they have more accurate data about their employees’ literacy than this general data.

I only replied because OP seems to be getting jumped on for making a guess that feels uncomfortable to talk about.

That is incredibly state dependent however, looking at https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/How-Serious-Is-Americas..., you are in a different world of literacy if you live in Washington State vs. Texas.

The south happens to be where Waffle House is common.

Luckily https://dollyparton.com/imagination-library is a thing

On a county level, the south doesn't look too bad as long as you're in an urban area: Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Tampa, etc.

https://preview.redd.it/adult-literacy-in-the-us-by-county-v...

The south is less urbanized than the north, so that makes sense.

Presumably the fact they filled out a job application is enough barrier toward literacy. Especially towards words like "egg" or "waffle"

“So if you've ever been to a Waffle House and you notice the menu has pictures of the food on it? …yeah.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwkdGr9JYmE

As someone who is always in the mood for an All-Star Special I would agree that this joke is pretentious and reflects poorly on Hicks despite the very funny delivery :)

It wasn’t my original thought. That’s been the popular justification on Reddit for the system. Makes sense considering WH is a southern-centric restaurant and many in the south would still have struggled with literacy circa 1955 when it was founded.

> likely illiteracy of their workforce

Seriously?

>teaching the workforce just 3-5 letters and using combinations of those letters would be a massive upgrade over this system.

Upgrade, how exactly? This works fast, does not require paper or pens (which run out, dry out or go missing).

See it in action - it works fast as hell

also the medium on which the message is "written" is the plate that the order will be served on and elements that accompany the order. super efficient.

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