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Comment by tehnub | Hacker News Reader

Pair programming with coworkers over the years, many seem to have trouble with the keyboard, to the point where pressing right parenthesis is a significant burden and they don’t use right or down arrow to get out of the span but actually move their hand to their mouse and click out.

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I'm shocked every time I go to City Hall and wait while the clerk types my name letter by letter with two fingers. Doesn't he do that every day?! How as it never occurred to him or anyone else that maybe, just maybe, they would benefit from a typing course. It’s just one example of a pattern I’ve noticed with a lot of office workers.

Maybe it's not that important? Taking 5 seconds vs 2 seconds to type a name is probably not that much of a difference? Especially when most of the time you are typing stuff that you need to ask how to spell anyway?

It’s not five seconds versus two; it’s fifteen, and with more mistakes remaining at the end (which will sometime waste hours down the line). Because your inferior typist can’t keep up with the phone number being told them, and lose their place in the digits; and are having to concentrate so much on their typing that they don’t correctly interpret what you say to them; and so on. It’s a compounding effect.

Poor typists always slow down processes, and frequently become a bottleneck, local or global. If you can speed up a process by only ten seconds per Thing, by improving someone’s typing skills or by fixing bad UI and workflow, you only have to process 360 Things in a day (which is about one minute per Thing) to have saved an entire hour.

It can be very eye-opening to watch a skilled typist experienced with a software system that was designed for speed, working. In more extreme cases, it can be that one person can do the work of ten. In more human-facing things, it can still be at least a 50% boost, so that two skilled people can beneficially replace three mediocre.

Not to be be too caustic, but that above commenter really did embrace the whole spiriton on why "Whatever" is rising. That utter numbness to how inefficient this method truly is is a symptom (which is odd, since these sorts of topics are fixated on optimizing workflows).

We seem to value the actual craft less and less with each passing day. so everything slows down overall.

What I was getting at was that maybe typing speed is not the bottleneck. You have to look at how much time the clerk spends typing vs. eg. talking to the customer, clarifying details, explaining the process, reviewing documents, etc. If they spend 5% of their time typing, then even speeding up their typing speed by a factor of 5 will only lead to a 4% speedup, assuming they are fully booked (ie. no wait time between clients).

The answer to most of this question is just this: "Because it's good enough."

It's good enough, it gets the job done and does not cause enough friction for the person to feel the need to improve. Complacency.

I've said it in another comment (might be here or Reddit, I don't even know anymore) and it feels like basic skills are just overlooked or taken for granted these days - computer use, mouse / keyboard / typing skills, reading comprehension, writing ability, communication skills, etc.

I'm nowhere near a hiring position but if I was I'd add assessing that to the application procedure.

It feels like this is part of a set of growing issues, with millennials being the only generation in between gen X / boomers and gen Z that have computer skills and can do things like manage files or read a whole paragraph of text without a computer generated voice + RSVP [0] + Subway Surfers gameplay in the background.

But it was also millennials that identified their own quickly diminishing attention spans, during the rise of Twitter, Youtube, Netflix and the like [1].

I want to believe all of this is giving me some job security at least.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentati...

[1] https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/ (originally published 2003, updated over time to reference newer trends)

> read a whole paragraph of text without a computer generated voice + RSVP [0] + Subway Surfers gameplay in the background

Quite literally laughed out loud at this. I still cannot believe this is a thing people actually do; I thought it was a joke "genre" at first.

Okay, so optional accessibility issue?

> right or down arrow

If you have to use multiple keyboards, arrows, end, home etc tend to be at different position on the keyboard. Almost no better than using a mouse.

That's were old school vi / emacs shine. CTRL? Always same area, so ctrl-f to go forward? Same gesture whatever brand of a laptop I have to work on.

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