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Comment by rexpop | Hacker News Reader

> The school didn't have the funds to get a commercial typing program so I wrote my own typing program.

Off-topic, but:

It seems absurd, to me, that such a conclusion could ever be reached. Obviously, from my perspective, the economies of scale, the infrastructure, overhead, and institutional resources available to programmers at a dedicated software development firm would produce an application at better quality per dollar (however you measure it) than a high school teacher in their off-hours. To me it seems that it's certainly not cheaper for us as a society, as a species, and only appears so because you are under-paid. If you were paid your actual worth, the school would say "we don't have the funds to develop this in-house, and had to buy a commercial typing program off-the-shelf, despite its loose fit for our use case."

How can we, as rational members of society, abide this?

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Agreed.

Where I work there is a tool that's used in hundreds of our internal services. It was written in-house during one of our hack weeks years ago, and later we open-sourced it. Despite the fact that the org relies so heavily on it, it's completely unfunded; two employees improve and maintain it in our free time. (We do have a few outside contributors, too, which is awesome!)

That's not exactly the same situation, but I think this kind of short-sightedness is pervasive in our culture, in every walk of life.

To go in another off-topic direction...of course I mainly did it because I wanted to. I had a view about how to teach/learn typing that the popular typing programs then didn't seem to have. When you're learning typing for the first time, IMO it's fundamentally a kinesthetic endeavor. It's more important to focus on burning the motor pattern of moving your finger from the home row to the key you're typing and back to the home row than remembering where the letters are placed on the keyboard. (Of course you have to also remember where the letters are, but that will happen automatically in the process of doing the former.) So I wanted to take this into account and have my students type things like this:

fff ggg fgf gfg ffgg fggf gffg

jjj hhh jhj hjh jjhh jhhj hjjh

This forces the student to exercise that movement pattern in a way that just telling them to put their fingers on the home row and type English words does not.

So the above sentence you quoted was a an over-simplification for story telling purposes and not the whole story. :)

> Obviously, from my perspective, the economies of scale, the infrastructure, overhead, and institutional resources available to programmers at a dedicated software development firm would produce an application at better quality per dollar (however you measure it) than a high school teacher in their off-hours.

If you measure it by cost to the district (for which a teacher doing it in their off hours is $0), it's clearly not, even if you only consider the sticker price of the commercial software and not the other costs associated with purchasing in a school.

> If you were paid your actual worth,

The school would fire about half it's teaching staff in order to make budget, and still not have money left over to either develop or purchase the typing program, probably.

How do you commercially produce "better quality per dollar" when the high school teacher's off-hours cost the school $0 and they get infinite quality per dollar?

Calling work done in off-hours "$0" is magical thinking. That teacher costs a lot to maintain. Those of us who are employed full-time don't really have "off-hours", and regardless of the intensity with which we focus in a given 60-minute period.

Sometimes, while at work, I am thinking of leisure. Sometimes, while at leisure, I am thinking of work.

At the end of the day, the school pays their employee. And the rest of society pays them during "off-hours", e.g. in depreciation of common resources if, say, they drive on the road.

My point is that people cost society to keep alive, but some of those people are better equipped for certain tasks than others. The question is only where do those costs come from, and to what particular efforts are the particularly-equipped assigned.

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