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Comment by thasso | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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