I have an office job that entails a lot of interaction with people who in the construction industry, small business owners, developers, bankers, etc. I’m too androgynous for my employers to feel comfortable with letting me meet people in person (thank god) so most of it is through email or phone calls. They all vary in education and income; some have PhDs, some never finished high school, some are rich as fuck, some are struggling to get by. Most of them are local but I work with quite a few people from different parts of the country.
There’s something that is common between a lot of these people, maybe even the vast majority, is that they cannot do extremely simple tasks or understand simple concepts, even when I try to explain them visually (like I’ll share a spreadsheet with them and go through each individual thing I’m doing to show them what I mean). Very few of them get it. I’m not particularly smart or amazing at math or anything, but I’d like to think I can understand simple instructions. Sign this, add these numbers, make this match this. I can’t imagine what it’s like working in retail if the average person is this dumb.
I bet you’d feel pretty dumb if you had to learn a new data process as well. It’s not necessarily that adding numbers is hard for them, just understanding the semantics of the columns, why you’re doing what you’re doing, and so on.
I could probably write what your spreadsheet does in 20 lines of Python and the part in question would just be a + b. But if I told you to repeat it or modify it for a new situation, would you get it all the first time? Would you need repeated explanations? Is it my job or your job to know this stuff? Etc etc
