I could understand secretaries instantaneously loosing respect if they see their bosses typing with one finger.
It happened to me with one operator of a lathe when he discovered I had no idea or cared how to program it because I was "engineer"(I had other work to do). I had to study the thing on a weekend for regaining the respect from those people on my team.
Imagine being in the war and your life depends on a person(e.g a sergeant) and the only thing you know about this person is that he is incompetent on what you know to do well... not good.
Of course, in that time even more than today, sex & status were deeply intertwined. It wasn't a coincidence that the secretarial pool was all female and the executive suite was all male: women had typing classes in school, went to secretarial school, and got jobs as secretaries or other low-status positions; men became got jobs as clerks or went to college, and if the bosses liked them, they were promoted to executive positions. There usually wasn't much of a career track from secretary to executive.
I'm wondering when this changed to include all kids. I remember doing Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on my home computer at around 6, then again at school in grade 2. This would have been in the early 90s, and every kid at my school took typing classes once a week. By grade 3 or 4 they were teaching us Basic on the Apple IIe. Around that time as well, school assignments had to be typed and printed off for submission. Did other people have the same experience, with computers being a part of your official early education?
This hits the nail on the head in my experience. As "technical" people (I think that describes most HN readers) it is common to find ourselves working with at least a few people who are less adept at various technologies. In some cases this doesn't really make a difference, but I have often found it to be very frustrating.
A boss or coworker who can't use a computer is largely forgivable. A boss or coworker who refuses to learn is hard to respect and, by extension, hard to work for or with.
It's definitely related to gender. There were never any males in the typing pool. As a male with an office, if you had a machine with a keyboard, it would have been seen as effeminate.
And quirky -- why would you type when you can have someone do it for you?
I could understand secretaries instantaneously loosing respect if they see their bosses typing with one finger.
It happened to me with one operator of a lathe when he discovered I had no idea or cared how to program it because I was "engineer"(I had other work to do). I had to study the thing on a weekend for regaining the respect from those people on my team.
Imagine being in the war and your life depends on a person(e.g a sergeant) and the only thing you know about this person is that he is incompetent on what you know to do well... not good.