Comment by nucleardog

> Interruptions suck for everyone because there are always leaky abstractions and messy dependency trees

I think the "dependency trees" is usually the most obvious killer. You're putting tables away... who made sure everyone's even out of the building? Who cleared the stuff off the tables?

Even ignoring that... Even if the job is just purely "move tables", I'd propose a simple thought experiment: We're operating a venue for events. Imagine a church basement. We have 75 tables and a large closet we keep them all in between events.

You can choose one of two people to clean up after an event:

Person A has put these tables away 176 times over that past year.

Person B has put these tables away 3 times over the past year.

(If you're not looking and going "yeah those two things look exactly equal", than intuitively I think you have some sense that even unskilled positions benefit from experience and skill.)

If I'm the venue owner and I'm paying hourly for cleanup, I'd put my full faith in Person A. It's not a "skilled" position or a "knowledge" job, but someone that has done it that many times has likely found the easiest and quickest way to get it done with minimal wasted time. When exceptions come up they know what to do or who to talk to. They've also realized that carrying a rag in their pocket and wiping the table before they put it away costs them 5% extra time now, but saves us overall a bunch of time because the event set up shift no longer needs to run around with paint scrapers to remove dried cheese from half the tables after fondue night.

I think, in general, the idea of "unskilled" labour should be applied more to "the barrier to entry" more than "the people that work in that labour". Many "unskilled labours" _can_ be done by someone with no skill. They are done _well_ by someone with a lot of experience and effort that I think make a lot of "knowledge jobs" look pathetic in comparison.