Comment by tomrod

During some of the earlier web service development days, one would find people at F500 skating by in low-to-mid level jobs just cutting and pasting between spreadsheets, things would take them hours could be done in seconds, and with lower error rates, with a proper data interface.

Very anecdotally, but I hazard that most of these types of low-hanging fruit, low-value add roles are much less common since they tended to be blockers for operational improvement. Six-sigma, Lean, various flavors of Agile would often surface these low performers up and they either improved or got shown the door between 2005 - 2020.

Not that everyone is 100% all the time, every day, but what we are left with is often people that are highly competent at not just their task list but at their job.