It's hard to argue with this, yet, I never learned to touch type or type fast, never bothered to learn a bunch of vim or emacs hot keys or rice a vim setup. I use pretty basic editors and ides that barely qualify as ides.
Everyone else around me blazes at the simple act of typing. And far fewer but some have powerful vim setups where they can do inarguably useful things fast.
You would be agonized to watch me type code.
But for 30+ years it never mattered. I spend 10x more time thinking than typing, or jumping around refactoring 300 things all over the place every 5 minutes, and propduce results that work, are efficient, and fail far more gracefully than everyone else.
(I'm not claiming to trade iteration for get-it-right-the-first-time, I obviously iterate and I'd even say the correctness of the final result is mostly the result of iteration).
Maybe it doesn't conflict with your point because even so I wouldn't exactly say I'm no more functional than your grandma, so maybe typing and vim/ide-ricing are just a couple of exceptions that I can afford to get wrong as long as everything else is good.
Though I don't know what else there even is to be "fast" at. I don't think I really even understand how one can be good or bad at mere window management. ssh-ing? What is there to that? knowing how to manage keys?
However, all in all, I like this. Even if it means I'd currently fall on the wrong side of this idea, I think I agree with this idea to have an expectation of basic competency with the tools in any field one would presume to get paid for. Maybe even now I should just suck it up and learn to type and develop a powerful vim setup.
GP reads to me as “when sharing your process, be fluid instead of bumbling.”
Things like “uh, where’s that file again?”, “the window disappeared”, etc shouldn’t happen during screen sharing, pairing, and demos.
In other words: be a good presenter.
Oh god if that's all, yeah ok the bar is far lower than I was thinking. But yeah I've seen that so yeah.
Yes, the bar sometimes I have to witness, is low, very very low. I say that someone like you who even thinks and can rephrase thoughts about this, is already of the upper percentiles of capability.
OTOH presenting is a different skill. Maybe I should have elaborated that as a field expert of a (not-so-)niche thing, I often get contacted by random colleagues who will ask me to "let them quickly share their screen to show what the problem is". Their demonstrated horrific inability to "do computers" is surprising and upsetting.
Therefore I thought about this a lot in the past. Maybe the windows concept is wrong? Should there be more experiments like OP proposing? And slowly I start to believe, that probably the windows concept is okay, since you and me and thousands of others are capable, and it's just a skill issue.