Ploughed through weeks of works in days (he is really fast at typing too).
When he came back with his work the manager of course wouldn't belive him, set two men to verify it for weeks and they concluded it wasn't only correct but even had less errors.
After that he was "promoted" to a customer facing job (since he was "unqualified" to program).
My dad told me this story when I was a kid. It's how I ended up as a developer and why I still am.
Delighting customer by making weeks of boring work vanish into empty air is still fantastic.
Edit: I've been luckier than him. It is not always that people can be helped but I was never punished.
After I graduated I worked at Boeing in a test group, and wrote control software for test rigs, mainly to test Fuel Quantity Indicating Systems on the 57 and 67, 47-400, and 77.
That was in Les Carpenter's group, and they still had some test rigs lying around built with relays mounted on wooden boards.
This brought back a memory. In the late 80s I got a job at a very high-tech science and engineering firm. A colleague told me to be careful about writing code. His supervisor had walked by his office one day and saw him writing code on a terminal. He chewed him out for "typing" because "typing is for secretaries." Apparently the correct procedure was to hand-write your code onto a paper form and hand it to a secretary for entry into the computer. I assumed my colleague was joking but checked out the official procedure and it was true.
After that, I shut my door when I wrote code.
Heck, I'd been using a computer to write my papers in college (using DECUS' runoff program, similar to Unix's man formatting program).
I can't remember the last time I hand wrote more than a few words.
The level of structural sexism back then was off the charts, at least it was overt. Now we just tell people there is no glass ceiling and it must be their problem.
I am wondering about error rates, human -> paper, paper -> file, file -> execution.
Those feedback loops are enormous. It would be interesting to interview woman from the computer code typing pool.
They all either ignored me or were nice to me.
The interesting thing is the supervisor, who sat facing the workers like a teacher in a classroom. When she found I could use the Wang as well as anyone by just looking at the manual for a few minutes, she realized that her fiefdom was doomed. Her moat had been the 2 week training course.
I kind of felt sorry for her.
Anyhow, I befriended the sysadmin and he on the sly gave me an account and the code for the door. I wrote a bunch of numerical integration matrix programs, and showed the results to my lead, who told me computer results were all bullshit (he'd gotten bad numbers from them before) and called over his best draftsman, and told him to show me up (all in a friendly way, he was a great fellow).
The draftsman worked for two days, and came up with a sheet full of numbers to 3 significant digits. Mine were to 6. We compared, and one was wrong. He said my number was wrong. I knew it wasn't, because continuous functions don't have anomalous behavior. He good naturedly agreed to redo that one, and in a while came back and said my numbers were right. After that, my lead trusted my work, and I got all the math work in his group.
Eventually, some manager in BCS discovered I was making unauthorized use of the '11, and went several management levels over my head to demand I be censured. My lead (one of the engineering treasures at Boeing) went to bat for me. That went many levels up, and the BCS manager got a smackdown and was ordered to legitimize my usage.
In another incident, I got the job of writing some test plan specifications. The usual technique was to hand write them and hand them off to the secretary pool to type up. I get writer's cramps after handwriting 5 or 6 words. The secretary pool was in a special doored room full of Wang word processors. All women, and the supervisor was a woman. I asked for access to a Wang, as it was faster for me to type than hand write. She said ok, but I'd have to take the 2 week Wang course first. I asked if I could just have a look at the manual. She laughed and said sure. She was sure I'd fail.
I looked through it for a few moments, fired up the Wang and started editing. It was, after all, just a text editor. The supervisor was annoyed, but she kept her word.
If I'd stayed at Boeing I'd have likely been the first engineer to bring in my own PC for my desk, at my own expense.