@#3 ... Soooo what were they supposed to be working on that involved so much keyboarding? How much of their job didn't involve keyboarding? What were they required to be doing when keyboarding wasn't involved? Salary or hourly? Time constraints? Deadlines? Did they produce what was expected but no more? No ambition? ...

Excellent questions.

My experience...

Once I managed a software engineering team. One of the Engineers broke from the norm at the time.

When he was working on a project, he would consult those who were affected by the outcome of his project. I know, odd for the Engineering team to actively engage with the Marketing team. But there it was. A steady stream of marketing folk into his office with many whiteboard ~discussions~ about the specs of the project.

Once he got a grasp of what he needed to do on the project, the specs were updated, with the approval of the VP of Marketing btw.

Then he just shut the door to his office, turned off the lights in his office, and started typing code.

Amazing code, some of the least buggy code I have ever seen.

When he he finished that phase, he again had a stream of Marketing folk going into his office to give their opinions.

He wrote some of the best software I've ever seen, and the Marketing folk (according to what the VP of Marketing had told me) agreed,

Now, if I had measured keyboard activity, that excellent Software Engineer would have been fired.

But I did not measure keyboard activity, I measured results and the time to produce those results.