"...I'd estimate [that] 9/10 people have all their documents in a single flat folder."
You pulled that out of your backside; I decided to use real data. My employer has extraordinarily loose security: our main file server has no access restrictions on any user's working directory. So, I am able to get a quick look at the filing practices of just under 200 people. Of these, 15 didn't use their personal folders at all, presumably preferring to store everything on their desktops. Everyone else had at least one level of folders in their directories. Roughly half of the company are developers, the other half are non-technologists, like sales, administrators, and trainers.
I asked my wife (MD of a mid-sized media company with over 500 staff) what her lot did. Every one of the middle managers she directly looks after have complex filing schemes of their own. She recently went through a big process with IT to create a centralised repository for project work so she is intimately familiar with how her team run their workflow. This is not a technology company; these are sales managers, marketers, operations people, creatives and so on.
9/10? No, not at all. 1/10 perhaps.
"...users can't be bothered to come up with hierarchies...folders are an anachronism..."
This is simply untrue. Neither the data nor my personal experience bear that out: My mother, a retired luddite who never used a computer in her working life and someone who has sent precisely six emails in her entire life, has a hierarchy of folders on the first gen Mac Mini I bought her a decade ago.
"...they just want..."
Assumption is incredibly dangerous. Be careful, especially if you are designing things for people to use. Moving away from hard numbers and into psychology, your thinking is simplistic in the extreme. Human beings absolutely love to organise things. Scrapbooking, Pinterest, stamp collecting. Hobbies that are basically just organising stuff. We love categorising the world: genre-ordered record collections, the Dewey decimal system, Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species, Felony Murder 2, Captain-Commander-Lieutenant, Category Theory in mathematics, the Standard Model... People are a lot smarter and a lot more organised than you understand. Have you ever seen a toddler carefully sorting their toys? It's deep inside us.
Very true, I've been in IT for over 20 years and have worked at sites ranging from 10 users to over 13000 users. I can attest to the flat filing system as the exception not the rule. At my current employer, looking at public folders on network shares the average folder depth is 5 deep. Many have a main repository and then secondary and Tertiary hierarchies using symbolic links to the same contents to help people find what they are looking for.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I do want to point out that you're talking about employees of a company that has a shared file server... That people use! I have several family members, that I consider highly intelligent, who work blue colar, manual labor jobs, for which they don't have email addresses, even as they were promoted to more senior and leadership roles. My uncle hates his computer. He loves his iPad. Furthermore, I know several more folks who have business email addresses, some kind of web mail, are not issued company machines, and maybe only check that email once a month. Consider service industries, like restaurants. The number of people that work these sorts of jobs likely outnumber tech savvy office dwellers 10-to-1. You live in a bubble. Most of us here on HN do.
Not unreasonable. The bubble in this case is pretty big though: it's anyone who works out of an office. Not necessarily 'tech savvy' by any means: I'm talking about Excel/Word/Powerpoint jockeys, HR managers, sales reps, designers, producers etc. These people's primary tool is the computer they sit in front of all day so there's at least a little familiarity there. The computer turns their thoughts into bits: letters, spreadsheets, presentations, emails. They work mainly in the ephemeral, acting as links in a chain of information, passing it from one person to the next and maybe massaging it a bit in between. They are used to flipping concepts around their heads and are fluent in the 'language' of information. This means they don't suffer much cognitive dissonance when dealing with multi-layered folder hierarchies.
Your blue collar kinsfolk have different tools: hands, for the most part, boosted by some array of domain-specific instruments. Those tools turn their thoughts into furniture, or repaired cars, or pipework, or cabling; I'd widen the group from traditional blue collar to include people like surgeons, too. They work in the arena of the tangible, so - and here I speculate - obviously tortured metaphors like nested folders grate on them and are much harder to adopt.
As to your numbers of waiters vs. office rats: there is probably some data from the Bureau of Labor/ONS. Work calls though :)
You pulled that out of your backside; I decided to use real data. My employer has extraordinarily loose security: our main file server has no access restrictions on any user's working directory. So, I am able to get a quick look at the filing practices of just under 200 people. Of these, 15 didn't use their personal folders at all, presumably preferring to store everything on their desktops. Everyone else had at least one level of folders in their directories. Roughly half of the company are developers, the other half are non-technologists, like sales, administrators, and trainers.
I asked my wife (MD of a mid-sized media company with over 500 staff) what her lot did. Every one of the middle managers she directly looks after have complex filing schemes of their own. She recently went through a big process with IT to create a centralised repository for project work so she is intimately familiar with how her team run their workflow. This is not a technology company; these are sales managers, marketers, operations people, creatives and so on.
9/10? No, not at all. 1/10 perhaps.
"...users can't be bothered to come up with hierarchies...folders are an anachronism..."
This is simply untrue. Neither the data nor my personal experience bear that out: My mother, a retired luddite who never used a computer in her working life and someone who has sent precisely six emails in her entire life, has a hierarchy of folders on the first gen Mac Mini I bought her a decade ago.
"...they just want..."
Assumption is incredibly dangerous. Be careful, especially if you are designing things for people to use. Moving away from hard numbers and into psychology, your thinking is simplistic in the extreme. Human beings absolutely love to organise things. Scrapbooking, Pinterest, stamp collecting. Hobbies that are basically just organising stuff. We love categorising the world: genre-ordered record collections, the Dewey decimal system, Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species, Felony Murder 2, Captain-Commander-Lieutenant, Category Theory in mathematics, the Standard Model... People are a lot smarter and a lot more organised than you understand. Have you ever seen a toddler carefully sorting their toys? It's deep inside us.