The cost goes beyond simple inefficiency and becomes a mountain of invisible labor, usually absorbed by the most junior person in the room or whoever has the misfortune of being labeled as “good with computers.” It becomes a drag on every collaboration, the friction in every workflow, the meetings that take an extra ten minutes while someone (who is often paid twice the average salary of the other people in the meeting) figures out why they can’t access the shared folder the rest of us have been using for months. It’s the quiet erosion of patience and goodwill among people who are constantly expected to know and fix things that shouldn’t need fixing in the first place.
The cost of lack of skills is not just in the individual knowledge worker, it gets externalised to others to fix it, or multiplied in groups waiting on you to get something working. The incompetence spreads out.