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A comment on A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work. Parent comment

Re:A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work by ergot_vacation on Wednesday May 19, 2021 @02:10PM (#27212277)
Your story is probably the more common one by far. Most employers and managers (especially for starter/entry-level jobs) are incredibly insecure, and any sign of intellect or creativity scares them. I've learned the hard way to never ruffle feathers by trying to think or solve problems at full power on a job. Just do what's expected and move on.
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Re:A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work by andai on Wednesday May 19, 2021 @02:50PM (#27212758)
> I've learned the hard way to never ruffle feathers by trying to think or solve problems at full power on a job. Just do what's expected and move on.

This might be the saddest thing I've read recently.

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Re:A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work by jdbernard on Wednesday May 19, 2021 @04:30PM (#27214076)
It's also why the nimble newcomer can often disrupt and slay the giant incumbent. It's a lot easier to create high-performance environments when you have teams small enough for all members to know each other personally than when you have hordes of people and have to use lowest-common-denominator bureaucracy to manage them in bulk.
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Re:A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work by lifeisstillgood on Wednesday May 19, 2021 @04:28PM (#27214059)
Trust in Mr Schumpeter :-)
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Re:A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work by alvah on Wednesday May 19, 2021 @10:35PM (#27216726)
I'm doubt much of this behaviour is driven insecurity / fear of intellect and creativity - it's mainly an incentive problem IMO. If I'm incentivised to keep an inefficient manual system going, I'll fight for that inefficient manual system until the bitter end. Sending a smart but non-business-savvy temp back to the temp agency is small potatoes.
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Re:A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work by zentiggr on Thursday May 20, 2021 @11:38AM (#27222555)
I don't think it's insecurity all the time, although I have run into people who refuse to trust an automated process because they can't see the work getting done...

I think a lot of resistance is due to, like others have said in this thread, unexpected incentives.

If someone's career progress, financial incentives, or work politics require the status quo, no changes will be welcome, and might even be perceived as an attack. (Yep, been there.)

If you miraculously can get the incentives changed, then you can make progress...

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