In my experience, it seems to apply to every sector out there. I got started in a different industry than what I'm active in now, and what you describe I have seen across any type of job I've held.
Might be smart in many instances to do cross training, and on the job perspective expanding, but at the end of the day: it's usually better to let the animous live...and the spice flow.
Before you can even have this conversation, you need to define what "work" is and take into account the stressors of that work, the abilities of the workers, etc. This mentality of "us vs them" when someone wants to ask "who works harder" accomplishes nothing aside from pointing out disgruntled laborers who got suckered into punishing jobs for laughable compensation.
It stems from this a twisted pride, typically from the laborer side of things, that I have seen so many times I've come to just expect it from them. The problem with that stance is that it falls apart with any scrutiny, after the laborer who wants to call someone else out for "not working as hard as they do" realizes that they are being exploited, which is nothing to be prideful about.
It's silly, as was your contribution to this conversation. I recommend reframing it as each position being important to the team, but requiring different demands and skill sets to which different people can contribute. It's not a competition and nobody wins by trying to diminish the contribution of others.
The only morally acceptable form of bigotry in society is against the lazy & stupid.
So if you want to hate, you need to turn everything into one of those two things.
Company A(CA) had tons of open channels between sales, engineering and machining. Sakes reps had to spend time with the service dept every few months, helping with repairs and what not. One sales guy opted to do it more often because it helped him understand the products better, which helped him sell. Engineering and machining were constantly showing each other different things that could improve production. We barely needed management, leavjng them to focus on administrative crap nobody else wanted to do. It was quite wonderful and remarkably effective. I miss that job, actually.
Company B(CB) did the opposite. All departments, and I mean all had walls between them, both metaphorical and physical. Department heads were the only conduits and they were unreliable at moving info between depts, not to mention reluctant to work with each other. Things constantly had to be reworked, tons of money wasted on parts nobody could use, quality assurance was always an after-thought, etc. The company suffered and the customers suffered more, but under all that was embitterment between the engineers and the production team. Everyone felt miserable and micromanaged to death. It was nonsense, and even resulted in a short alternation just before I left the company.
So, guess who is still in business? CA or CB? Both shops are the same size and offered very similar products and services. Those are just two of my examples, too. I've been with a handful of shops for a long time, and the latter is always a hellscape to work in.
> Company B(CB) did the opposite. [...] The company suffered and the customers suffered more, but under all that was embitterment between the engineers and the production team. Everyone felt miserable and micromanaged to death.
> So, guess who is still in business? CA or CB?
Murphy's law says Company B. :-(
(Please, please tell us different!)
> It was nonsense, and even resulted in a short alternation just before I left the company.
YM AlterCation?
There are extreme cases, such as people dying and no one realising that their work is not being done, and that is rare, but a certain amount of slacking off, spending time of social media, etc. is not at all uncommon.
I mean, the statistics support the extraordinary amount of time spent on social media all throughout the day across all generations.
I wish there was a good term for it like we have "fundamental attribution error" for that other pernicious cognitive fallacy.
The core mistake is that believing that all we know about something is equivalent to all there is to know about something. So if you don't know anything about welding, you assume it must be brain-dead simple because your knowledge of it is so tiny. If you don't know anything about engineering, you assume it's just pushing buttons.
It's not just about people's jobs, either. It shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.
It all seems to grow from a Seed of Ignorance:; a complete lack of understanding of what someone else's job actually entails, coupled with the subjective measure of how difficult a thing is which is largely based on our own narrow limitations and experiences. It's a weed that grows easily and is difficult to kill in the manufacturing sector.