When you don't let someone take a risk, they can never let you down but also never surprise you.
Isn't this the premise of virtually all "E-Myth" type thinking about business management, and most franchises?
You reduce the job to a punch list with occasional if/then/else branches, which are laid out in a management manual.
I think it's easy to run into business people, who run well regarded, consistent businesses, who believe that it's a sign of mismanagement to have employees who stretch to do their basic job duties.
In pop culture, it is a signature of the poorly performing restaurants in makeover shows like
Kitchen Nightmares that everyone working there is winging it with no guidance or master plan.
I don't know if it is possible to reconcile the demand of a business to run smoothly and with minimal waste, with the need in some individuals to not do low demand rote tasks all of the time.
I suspect that it's really a de facto occupational caste system in place. The "best" people (professionals) get to stretch their wings. The low regarded humans are routed into highly demarcated, rigidly specific jobs.
For me, software contracting became a toxic bit of both properties. I was expected to perform like a renaissance man while being given the constraints of a bottom level worker. I suspect most borked software contracts work that way.
There seem to be many jobs in IT where your role essentially makes you regarded as an "untermensch" (subhuman in old Nazi parlance.) And it's a caste system in the sense that in a given organization, you probably cannot dig your way out of that perception of your person.
Even at higher levels than minimum wage style employment, such as software engineering, you can wind up in a role that is labels you internally as having no potential and little trust factor. You are in a narrow band as long as you stay in the job.
It sounds like the person that choppedwood describes in his anecdote was regarded that way in his old job.
