I've noticed over the years among the many people I've worked with that there are always a handful who... I like to describe it as "working by rote". Remember in college there were always people who typed the examples from the textbook into the computer verbatim? That's ok unless the examples are buggy. I've found people in business with the same mindset. They can't seem to handle critical thinking or troubleshooting, or thinking outside the box even a tiny bit.
One guy I met (and occasionally have to grit my teeth and work with) did exactly this at a customer site: needed to back up the system before performing an OS upgrade. He shut down the production system, sat down and proceeded to read the backup manual. He was perplexed when the examples he was typing in didn't work. When I tried to clue him in that the actual device names weren't the same as the examples in the manual, he got annoyed and said he wanted to do it "his way".
Once I was asked to help a fellow lady programmer debug a cobol program (this was in the 1990's). I started just by sitting next to her watching but letting her do her thing. It became apparent to me that she was just reading the code on the screen, trying to guess where it might be failing. I showed her how to set a breakpoint and explained that she should set it close to where the problem might be happening. Ok, says she. Stares at the screen some more. She couldn't even guess where to put the breakpoint. So I picked a place and we ran it through. I was off, but now we had a better idea where the failure might be. I told her to start over and set the breakpoint closer. More staring at the code. In a Socratic fashion, I asked her where she thought we should set the breakpoint. After some thought, she pointed to a line of code *before* the previous breakpoint.
Now, I know some people are faster than others, and everybody has their own way of thinking things through. But I was amazed that her style was mentally walking through the code, guessing what the variable contents could be and which paths might be followed. Having the debugger show her what is actually happening was a foreign concept to her. I've met others like that since then, they seem to take forever to accomplish tasks that are trivial to others.
Last week, we asked a DBA to install a database for a customer after we upgraded his platform and software. She has a reputation for being good and reliable. She emailed us a list of requirements for the version of Oracle she was going to install. Minimum OS version 8.2-1 and a list of patches on top of that. I wrote back to say that we're installing the latest, which is 8.3, so all the patches for 8.2-1 will already be bundled into it. She wrote back and just repeated that the Oracle manual states minimum OS version 8.2-1 and this list of patches.....
Has anybody else noticed this in their environments? I can't imagine how people who can't analyze, can't troubleshoot, and can't extrapolate or reason things out - get jobs in the IT industry. Isn't the job all about those things?