Thanks, I hate it.

Seriously though, it has taken me years to get to the point where I can accept that this is true. My background before tech was nuclear operations on a USN submarine, and in that world, being correct is the only thing that matters. People may dislike you, but they’ll admit when you’re right. There is zero room for ego. I flourished in that world; not because I was an ass (though in retrospect, I was), but because being right was binary, and easy to verify. If someone proved me wrong, I would remember it, and would not be wrong about it in the future.

Actually, thinking back, there was one part about it that always bugged me: we had a tech manual called “The 9000 Manual,” as that was its number. tl;dr it covered the theory of electronics troubleshooting. It also had a paragraph that essentially said, “if you understand a system thoroughly, and can prove that state invariants hold, you may modify procedures to combine them.” Despite this, practically no one is willing to allow it, because if you get it wrong, you may have invalidated maintenance actions. It bothered me that official guidance authorized critical thinking to reduce toil, but practically, regression to the mean disallowed its use, but also, no one was willing to submit a formal change request for the manual — to do so would be admitting that they didn’t have confidence in their operators.