You assign them to pull the levers, and they pull the levers. If the machine they're running is manifestly inefficient, they don't notice, or they pretend not to notice.
(Or – if they're good – they adapt themselves, adopting a complex series of difficult physical and mental moves to compensate for the machine's brokenness. Sometimes those physical moves are such that, after four years on the job, they'll be in the hospital. But they do them anyway, because, hey, making the inefficient machine work is their job.)
If the machine next to theirs is broken in a way such that it messes up half of the work coming out of their machine, they just keep going -- hey, it's their job to run this machine, not that machine. If the machine they're running breaks down, they call for help and then sit there unmoving until help arrives. ("I didn't want to break anything.")
You tell them to RTFM, and they do, all of it, and then they come back to you: "I read the whole manual; now what do you want me to do?"
They may have even memorized the manual. It's not that these people aren't smart and eager to please. Indeed – and this is the thing I have trouble getting my head around – sometimes, within their area of expertise, they may know how to tinker like mad, they know the freaking serial numbers of every part of their machine and which ones can substitute for each other in an emergency. And yet, beyond their area, there's this strange paralysis. You hand them the duct tape and gesture encouragingly at a neighboring machine and... nothing happens.
If you give such a person a room full of miscellaneous broken things and ask them to fix everything they will proceed at a rate of (1 + epsilon) hour of progress per hour you spend telling them what to do. On the flip side, if you give them a room full of ten thousand widgets to finagle and they have a certification in Widget Finagling, those widgets will get finagled. They might even work overtime to please you. And when the widgets are done they'll go home, even if the rest of the factory is on fire, because there's nothing left for them to do.
When hiring someone to solve our problems we desperately need to know whether or not we're getting a hacker, or a technician. Both have their roles, but they can't substitute for each other.
