Comment by ssss11

I did an internship during uni as an electronics technician repairing handheld, vehicle mount rugged terminals, and base stations (rf network controllers before 802.11 arrived).

Each repair job had the same priority but some were much simpler than others - one month I thought I’d take the base station jobs to learn and because no one else was repairing them. They took longer to fix but obviously were more crucial to operations.

At the end of the month PHB held a team meeting where pie charts of utilisation were shown and I had performed terribly against the rest of the (senior and experienced) team. That was the moment I learned that the senior staff were picking off quick and easy jobs for a reason, and that office politics was a thing.

PHB couldn’t understand my reasoning of selecting those jobs and the outcome was his dislike of my performance… glad I learned about poor bosses that early in my career.