No Initiative: How a Night Mechanic Optimized for Not Getting Screwed

They posted a short note from the graveyard shift: night mechanic for municipal buses, told—apparently in policy or tone—to take no own initiatives. He complied. The city received precisely the amount of effort it contracted for and no more, which felt both triumphant and disappointingly bureaucratic.

A toy model: suppose an employer has utility U = reliability + control, and an employee has utility V = pay − effort + appreciation. If an employee ever does extra, the employer updates beliefs and raises expected baseline effort. So doing extra is an investment with negative expected return unless the employer commits to reward it. (Reddit summarized this neatly: “Work only as hard as they tell you. If you give them extra, they’ll start expecting it.” And for emotional accuracy: “If hard work actually paid off, the donkey would own the farm.”)

The elegant solution is maliciously compliant obedience: do exactly what you’re told, no heroics, no anticipatory repairs, no bandwidth-expanding favors. Imagine a memo: “Policy 4.3 — No Initiative: Employees shall not undertake work outside explicit assignments.” Follow it literally, and the system reverts to the incentives that produced the rule in the first place. People notice socked-in processes and call it petty; the worker calls it rational housekeeping. (Also: OP’s English got a polite compliment in the thread—“you’ve even got the contractions”—which is to say, he went the extra mile with grammar and got the municipal mile back in policy.)

So this isn’t cruelty so much as equilibrium selection: you either pay people to surprise you pleasantly, or you set a rule that eliminates surprises. The mechanic chose the latter, which is efficient, in a ‘for certain values of efficient’ way—neatly aligning personal incentives with stated policy and leaving initiative as a private-sector product.