[jegutman]

I don't think companies really don't want employees that think independently. These employees come with a ton of upside. However, not everybody turns out to be a star and in some companies (plenty still foster it) they don't want their average employees to be completely rogue.

[GVIrish]

> However, not everybody turns out to be a star and in some companies (plenty still foster it) they don't want their average employees to be completely rogue.

I think it's more that most companies don't want employees challenging decisions made higher up in the org chart, star or no star. A lot of people don't like having their decisions challenged, especially when they're wrong or they have a hard time defending those decisions.

[p4wnc6]

There is even a vein of organizational management research literature on topics like this, see e.g. [0]

[0] "Reversing the Extraverted Leadership Advantage: The Role of Collective Employee Proactivity." by A. M. Grant, F. Gino and D. Hofmann

[PDF] < https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:mai... >

Briefly, the paper suggests some evidence that the most disliked type of employee is a subordinate who is introverted and also proactive. Someone who takes initiative, solves problems independently, and is self-reliant, is seen as a problematic and uncooperative subordinate.

Employers say this is the type of employee they want -- someone with a lot of self-reliance, independence, ability to think on their own and needing little oversight. But actually they don't really want that, because the micromanagerial oversight and the need for the manager to step in to direct people is what the management layer uses to justify their compensation and status in the firm. If everyone beneath you handles things without your intervention, it's just a short step to a situation where they claim credit instead of you, and maybe get promoted above you. This makes a lot of middle managers sweat and become paranoid about putting their stamp of micromanagement on everybody's work, which means they need subordinates who require more attention and who reliably can't find the right direction or solve the problem fully independently, and who will be satisfied when given work that doesn't allow for as much autonomy.

High performers and independent thinkers will want autonomy (there's actually a lot of literature about this too), and giving them autonomy would be overall good for the company. But it would be bad for specific gatekeeper middle managers.

That's why they talk a big game about hiring people based on their creative thinking abilities and general aptitude, but in reality they instead focus on micromanagerial things, like how much of some specific Hadoop tool API have you memorized, or how much direct experience do you have in precisely our exact tech stack. These are just status games to protect them from actually productive subordinates.