Kevin Drum sympathizes with a Dish reader searching for work who wrote that "If you've done exactly the job advertised before, you'll be considered. But you'll be considered incapable of learning anything new":
This is a surprisingly widespread attitude, even in the white collar sector. Back when I had a real job and frequently hired new staff members, I always looked for people who had the right general background (product management, say, or tech writing) but I didn't worry too much about whether their background precisely matched what they'd be doing for me. This was, however, decidedly not the attitude of most of my peers.
Many of my job candidates were interviewed by a few others in the company as well as by me, and I was always surprised by the number of people who would say "But he only has a hardware background" (we were a software company) or "she's never worked in document imaging" (we were a document imaging company). And the folks who said this were consistent when they were hiring for their own departments: they were really meticulous about looking only for people who had exactly the background they needed, whether that meant selling high-volume scanning software (for a sales job) or knowing the precise set of technologies we used to build our software (for a programming job).
This attitude wasn't universal, but it was surprisingly common. And it betrays a real laziness.
Steinglass half agrees.