To get cross when people with no catering experience think they know more than those who work in the industry?

[ExtraPineappleExtraHam]

Someone was just talking about the food waste in the NHS. I said that the system in our hospital was that patient menu choices are chosen almost a week in advance. This is so the kitchen can order in the exact amount of each portion. My hospital is long stay so the likelihood of the patient still being there in a week is about 95%. If they happen to get discharged or go into another department then yes, that food is wasted but it's a very small amount. Staff usually eat it.
A woman with no experience in the field said to me 'that's a stupid system, they should order it the day before.' So that would be a better system would it, ordering loads of everything and then having too much of one thing and not enough of another, and then having just 4 hours to prepare EVERYTHING!
I've had this so many times, people who don't work in catering telling me how restaurants/ cafes should be run. The best was my ex- manager telling me that she would run a busy cafe using all vintage china (good luck putting those through an industrial dishwasher!)
Is it because it's 'low skilled' that people think they could make a better job at running it than the actual staff? I would never go into a care home and start telling the staff how to do their jobs, or start lecturing an engineer about how to design more effective aircraft.
I just can't fathom how people look at a huge corporation like Subway and think 'oh I could do a better job!'

The idea of 'anyone can do' certain jobs is frankly ridiculous. I used to work in Caffè Nero in the centre of a busy city. About 20% of applicants could do the job. You need a level head, good dexterity, an awesome memory, great people skills and speed. I lasted a year before I couldn't hack it anymore.

I'm sorry that you had a bad experience, flatcaps. Psychometrics are tools that can be used or misused, and interpreted by people who are or are not equipped to do so. They are a data source, nothing more. I have no idea how they were used or interpreted in your case and whether it was appropriate or not.

I reserve the right to find it mildly funny that so many people seem to have a secret fear that they are a psychopath, even though the psychometrics they're doing are absolutely nothing to do with forensic or clinical psych.

I think that, unless someone has shown themselves to be incompetent, you have to just respect people for what they do. Whether it's designing rockets for NASA, clipping dog's nails or cleaning windows, it's always going to be something where experience will provide unique insight. Most things look pretty easy from the outside but if you personally haven't done that job then you can't claim to know better.

I work in the justice system, literally everyone thinks they know how to do it better

"A bad experience"? Trust me, if you talk to people who've struggled with their mental health, lots and lots and lots of them will have experience-based reason for trepidation. And for those who haven't, you seem to have no insight into how worrying it can be to face the prospect of discovering something about who you are that you'd rather wasn't the case. Laughing at people's fear of having these tests reveal that something's wrong or abnormal about them is just foul. You expect them to just know what these tests can and can't do. And to you, the idea of having the way your mind works tested is just a normal routine thing. For average, everyday people, it's not. Get some insight and some empathy. People's fear is not for your amusement.

I don't work in mental health or any adjacent field, flatcaps. I work in talent and corporate. A test of verbal reasoning just tells you how you scored in a test of verbal reasoning on a given day. These aren't vulnerable people whose fates are at risk, they're senior executives getting leadership development.

I didn't say you did work in mental health. I assumed you were doing some kind of workplace or other gen pop testing; the reaction you describe isn't that which you'd get from MH patients. This is why I mentioned those who don't have these problems. But there will be people among those you test who have experienced that, and as I mentioned, the general population can also experience fear at being told they're going to have psychometric testing. They may be jokey about their fear but underneath it, people are vulnerable, senior executives or not, and if they're fearful, laughing at them is disgusting. I doubt they're nervously joking about whether you're going to discover they're a psychopath if they've explicitly been told they're only going to have a verbal reasoning test.

(I assumed that partly because of your use of the term "psychometrics" in your first post, which generally occurs in the kind of field you're in rather than mental illness or similar fields)