Unpopular opinion: the new guy who won't touch a job without the manual open is doing it right
Last Tuesday in the hangar I heard a 20 year guy tell an apprentice that real mechanics don't need the book, and the kid just nodded along. I kept my mouth shut but it bugged me all shift. This is the same guy who smoked a flap track bolt with a rattle gun last month because he was sure about the torque. The book takes five minutes, the rework takes five days. So how do you all handle it when an old hand passes down habits like that to someone new?
I used to roll my eyes at the book guys too, figured you learn by doing and all that... then I watched a guy pull a head off without checking the sequence and warp it. Now I grab the manual for anything I haven't touched in a while, no shame in it. The old guys who skip it are usually just doing it from memory, and memory gets fuzzy after a few years.