In the factory you get both. With essentially zero chance to change the algorithm. When my father worked in the factory he found a way to manufacture the product faster and cheaper and just as safely, and rearranged the factory to do so. He was punished by management for altering the algorithm and also ostracized by fellow workers because they perceived it as reducing the demand for jobs.
Yup, that does sure sound like a silent-generation or boomer era story.
I'm sure pockets of that stuff are left but pretty much all of "those sorts" of "we don't pay you to think" workplaces either transitioned or went tits up over the course of the 1980s and 1990s as the Japanese management made its way to the US (though one could argue it's come back over the past 10-15yr).
Now, of course if you are doing something that's as unskilled as unskilled gets or in a particularly perverse workplace you'll encounter those conditions, but they are absolutely not the norm. The business schools these days teach various flavors of "it's cheaper to run a workplace people feel doesn't suck".
This stuff goes through phases to some extent. The 1920s and 30s were adversarial. The 1940s-60s were more cooperative. The 1960s-80s were not great. 90s and 00s were quite collaborative. Now we've kind of got another wave of "management knows best" and adversarial thinking that's waning.
That's the American dream story- always starts with dad getting yelled at for making things better and faster - the next sentence in the founding documents: So he went his own way and now we have NicoCloth Inc. which in the years since has become a global corporation.
Pretty sure they regulated that out of existence in the past several decades. Now best you can hope for is to be bought out by the competitor of the company you left sometime before the 50 employee mark.
(only partly joking, and that part is way smaller than I want it to be)
