The thing that stands out about that job that makes it unique in my perspective is decision-making. Every other job, from dishwasher in a sit down restaurant to engineering team lead, works best when I make good decisions and my coworkers all do too. Everything runs most smoothly when everyone is on their game and consistently making the right choices.
At McDonald's, everything ran most smoothly when no one made any decisions at all.
Their system was literally that good. No one else's has ever come close. And you're right that there's a weird freedom and pleasantness to that: your job requires literally zero brain power most of the time and your sole responsibility is to keep up with the person behind you and not overwhelm the person in front of you, which isn't usually something you worry about. So all that energy every other job has got from me, I still had (and so did everyone else) which made it the most social, most fun workplace too.
Would you care to write some more about this?
I was under impression that scripted work is generally considered bad and makes people feel like cogs in a machine.
Being part of a staff that manages successful delivery (in this case of food items) where at peak moments you deliver in concerto 10x average throughout, time after time was just good for morale. Plus the general goofing of teens. I don’t remember the things that I currently associate with cogs in the machine (say, scripted unpaid toilet breaks for call centers, or a lack of ownership). You owned your tiny part of the customer experience and was near all other parts.
The cogs in the machine part is imho unsuccessfully scripted work. You can’t live up to your own expectations of proper customer service because you are forced in a mold that doesn’t fit, but can’t fix the mold.
Then comes the part that I’m still thinking about. What’s easier to achieve? Great processes and happiness via lean / kaizen that treat autonomy as foundational or great scripted processes that deliver satisfaction without autonomy.
Complexity and autonomy are probably related. Higher complexity makes scripted processes that fit all exceptions a lot harder. On the other hand my experience is that so-called experts frown upon standardization and quality suffers. I’ve done standardization for professionals and have hoped to find a sweet spot between autonomy and scripted work (The Checklist Manifesto comes to mind). But I must admit those sweet spots are harder to find the less I’m intimately aware of what people do from minute to minute.
My favorite days were when I had my preferred set of team members and and the day barely felt like work at all for us. Working in a bigger org now, days like that aren't nearly as common.