Once upon a time, I was a sysadmin, the sole tech guy at a small marketing firm. I came to similar conclusions about a new co-worker who everyone else respected highly. My instructions for them to follow in using the computers always resulted in calls for help. There was always some trivial wrinkle that tripped them up. It got to be quite frustrating.
It took a while to realize that what happened is that person was a pure "packer" in the mappers/packers sense.[1] Packers NEVER check concepts or instructions for consistency, and don't build mental models of how things work, they just are really, really good and memorizing things and following instructions precisely. However... any deviation and you're in a world of hurt, like a language without error handling.
I reconsidered the instructions I provided, and edited them to include any exceptions that might happen (files not present, etc) and included ways to deal with each. We became quite supportive of each other after that change. They never had another problem using the computer for their work after that.
I suspect it's not the case for you... but it's a non-zero probability this applies.
It took a while to realize that what happened is that person was a pure "packer" in the mappers/packers sense.[1] Packers NEVER check concepts or instructions for consistency, and don't build mental models of how things work, they just are really, really good and memorizing things and following instructions precisely. However... any deviation and you're in a world of hurt, like a language without error handling.
I reconsidered the instructions I provided, and edited them to include any exceptions that might happen (files not present, etc) and included ways to deal with each. We became quite supportive of each other after that change. They never had another problem using the computer for their work after that.
I suspect it's not the case for you... but it's a non-zero probability this applies.
[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?MappersVsPackers