My old man used to say the same thing about pressure washing the driveway before a party. I thought it was a huge waste of a Saturday until I skipped it one time and spent the whole cookout answering questions about why the concrete looked so bad. Small stuff adds up fast when other people are the ones looking at it.

Calling the old timers slow seems like a pretty easy thing to say from behind a desk where nobody judges your output by how many parts you crank out. Think about it, if they've been doing this for 20 years and still take longer, maybe that's because they learned the hard way that rushing gets fingers cut off, not because they're bad at their jobs. Your lead telling you to slow down isn't proof that speed doesn't matter, it's proof that he'd rather keep a new guy than watch him get hurt in month two. Nobody clocks out at 5 out of pure laziness either, some of those guys might have kids or second jobs or just bodies that hurt after 8 hours of standing. So which is it, are you the smart one for leaving on time, or are you just new enough that nobody's handed you the jobs where staying late actually matters?