I am a black-box tester myself. I take my job seriously and try to find new ways to improve my test design experience. I have seen some of the Software Testers in my company take their job very lightly. For them, its just simple black box/manual testing. They write beautiful test cases and mark them Pass/Fail and then they can justify the Management that they have done something, even though they don't bother to go little deep inside the AUT.
They get very happy on find low priority cosmetic issues like a "comma" is missing in the text sentence, even if serious financial transaction failure issues exists around the corner.
I asked one of those testers and he said that what's the use of trying different creative thinking techniques or heuristics to guide their test design. He seemed non-interested in any conversation related to analysis and test strategy. I think he is not using his full potential to perform his job as a tester.
He said that he just compares the product to the spec and never tries to find more interesting information that can be found outside the specification. Eventually, he doesn't find much problems in the application and then the customers reports serious production issues which cause loss of money, time and reputation.
What do you think is missing in those testers? Do they lack the skills of analysis and creativity. Is thinking deep about test ideas a waste of time, if it doesn't matter much to the stakeholders.
Do testers really need to think about a problems from many different angles, even if its testing a simple Text-box that accepts alphanumeric characters.
What would you suggest to them? What kinds of activities, resources, courses, videos, tweets feeds, blog posts would you suggest to trigger in tester the spike to be professional and look for what is important for a project?