alt Hacker NewsAmerican Airlines' Legendary Mechanic Passes Away at 100 After 80-Year Career
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Possibly the website has been hugged to death, but the principle resonates with me from the headline. In the large and old enterprises I've worked with, there is such a stark shift from I suppose, lifetime service to the consultant economy as the workforce transition follows the boomer generation out, and forecasting where that might leave us.
Short term drivers like a bad quarter or to be seen "disrupting" as a measure of progress, rather then genuine demonstrations of skills, turf out tenured employees often mid-career.
Or perhaps being in the engine room of many companies, doesn't often give you the lifestyle you want anymore, so the race to the top is the optimal spot to go for. Even if it means going up and falling down a few times on the heirarchy, its worth it.
The value of the nature of not having custodians of certain crafts, like aviation or really at the guts of any industry, seems to me its really going to set us back towards really transactional style of operating businesses that are only financially engineered and not really innovating the product in a way they should.
just random thoughts around how to have a fulfilling career, when most of the effort is in sales & marketing, and not much in operations when the funding pot gets allocated across a business.
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How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every single time.