alt Hacker NewsHow 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.
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It's sad but at the same time there is a sort of optimization that tends to occur each time the magic trick is rediscovered.
Often it is not possible to separate the technique from the man. Things like riding a bike or flying a helicopter come to mind. A lot of what makes a master good cannot be written down anywhere. There isn't anything tangible to actually lose.
How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently? You could explain the principles and general ideas, but the apprentice is going to need to get scraped up a bit before they actually learn anything that matters. The apprentice willing to suffer repeated failure is where most of the heavy lifting occurs. The master is mostly a backstop to keep the apprentice alive.
Yes, this seems to happen a lot in small companies. It seems less inevitable in big ones but it still happens. You would think at a minimum AA would want to hire a journalist or similar simply to shadow him for a year, get him to dictate everything (so that he has to do as little extra effort as possible), and publish a sort-of manual from the accumulated wisdom.
The point of hiring someone specifically to do this is that he might simply want to keep on working, uninterrupted by apprentices or other demands, so the recorder must be a second person dedicated to knowledge maintenance.
> It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen.
Generally speaking (only a Sith deals in absolutes), engineers want to engineer.
There is no incentive for management to nudge the best performing engineers to teach their expertise in their craft[s]. A high-performing engineer "reflects good" on a manger. The way incentives are generally structured, this becomes a problem that perpetuates itself: Everyone in the management pipeline gets more money for the high performing engineer to keep engineering, rather than to teach.
This is one of the saddest aspects of our societies being optimized for maximum short-term gains. In the past, master craftsman would own their own shop and pass it down to their apprentices, leaving a tradition and legacy that could last hundreds of years. This dynamic is becoming increasingly rare.
Their status and whatever wage they commanded depended on training as few apprentices as possible.
> unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears
Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a 777 doesn’t have to remember certain tricks or tips outside of what the manuals say, and when mistakes are found, they’d be noted, investigated and republished to all maintenance crews worldwide.