>A good technician who can interpret nuance has value. I want to highlight this phrase, because I think it is critically important and frequently missing from

>A good technician who can interpret nuance has value. I want to highlight this phrase, because I think it is critically important and frequently missing from the worldview of the technical workforce. It is a serious risk that is created by the narratives around STEM education - especially engineering. Good technicians are incredibly valuable. My first job out of engineering school was in a semiconductor factory. From the day I walked in, I was absolutely dependent on the technicians who worked on the tools to do my job well, as was every other engineer. I could do things they couldn't, but they absolutely could do things I couldn't. There were two types of early career engineers there (1) those who valued what the technicians could teach them and built those relationships and (2) those who did not. That second group struggled. They struggled because they didn't know how to listen to someone who they perceived as having less knowledge/education/value compared to them. Some of them got really upset when they found out senior technicians (typically with an AS) earned more than junior engineers (BS/MS). The reality was, the young engineers were a hell of a lot more replaceable and much easier to automate. Google recently published a paper on this topic[0] and it is now a required read in the basic and advanced statistics courses that I teach, because a lot of my students are very excited about getting into machine learning roles. Unless you have quality data and information, the complexity of analysis you do on it largely doesn't matter. [0] https://research.google/pubs/pub49953/ https://research.google/pubs/pub49953/