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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

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.

logseman 1mo ago
Their status and whatever wage they commanded depended on training as few apprentices as possible.
- PunchyHamster 1mo ago
  Incorrect. I don't think I've met one person that were actually good at their job but didn't wanted to share the skill. It's because management didn't value it. They put the veteran on on more jobs rather on moving them to training, because short term it's more profitable, and mid term it's easier to poach veterans off competition rather than train them in house
  - lmz 1mo ago
    How do you explain guilds restricting supply then? (The most common example is Physicians).
    - NetMageSCW 1mo ago
      Explain how that restriction is working in the face of NPs?
      - lmz 1mo ago
        We are debating the attempt to restrict supply here as a counterargument to "everyone wants to share their skill", not the success or failure of such attempts.
bob1029 1mo ago
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.
- embedding-shape 1mo ago
  > How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently? You don't. You put these people together for some years to work on stuff together, and a small percentage of this "intangible" feelings, knowledge and experiences you cannot write down somehow magically passes over to the other person. Of course, the apprentice will still require their own repeated failures and uphill battle even getting close, but having someone who mastered the craft near you as you go through this, makes the whole process a hell of a lot faster.
- Towaway69 1mo ago
  You speak of tacit knowledge[1] Worse is that they who have the knowledge don't realise that others don't know what they know, it's completely automatic and ingrained to the owner. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
  - embedding-shape 1mo ago
    I think they're touching on multiple things that typically happens between an apprentice and master, not just tacit knowledge. Also implicit learning, procedural / nondeclarative memory, expert intuition and metacognitive feelings, all very hard to quantify into a written document, but put two people together where one learns from the other, and all these somehow gets transferred over time.
applfanboysbgon 1mo ago
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.
- Towaway69 1mo ago
  This is relative. In two generations, the concept of "master craftsman" and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm". It is only because we know and can compare that we judge. Remember, when we were hunter & gatherers, before becoming bound to the land and tilling that land, we had different gifts and talents that have all been lost. For better or worse. Or closer to home: barely anyone remembers black and white television or the feeling it must have been to view the moon landing on one.[1] Cathode ray TVs have gone the way of the Dodos - good or bad? Who knows. Whether a long term or short term outlook is better or worse, no one can tell because there aren't any goals nor targets to meet in evolution. [1] https://archive.org/details/apollo-8-bbc-coverage https://archive.org/details/apollo-8-bbc-coverage
  - cucumber3732842 1mo ago
    >and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm". Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk. On a personal or organizational level there is no point in making investments that will turn profit over the course of decades if over the ~5yr horizon there's there's always the looming risk that the government will kick your craft out of the country at the behest of the people. What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies? The math is simple and they teach it in every business school in the country.
    - Towaway69 1mo ago
      That raises the question, what came first: maths or evolution? Of course we can apply the laws of physics and the theories of maths onto everything we see and experience around us but does that make them so - those experiences. > What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies? Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk. Take a more holistic view, what happened to all the stars and galaxies?[1] The spiritual acceptance of the inevitable end of everything isn't taught in any business school and we are left to face/cope with that ourselves. If maths/business is your poison for coping, then so be it. I dislike reducing every experience to numbers and graphs, profit margins, win/loss and them/us. I guess I'm trying to say is that even the biggest profit will have no longevity when compared to, even just human history, let alone the history of the universe. [1] https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer?ra=229.6352&dec=2.0739&layer=ls-dr11&zoom=12 https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer?ra=229.6352&dec=2.0739&l...
2legit2quit 1mo ago
> 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.
simonsarris 1mo ago
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.
- datsci_est_2015 1mo ago
  > 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. This is, pardon the cliche, the exact type of “outside of the box” thinking that is completely impossible in shareholder-driven (or PE-driven) corporate America. More and more I believe that we associate people with great ideas not because they were exceptionally capable of great thought, but because they managed to impose their ideas upon others through force of will, political chicanery, and sorcery.
rhplus 1mo ago
> 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.
- failbuffer 1mo ago
  The mistake of modernity is believing that all tacit knowledge can be reduced to words.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- embedding-shape 1mo ago
  > isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all I hope you're right :) You probably are too. But even with that, there is a reason it's a profession and not something we ask gig-workers to do, it takes expertise and skill like any other skilled work, even though all the literal actions one might take is technically written down somewhere. Even in such industries, experts would get "hunches" about what is wrong, and are able to quicker pinpoint issues, and similar things. Or "getting a bad feeling" before something is actually evidentially bad, which prevented human disaster more than once in history. I think if you consider that the job couldn't be done by just anybody who can read and follow instructions, then it might not be as easy as just "follow what the manuals say" and in those cases expertise, knowledge and experience matters a great deal.
- realo 1mo ago
  Well ... It takes four years of education before becoming a taxi driver in London: https://thetaxi.academy/ https://thetaxi.academy/ It takes also many years of study before they will let you touch any living person with your scalpel, and then many years of apprenticeship with actual surgeons when you do touch people with your tools. I can imagine maintaining a big jumbo jet also requires some specialized practical knowledge you cannot acquire just by reading books and looking at nice little videos. The problem is not to explain things when everything works perfectly. The problem is getting the ability to diagnose the root causes of defects using all your senses and your intuition. That is not taught in books.
Blackthorn 1mo ago
Some people do a lot as least. Forrest Addy has a massive library of posts that are still the top results on Google for just about any machining problem imaginable.
- colechristensen 1mo ago
  A small curated "best of" list of links wouldn't go unappreciated :)
  - Blackthorn 1mo ago
    https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/air-compressors-for-newbies-by-forrest-addy.110655/ https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/air-compres... https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/best-way-to-align-lathe.240678/#post-1747780 https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/best-way-to... Just a couple of examples.
- hamdingers 1mo ago
  It takes a rare multi-talented person to do this though. First you have to attain mastery of the craft itself, then you have to master (or at least be competent in) the art of communicating it to others. Some mechanics are just good mechanics, and that's okay.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1mo ago
  Huh. I was actually thinking about him a few days ago. Is he still among the living? I remember posting on PM about 15 years ago asking how to fix a mistake I kept making and he gently smacked me on the head and basically said just learn to do it right in the first place. Which was really the only good answer!
  - Blackthorn 1mo ago
    No, he died 2 years ago. The immense knowledge and skill that he shared with everyone remains an incredibly valuable archive and hopefully remains searchable for the indefinite future.
quickthrowman 1mo ago
> 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. Every single possible airplane maintenance operation is detailed on task cards that mechanics follow. Probably there is some small amount of tribal knowledge, but virtually everything is documented with step-by-step procedures, which includes the tools you need, every step, all torque values, etc. It’s not like being an electrician or pipefitter where you have to make your pipe or conduit get from point A to point B by following the construction code, airplane safety is crucial enough that documenting and standardizing airplane maintenance was done long ago.
dimitrios1 1mo ago
Be the change you wish to see in the world! Hopefully you are apprenticing many junior engineers!
darknavi 1mo ago
I didn't see any details in the article other than this quote, which seems promising. > He’s the guy who sits with the new kids at lunch and passes it on.
analog31 1mo ago
I work in a mid sized engineering organization, and the older engineers (and engineer-adjacent people like me) mentor the younger ones all the time. One thing that can't be codified in procedures is what I call "situational awareness" for lack of a better term. I don't think you can learn how to work in a machine shop safely from a book. Or recognize when a complex design is heading towards being unworkable. In my organization, the older engineers have a sixth sense for projects that are going to be cancelled. There's a reason why older drivers (up to a point of course) pay less for car insurance, yet the rules are the same for all of us.
- barbazoo 1mo ago
  > I don't think you can learn how to work in a machine shop safely from a book. Or recognize when a complex design is heading towards being unworkable. This strikes me as something one learns very slowly over time. Safety takes time to internalize after close calls or seeing people get hurt. Same with complexity, it takes going through project after project to get a gut feeling for what works and what doesn't.
  - tedd4u 1mo ago
    Parents also develop the ability to see several seconds into the future with regard to their toddlers and small children.
    - barbazoo 1mo ago
      Right! Maybe the longer into the future the older the kid is. It's hard to predict past 1s sometimes what my toddler is going to do. The older one, I'd bet on the outcome within a couple seconds.
- wil421 1mo ago
  It’s because miles driven decreases with age not because old people drive safer.
  - 1mo ago
Mawr 1mo ago
If only there was a way to directly share those understandings with others, through genetic material or something...
amelius 1mo ago
A 10x engineer can be turned into a 1x engineer when given enough apprentices. However, those apprentices can become 2x, 3x engineers. Ok, there must be some optimum.
roosterIllusi0n 1mo ago
We let CEOs earn unlimited money. They cut all the training to be personally richer. Vote republicans out so we can restore the 1950s tax rates and financial regs that prevented CEOs fron cutting wages and outsourcing to make themselves personally richer. CEOs pay nothing for their stock, it is given them for free. Then they take tax free loans on the stock and that allows them to bubble the stock price for tax free loan money. CEOs self enrich off of a cycle of bubbles and pops.

logseman 1mo ago

Their status and whatever wage they commanded depended on training as few apprentices as possible.

PunchyHamster 1mo ago
Incorrect. I don't think I've met one person that were actually good at their job but didn't wanted to share the skill. It's because management didn't value it. They put the veteran on on more jobs rather on moving them to training, because short term it's more profitable, and mid term it's easier to poach veterans off competition rather than train them in house
- lmz 1mo ago
  How do you explain guilds restricting supply then? (The most common example is Physicians).
  - NetMageSCW 1mo ago
    Explain how that restriction is working in the face of NPs?
    - lmz 1mo ago
      We are debating the attempt to restrict supply here as a counterargument to "everyone wants to share their skill", not the success or failure of such attempts.

bob1029 1mo ago

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.

embedding-shape 1mo ago
> How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently? You don't. You put these people together for some years to work on stuff together, and a small percentage of this "intangible" feelings, knowledge and experiences you cannot write down somehow magically passes over to the other person. Of course, the apprentice will still require their own repeated failures and uphill battle even getting close, but having someone who mastered the craft near you as you go through this, makes the whole process a hell of a lot faster.
Towaway69 1mo ago
You speak of tacit knowledge[1] Worse is that they who have the knowledge don't realise that others don't know what they know, it's completely automatic and ingrained to the owner. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
- embedding-shape 1mo ago
  I think they're touching on multiple things that typically happens between an apprentice and master, not just tacit knowledge. Also implicit learning, procedural / nondeclarative memory, expert intuition and metacognitive feelings, all very hard to quantify into a written document, but put two people together where one learns from the other, and all these somehow gets transferred over time.

applfanboysbgon 1mo ago

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.

Towaway69 1mo ago
This is relative. In two generations, the concept of "master craftsman" and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm". It is only because we know and can compare that we judge. Remember, when we were hunter & gatherers, before becoming bound to the land and tilling that land, we had different gifts and talents that have all been lost. For better or worse. Or closer to home: barely anyone remembers black and white television or the feeling it must have been to view the moon landing on one.[1] Cathode ray TVs have gone the way of the Dodos - good or bad? Who knows. Whether a long term or short term outlook is better or worse, no one can tell because there aren't any goals nor targets to meet in evolution. [1] https://archive.org/details/apollo-8-bbc-coverage https://archive.org/details/apollo-8-bbc-coverage
- cucumber3732842 1mo ago
  >and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm". Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk. On a personal or organizational level there is no point in making investments that will turn profit over the course of decades if over the ~5yr horizon there's there's always the looming risk that the government will kick your craft out of the country at the behest of the people. What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies? The math is simple and they teach it in every business school in the country.
  - Towaway69 1mo ago
    That raises the question, what came first: maths or evolution? Of course we can apply the laws of physics and the theories of maths onto everything we see and experience around us but does that make them so - those experiences. > What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies? Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk. Take a more holistic view, what happened to all the stars and galaxies?[1] The spiritual acceptance of the inevitable end of everything isn't taught in any business school and we are left to face/cope with that ourselves. If maths/business is your poison for coping, then so be it. I dislike reducing every experience to numbers and graphs, profit margins, win/loss and them/us. I guess I'm trying to say is that even the biggest profit will have no longevity when compared to, even just human history, let alone the history of the universe. [1] https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer?ra=229.6352&dec=2.0739&layer=ls-dr11&zoom=12 https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer?ra=229.6352&dec=2.0739&l...

2legit2quit 1mo ago

> 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.

simonsarris 1mo ago

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.

datsci_est_2015 1mo ago
> 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. This is, pardon the cliche, the exact type of “outside of the box” thinking that is completely impossible in shareholder-driven (or PE-driven) corporate America. More and more I believe that we associate people with great ideas not because they were exceptionally capable of great thought, but because they managed to impose their ideas upon others through force of will, political chicanery, and sorcery.

rhplus 1mo ago

> 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.

failbuffer 1mo ago
The mistake of modernity is believing that all tacit knowledge can be reduced to words.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
embedding-shape 1mo ago
> isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all I hope you're right :) You probably are too. But even with that, there is a reason it's a profession and not something we ask gig-workers to do, it takes expertise and skill like any other skilled work, even though all the literal actions one might take is technically written down somewhere. Even in such industries, experts would get "hunches" about what is wrong, and are able to quicker pinpoint issues, and similar things. Or "getting a bad feeling" before something is actually evidentially bad, which prevented human disaster more than once in history. I think if you consider that the job couldn't be done by just anybody who can read and follow instructions, then it might not be as easy as just "follow what the manuals say" and in those cases expertise, knowledge and experience matters a great deal.
realo 1mo ago
Well ... It takes four years of education before becoming a taxi driver in London: https://thetaxi.academy/ https://thetaxi.academy/ It takes also many years of study before they will let you touch any living person with your scalpel, and then many years of apprenticeship with actual surgeons when you do touch people with your tools. I can imagine maintaining a big jumbo jet also requires some specialized practical knowledge you cannot acquire just by reading books and looking at nice little videos. The problem is not to explain things when everything works perfectly. The problem is getting the ability to diagnose the root causes of defects using all your senses and your intuition. That is not taught in books.

Blackthorn 1mo ago

Some people do a lot as least. Forrest Addy has a massive library of posts that are still the top results on Google for just about any machining problem imaginable.

colechristensen 1mo ago
A small curated "best of" list of links wouldn't go unappreciated :)
- Blackthorn 1mo ago
  https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/air-compressors-for-newbies-by-forrest-addy.110655/ https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/air-compres... https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/best-way-to-align-lathe.240678/#post-1747780 https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/best-way-to... Just a couple of examples.
hamdingers 1mo ago
It takes a rare multi-talented person to do this though. First you have to attain mastery of the craft itself, then you have to master (or at least be competent in) the art of communicating it to others. Some mechanics are just good mechanics, and that's okay.
HeyLaughingBoy 1mo ago
Huh. I was actually thinking about him a few days ago. Is he still among the living? I remember posting on PM about 15 years ago asking how to fix a mistake I kept making and he gently smacked me on the head and basically said just learn to do it right in the first place. Which was really the only good answer!
- Blackthorn 1mo ago
  No, he died 2 years ago. The immense knowledge and skill that he shared with everyone remains an incredibly valuable archive and hopefully remains searchable for the indefinite future.

quickthrowman 1mo ago

> 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. Every single possible airplane maintenance operation is detailed on task cards that mechanics follow. Probably there is some small amount of tribal knowledge, but virtually everything is documented with step-by-step procedures, which includes the tools you need, every step, all torque values, etc. It’s not like being an electrician or pipefitter where you have to make your pipe or conduit get from point A to point B by following the construction code, airplane safety is crucial enough that documenting and standardizing airplane maintenance was done long ago.

dimitrios1 1mo ago

Be the change you wish to see in the world! Hopefully you are apprenticing many junior engineers!

darknavi 1mo ago

I didn't see any details in the article other than this quote, which seems promising. > He’s the guy who sits with the new kids at lunch and passes it on.

analog31 1mo ago

I work in a mid sized engineering organization, and the older engineers (and engineer-adjacent people like me) mentor the younger ones all the time. One thing that can't be codified in procedures is what I call "situational awareness" for lack of a better term. I don't think you can learn how to work in a machine shop safely from a book. Or recognize when a complex design is heading towards being unworkable. In my organization, the older engineers have a sixth sense for projects that are going to be cancelled. There's a reason why older drivers (up to a point of course) pay less for car insurance, yet the rules are the same for all of us.

barbazoo 1mo ago
> I don't think you can learn how to work in a machine shop safely from a book. Or recognize when a complex design is heading towards being unworkable. This strikes me as something one learns very slowly over time. Safety takes time to internalize after close calls or seeing people get hurt. Same with complexity, it takes going through project after project to get a gut feeling for what works and what doesn't.
- tedd4u 1mo ago
  Parents also develop the ability to see several seconds into the future with regard to their toddlers and small children.
  - barbazoo 1mo ago
    Right! Maybe the longer into the future the older the kid is. It's hard to predict past 1s sometimes what my toddler is going to do. The older one, I'd bet on the outcome within a couple seconds.
wil421 1mo ago
It’s because miles driven decreases with age not because old people drive safer.
- 1mo ago

Mawr 1mo ago

If only there was a way to directly share those understandings with others, through genetic material or something...

amelius 1mo ago

A 10x engineer can be turned into a 1x engineer when given enough apprentices. However, those apprentices can become 2x, 3x engineers. Ok, there must be some optimum.

roosterIllusi0n 1mo ago

We let CEOs earn unlimited money. They cut all the training to be personally richer. Vote republicans out so we can restore the 1950s tax rates and financial regs that prevented CEOs fron cutting wages and outsourcing to make themselves personally richer. CEOs pay nothing for their stock, it is given them for free. Then they take tax free loans on the stock and that allows them to bubble the stock price for tax free loan money. CEOs self enrich off of a cycle of bubbles and pops.