Where Tomorrow's Engineers Come From, Part 2: The Apprenticeship Problem

https://www.abovethertl.com/p/where-tomorrows-engineers-come-from-b71

by rramadass • 11 days ago

2 1 11 days ago

rramadass• 11 days ago

This is a well-written succinct article which is worth a read.

Read Part 1 first which is linked to at the beginning of the article. Titled "Where Tomorrow’s Engineers Come From, Part 1: The Role That Survives" it asks the question as to what roles survive given the AI juggernaut.

Part 2 answers the question using the concept of "The Olfact" viz;

Call it the olfact: the engineer’s sense of smell for the parts that do not add up.

Every senior engineer has it and almost none of them can fully explain it. It is the sense that something is wrong before you can say why.

The olfact is not knowledge. It is compiled experience. It is built from hundreds of cases, most of them never written down, many of them never even discussed, and it is the single thing that separates an engineer who can be trusted with sign-off from one who holds the title but not the judgment. It is also, precisely because it is compiled from undocumented experience, the thing no corpus contains and no model can be trained on.

The olfact cannot be taught, but it can be practiced, and the conditions for practicing it are better now than they have ever been.

PS: Also relevant is his later article; If It’s Working, Why Are You Shrinking? - https://www.abovethertl.com/p/if-its-working-why-are-you-shr...

Where Tomorrow's Engineers Come From, Part 2: The Apprenticeship Problem

Related Stories