I’ve been thinking about this essay for a few hours now, and I can’t shake the feeling that, if we’re using “tacit knowledge” as an argument for retaining seniors engineers, it’ll fail miserably.
The examples have that “I don’t like it, but I can’t tell you why yet. Give me an hour.” pattern to them. The author says this knowledge can’t be extracted or transcribed, but isn’t that exactly what that senior engineer does after that hour has passed?
That kind of work is impossible for an AI. It’s also impossible to prompt an AI into doing, because the input my colleague used — a constellation of subtle features, a year-long history of similar bugs, a half-conscious memory of “where pain has come from before” — isn’t anywhere it can be fed in. It lived in him. He’d built it the slow way, over a decade.
Well, it’s “impossible” in the same way that it’s impossible to a newcomer: because it’s unwritten; it requires knowledge from other sources. Currently. There’s nothing inherent about this kind of knowledge that prevents it from being written in the first place. The fact this knowledge is missing only tells us that someone has never bothered writing it down before. Perhaps they didn’t see the need, perhaps that wasn’t a priority. With automated systems writing code and documentation, well-managed projects will also be better at tracking this kind of knowledge and - finally - writing it down.
You’re the one who can look at a PR and say “this fits us” or “this doesn’t.” That sentence is mostly tacit.
If you’re a senior engineer and can’t argue why something is or isn’t a good fit, and yet you are locked on either one of those… I don’t know what to tell you other than that, maybe, you lack communication skills.
I do think that projects have this sort of tacit knowledge to them, I’m not questioning that. But:
I don’t believe this is an argument in favor of senior engineers because it may be misinterpreted as ignorance (“If you can’t explain something to a first year student, then you haven’t really understood.” - Richard Feynman);
I’m not convinced this kind of knowledge would be required for a project to succeed;
I’m not convinced AI itself isn’t able to extract patterns from the project that we would call tacit knowledge. Pattern recognition is kind of their thing, after all.
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Chick sexers are an old example of this phenomenon. Surprised it was left out from the article despite it being widely known for it.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m8id5wHblY
This is a shockingly well-written article. Thanks for sharing!
I’ve been thinking about this essay for a few hours now, and I can’t shake the feeling that, if we’re using “tacit knowledge” as an argument for retaining seniors engineers, it’ll fail miserably.
The examples have that “I don’t like it, but I can’t tell you why yet. Give me an hour.” pattern to them. The author says this knowledge can’t be extracted or transcribed, but isn’t that exactly what that senior engineer does after that hour has passed?
Well, it’s “impossible” in the same way that it’s impossible to a newcomer: because it’s unwritten; it requires knowledge from other sources. Currently. There’s nothing inherent about this kind of knowledge that prevents it from being written in the first place. The fact this knowledge is missing only tells us that someone has never bothered writing it down before. Perhaps they didn’t see the need, perhaps that wasn’t a priority. With automated systems writing code and documentation, well-managed projects will also be better at tracking this kind of knowledge and - finally - writing it down.
If you’re a senior engineer and can’t argue why something is or isn’t a good fit, and yet you are locked on either one of those… I don’t know what to tell you other than that, maybe, you lack communication skills.
I do think that projects have this sort of tacit knowledge to them, I’m not questioning that. But:
I don’t believe this is an argument in favor of senior engineers because it may be misinterpreted as ignorance (“If you can’t explain something to a first year student, then you haven’t really understood.” - Richard Feynman);
I’m not convinced this kind of knowledge would be required for a project to succeed;
I’m not convinced AI itself isn’t able to extract patterns from the project that we would call tacit knowledge. Pattern recognition is kind of their thing, after all.