❯Schrödinger's Engineer and the Illusion of Experience
Experience is sought for, but also not.
It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.—Jean Baudrillard
Put simply, a Schrödinger's engineer is an engineer whose experience is considered both indispensable and irrelevant at the same time.
Working in engineering is becoming a simulation built on an increasing sequence of abstractions. We can identify at least a few:
- Stage 1: Early computing. Code directly manipulates the machine (Assembly, C). The code is a faithful reflection of what the hardware is actually doing.
- Stage 2: High-level languages and frameworks. We abstract away memory management and hardware specifics. It’s helpful, but we are beginning to hide the "real" machine.
- Stage 3: Cloud computing, serverless, and Kubernetes. The "server" no longer exists as a physical entity you can touch; it’s an abstracted pool of ephemeral resources.
- Stage 4: AI layers, modern tech stacks, endless "services". The industry now interacts entirely with symbols of symbols. Engineers build systems to orchestrate abstractions that manage other abstractions.
In my view, an abstraction creates value when it reduces the total complexity. It creates negative value when the abstraction itself becomes another source of complexity.
We can draw a couple of conclusions. First, as we produce higher level abstractions we lose contact with the foundational concepts that got us where we are. Abstraction is not the goal, it's a useful tool to build a functional system. The tool does not bring you closer to the solution. Understanding the problem does.
If everything has a cost, "devolution" might be the price for abstraction. By “devolution”, I mean the loss of understanding that happens when you move to higher levels of abstraction and gradually lose touch with the underlying foundations.
Second, complexity hasn't gone away, it's just camouflaged by language and marketing. The industry has shifted toward building increasingly complex systems, partly due to the power of abstraction, but perhaps also because it blurs the distinction between tools and solutions, or because presenting a complex system brings social rewards. At some point along the way complexity has become easier to justify than simplicity.
Lost in Translation
Raising the level of abstraction has influenced the way we work. If knowledge is less important, what remains to be offered?
One thing I've noticed is that the focus has shifted from understanding and study, to "likability" and "personality". As fundamentals become shadowed by abstraction and "services", the market shifts attention towards tools and presentations.
As I mentioned, I don't believe the complexity has disappeared; we're still dependent on a small number of experienced people to keep the system operating. Those individuals may simply be too occupied and conscious of the risks, to continually prioritize being likable. Is our industry headed for a rough correction?
In fact, experienced engineers are often skeptical of novelty, they are opinionated and challenge assumptions because they know where the real problems are. They ask questions that reveal inefficiencies and point at difficult tradeoffs which challenge people. To a rigid corporate structure, these questions sound like "pushback" or "lack of alignment." Even if those questions are well-posed and crafted with appropriate language, a denial doesn't feel as good as an approval.
I want to underline that I'm not suggesting closing yourself in a mental box and being uncollaborative as a course of action. Rather, I'm pointing to a trend that places greater weight on likability than on many other characteristics typically associated with experience.
Hyper-collaboration is one fruit of this trend. Modern work wants you to spread yourself around the office in an almost obsessive manner and participate to rituals. For example, tickets are broken down in a dozen subtasks to live up to the idea of "collaboration", but this way of working only slows things down and increases the chances of frictions and misunderstandings. I see this as a performative dynamic that is becoming increasingly paradoxical.
Copy-Pasting from AI
Another consequence of living in abstract-land, is summarized by the trend (and sometime mandate) of copy-pasting AI's output. This has interesting consequences I will perhaps speculate on in another article.
I'll briefly say this: some people say that code is just a means to an end. To that, I would say that much of human activity cannot be reduced to this trivial explanation, we're not just automas pushing buttons, we don't think of ourselves in that way, at least most of us. Our cultural production is sufficient proof that the reductionist view is doesn't explain reality, therefore it's not a good model to interpret it.
I would argue that it's because we do not treat our endeavor as reducible to a mere cause-effect sequence that many fields of study have reached their present standing. Programming, software development, engineering: all represent more than just the task, for many of us.
Conclusion
Companies pay a premium for veterans, sometimes, not to leverage their wisdom. They make seniors work with hands tied behind their backs, walking a pre-established path that is hardly optimal. In other words companies claim they want experienced people for the solutions they can offer, but at the same time they already have the solution in mind.
Management is made of mere mortals just like you and me. I know much of management is not blind to the simulation, they do understand they are contributing to creating difficult situations and frictions or at the very least, they are not making things easier even when they could. To be real, there are cases where management has its hands tied. They respond to a different set of pressure levers. But I think that's hardly an excuse for constantly selling vacuous slogans.
If a company has already presupposed the solution, they do not need experience. Until organizations realize that true seniority is defined by the license to say "no," the hiring market will remain an expensive theater where wisdom is bought at a premium, only to be locked in a room and ignored.