·Tech Culture·5 min read

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 excessive 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.

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.

I understand the pragmatism of keeping or getting a job that requires AI copy-paste. But that's not the point that I am making.

Companies pay a premium for veterans, sometimes, not to leverage their wisdom but to make them copy-paste from AI. We're being told that our replacement is imminent, yet some roles at AI companies are paid over $500K yearly. Companies claim they want experienced people for the solutions they can offer, but at the same time they already have a solution in mind or make engineers work with hands tied behind their backs. The emphasis on tools is excessive, while the focus on understanding problems remains superficial. What is this telling us? I don't have a brilliant answer. Perhaps it's just an expression of a time of change where a new equilibrium is being negotiated.