There is a famous story about how an F16 got grounded because an half inch metal pin was missing from the cockpit canopy. Nobody knew what the pin did or if it was even necessary but you can't fly a plan that 'missing a part'. After several days of being grounded they finally reached out to a guy who had retired 20 years ago who told them the pin was a part of a analogue sensor that had been replaced nearly 30 years ago. Only the pin remained as a vestigial organ since it was part of the airframe design.

It doesn't matter how well you document things there will always be tribal / personal knowledge.

Even if stuff is written down you have to know where to look.

A former employer owned a combined cycle power plant -when they were having issues (not huge ones, but weird issues or gauge readings) they’d call this old timer and he’d come in walking around ask the operators to make some settings changes and be listening the whole time. And he’d come back and be like “hey the second stage compressor is out of balance” there were all sorts of telematics and manuals, but he could tell what was wrong just by listening…that was invaluable

Well ... It takes four years of education before becoming a taxi driver in London: 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.

“Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t software development one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a web service 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 developers worldwide.”

Just making a point that everyone else’s job always seems simple from the outside.

I've worked with a number of clients that have lost senior engineers due to old age or retirement, and the impact is often very significant regardless of how sophisticated their knowledge management infrastructure is. Documentation can not fully replace the insight and situational awareness many of these experts posses and most of the time knowledge management still suffers from the 'not knowing what you don't know' issue. Only well structured 'apprenticeship' programs come close. I know some are going to point to AI, but I've worked in AI for over 2 decades and have extensive experience in Expert Systems and Knowledge Engineering from early in my career. It is not a complete solution. Given today's technology its trivial to replicate 'text book knowledge' but the difficult, expensive problems occur in the margins and its still hard to train AI on open ended / rare occurrences outside of domains that have specific advantages like software engineering. Talented and experienced people are still required. Maybe that will change soon, but AI isn't there yet.

The mistake of modernity is believing that all tacit knowledge can be reduced to words.

I implore everyone to take on a nut and bolts (or resistors and transistors) hardware project sometime in their life to learn what it's like working on "Mother Nature OS".

I guess a more relatable way of conveying this is that you can have the recipe from a michelin star chef, but you're still not going to get anywhere close to michelin star quality.

> 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.

Sure, but you are always going to get the "thing makes a strange noise but it isn't doing it now" ticket and there isn't going to be a "occasional strange noise" checklist.

[flagged]