Comment by mattbee
6 hours ago
How is "without being able to really put it in words" a mark of experience? Surely an engineer should be able to justify why an architecture should be arranged the way it is!
6 hours ago
How is "without being able to really put it in words" a mark of experience? Surely an engineer should be able to justify why an architecture should be arranged the way it is!
There are plenty of deeply skilled, experienced people (in all fields, not just ours) who struggle to explain that knowledge to others. Being a practitioner and being a teacher aren't the same skill.
It's perfectly possible to put that sort of knowledge into words, but not in a condensed "recipe" that can be explained in a meeting, that will go into a single Hacker News comment, that will cover all cases, or that will satisfy LLM users looking for the easy way out.
Pretty much every area of knowledge is full of those. That's why people publish books, that's why people go to college or get PhDs, that's why people with experience gets hired.
Somethings are true not because of one big cause but 10,000 tiny paper cuts. Trying to explain it all just becomes a laundry list where each problem seems solvable but really each problem is there at the same time and inter-linked in non-obvious ways. And the experienced person just comes across as a nay sayer who doesn’t welcome innovation.
You're not wrong that a rationale is required.
But the master knowing when to break the rules because of tacit knowledge without being able to explain it is a real effect