The full read particularly resonated with me from the perspective of a metaphor to today's rapidly changing engineering practices.
> “Time was,” he lamented later, “when a man made steel, decided what it was good for and told the customer how to make the best of it. Then, with time’s quickening step, he just made the steel; he engaged another man, who knew nothing about steelmaking, to analyse it, and say what it was good for. Then he engaged a second man, who knew all about hardening and tempering steel; then a third man who could neither make steel, nor analyse it, nor harden and temper it—but this last tested it, put his OK mark on it and passed it into service.”
In a way it warms my heart that obfuscation in such a manner, perhaps even enshittification, is not a new experience for those watching a trade modernise. Several things come to mind: npm and python library dependency hell and LLM as a catalyst of skill atrophy in experts simultaneously with the enablement of a whole new middle layer of proprietors.
Also the article led me to think more about the idea of simultaneous invention - I used to believe it to be redundant and wasted work. But this still can lead to different outcomes even with identical formulations or methods. Getting an invention into use in the world is perhaps as great a feat as the invention itself. I now believe any worthwhile invention deserves more than one champion.
In today's hyperconnected world it is easy to discover that someone else has beaten you to the full flourishing of idea into invention, but I find that doing the novel work oneself with one's own mind and hands still provides the unique learning opportunity which can allow one to invent yet again, albeit now with a widened skill and knowledge horizon.
Sometime around 1993 I was bored and picked up a Reader’s Digest my parents had lying around. In it was an article about how the oil fires Saddam set in Iraq were put out in about a quarter of the time the crews estimated.
Volunteer oil well firefighters from a host of first world and some developing countries showed up and started trying to work together.
The intense heat makes for slow going, and can melt not just people but also equipment. It turned out every country had solved a different part of the problem. The Russians used thermal mass - they attached the hose to the barrel of a tank and let the armor soak up heat for a while. Someone else had better heat shielding. The Americans (?) had perfected detonation to extinguish rather than ignite a fire. And someone had better protective gear.
All of these techniques could be combined. Heat shielding on a tank means the machines you can get the equipment closer to the fire for longer, and the suits and explosives put the fire out faster so the capping crew can get in there.
In the end they were doing several wells per day and multiple sites per week, instead of a few wells per week. Parallel invention doesn’t always end up at the exact same outcome.
I love this example! The unforeseen synergies of different methods attempting the same outcome cannot be overstated enough in my opinion. Each strategy has its own diminishing returns, and stacking them covers gaps each has.
I think a great illustration of this today are SLaM methods that almost always seem to combine a low-drift high-noise technique with one that is high-drift and low-noise.
I think where parallel discovery really shines is in operational excellence. Your best people have high tolerances for certain aspects of the work, the craft, and low tolerances for others. But to industrialize it needs to be accessible to tens of thousands, and they don’t have time for this shit.
I expect that was a lot of the speed up. You can’t do eight wells a week if every well exhausts your team. Better working conditions mean faster cycling. Hell I bet whoever brought the best “Gatorade”, masseuse, and entertainment deserves more credit than they ever got.
> perhaps even enshittification
This is rather silly, since steel today is far superior to the steel of his day. The complexity he bemoans is part of that process of improvement.
I did not mean to imply that steel quality has in any way continued to suffer. He was talking about the process of the early 20st century in comparison to the late 19th when steelmaking was handled more end-to-end from maker to user.
I am talking about enshittification of digital applications and services compared to the earlier years of the information age.
The transitory enshittified steel subsided once scientific formalization of their requirements emerged. I wonder if the transition period of vibe-coded slop will eventually be supplanted with formal-verification that supersede even the quality of cottage codesmanship, or would it forever remain in snakeoil-ridden limbo due to unspecifiability of software taste unlike that of a material’s mechanical performance?