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Comment by techblueberry | Hacker News Reader

> The deeper issue is tacit knowledge. Most of what a skilled engineer knows is not something they can articulate on demand.

Why is it that everyone says that soft skills can be more important than hard skills, that engineers talk to people they don’t sit in rooms turning requirements into code, but then, it seems like one of the criticisms about the interview process is “well, engineers can come up with good solutions when alone in a room”

That’s not the job. Articulating technical details when in conversation with your colleagues is.

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Articulation is not the issue; the reasoning and consideration process is.

If you step back a bit from the words on that page and squint, what you might see is something like "Most of what a skilled engineer does is recognize, sense problems, and feel things that may not be obvious."

The discovery of the right path forward for the goals of the organization comes after that and takes time and planning.

> "Most of what a skilled engineer does is recognize, sense problems, and feel things that may not be obvious."

This is a great way of putting it, love it.

At the end of the day, that's it. A lot of people are very good at executing the tasks, delivering what needs to be delivered.

But the special people are the ones who maintain a constant sense of awareness of what might be off and digging deep into it.

It totally is the job. What kind of unreasonable process you have that people dont have time to think?

First you think, then you think about how to say it, then you talk with others. Then you think again and maybe talk again.

But, it is not like we were designing everything in quick on the spot debates without research.

> What kind of unreasonable process you have that people dont have time to think?

AI is making this much worse. Executives expect you to be managing a herd of AI agents working on a dozen things at once, 24/7.

Good luck trying to find time to think. This will backfire.

One returns in a week with a fully articulated solution, not at point blank. Famously, Archimedes came up with his in the bathtub.

Tacit knowledge is not soft skill, there's quite a comprehensive field of neuroscience research around it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

eh, my take is that you’re kind of going off in a specific direction when reality is actually behind you little here.

i cannot explain why it’s not possible for us to fling the flange if i don’t understand how both the flange flanges and the fling flings.

being able to talk about it is a downstream effect of knowing about it.

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