10 ms·

> unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t airline mainten

• embedding-shape 17d ago
  > 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.
• realo 17d ago
  Well ... It takes four years of education before becoming a taxi driver in London: https://thetaxi.academy/ 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.
  • netdevphoenix 17d ago
    > It takes four years of education before becoming a taxi driver in London That doesn't apply to private hire vehicle drivers afaik.
    • nephihaha 16d ago
      Private hire is technically not a taxi. They can't pick someone up at a rank or on the street.
    • dpoloncsak 17d ago
      Or Uber drivers in London
      • celsoazevedo 17d ago
        (In case you're not aware) It's the same thing. Uber operates in London as private hire operator, so their drivers are mini cab drivers. Same rules (now: basic English and rules test, yearly car inspections, MOT every 6 months, cars must have TFL badges, etc).
    • IAmBroom 16d ago
      ... who are obviously not taxi drivers, so ... your point?
  • quickthrowman 17d ago
    There are detailed step-by-step instruction cards (task cards) for every single maintenance operation on an airplane. Nobody is reinventing the wheel, they’re carefully following predetermined procedures. Someone has to figure out which maintenance procedures need to happen, but the work itself is laid out for you step by step.
    • realo 17d ago
      Cool! I did not know that. Augmented reality glasses, coupled with an AI that can interpret vision would seem to be useful here then.
• deleted 17d ago
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• zulgin 17d ago
  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.
  • gwbas1c 17d ago
    > Even if stuff is written down you have to know where to look. That's one of the things I love about AI: It's excellent at figuring out where to look, because it can digest so many documents so much faster than a person.
    • SteveNuts 17d ago
      Yeah it’s great to point an AI at a very detailed and specific engineering manual and have it distilled down into bullet points. There’s certainly no room for information loss in that plan! /s
      • msl 16d ago
        GP did not suggest anything of the kind, though. They talked about "figuring out where to look" which very different. In that kind of use, it doesn't really matter that the model might hallucinate or draw faulty conclusions, as you're not using it figure out what to do, how or why. The only thing it is telling you is where some information is located, after which you go check it out from the actual source of truth. If the reference turns out to be wrong, you'll notice immediately.
      • compiler-guy 17d ago
        Plus everything important is always written down. It’s more true in aviation than anywhere else (except maybe space flight), but still.
• greenjudge 17d ago
  [flagged]
• balderdash 17d ago
  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
  • cucumber3732842 16d ago
    The diagnostic/service steps you have to write to preclude any requirement of skill/experience make it stupid proof waste a lot of labor in the process. Cheaper to have the guy with the skill/experience show up and listen to the thing.
• WarmWash 17d ago
  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.
  • chasd00 17d ago
    heh the first time i took on a project as a new homeowner (building a deck) i learned this lesson. I spec'd everything out on paper and covered all the bases and felt pretty confident. Then I purchased the wood and so many pieces weren't the size advertised and i don't mean how a 2x4 is not really 2 inches by 4 inches. Some pieces were 3/4" too short, others too long, some straight but most weren't. It took so many trips to/from home depot and went over budget and wayyy over time. oh and post holes, some are easy and some you hit mystery chunks of concrete(!?). It was like archaeological expedition trying to get deep enough holes in the ground.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 16d ago
    I had a co-worker who was an experienced software developer but had never worked on a system that interfaced with the physical world before. For quite a while, he hated having to test on real hardware because all sorts of failure modes that he couldn't predict: belts stretching, mechanisms hitting each other or not lining up properly and losing position, etc. kept happening and interfering with his nice "this will only take 15 minutes to test" estimates, making it an all-afternoon affair. OTOH, it was that unpredictability and having to deal with weird stuff that I liked about programming embedded systems.
• clickety_clack 17d ago
  “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.
  • falsemyrmidon 17d ago
    Just read and internalize the 800k page manual, some of which poorly explains why things are the way they are or is outright wrong. Ezpz
  • Xirdus 16d ago
    The joke about software developers refusing to enter an airplane running their own code dates back at least 30 years. Software engineering is unique in STEM in that it has nearly zero regulations. Nobody keeps anybody accountable for quality and there are never any legal consequences. No other STEM jobs is like that, usually there are thousand hoops to jump through to do anything non-standard, but in software there's nothing. You can literally go to prison for forging an aircraft maintenance log, but you can forge JIRA logs to your heart's content and never get prosecuted (at most your employer can sue you for damages but that's it).
    • HeyLaughingBoy 16d ago
      That's not a valid comparison. A Jira log is not part of a Quality Management System (QMS). An aircraft maintenance log is. If you fake data in the QMS, software or not, for a regulated industry, I can assure you that it won't be taken lightly by the regulators. Try forging the software validation test records for that airplane's flight control system and see what happens.
      • lazyasciiart 16d ago
        Hopefully something happens a lot quicker than with volkswagon!
• 4fterd4rk 17d ago
  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.
• failbuffer 16d ago
  The mistake of modernity is believing that all tacit knowledge can be reduced to words.
• bluejay2387 16d ago
  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.