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American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

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Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#21

Post by andyst »

Possibly the website has been hugged to death, but the principle resonates with me from the headline. In the large and old enterprises I've worked with, there is such a stark shift from I suppose, lifetime service to the consultant economy as the workforce transition follows the boomer generation out, and forecasting where that might leave us.

Short term drivers like a bad quarter or to be seen "disrupting" as a measure of progress, rather then genuine demonstrations of skills, turf out tenured employees often mid-career.

Or perhaps being in the engine room of many companies, doesn't often give you the lifestyle you want anymore, so the race to the top is the optimal spot to go for. Even if it means going up and falling down a few times on the heirarchy, its worth it.

The value of the nature of not having custodians of certain crafts, like aviation or really at the guts of any industry, seems to me its really going to set us back towards really transactional style of operating businesses that are only financially engineered and not really innovating the product in a way they should.

just random thoughts around how to have a fulfilling career, when most of the effort is in sales & marketing, and not much in operations when the funding pot gets allocated across a business.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#22

Post by cucumber3732842 »

1718627440 wrote: post #19
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm". Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk. On a personal or organizational level there is no point in making investments that will turn profit over the course of decades if over the ~5yr horizon there's there's always the looming risk that the government will kick your craft out of the country at the behest of the pe…

The thing is that profit is not the only reason people do something. Some people just like their profession, I would argue that this is kinda a requirement to actually become really good. So in order to actually matter for a good skill you must lack the very argument you argue with. The leading of companies with people not actually skilled at the craft is still a historic anomaly.

Money is not the "only" reason people do things. But it sure helps.

Would we have nearly as many slime-balls scheming up ways to plaster ads upon everyone's eyeballs and record our every movement and click if not for the money in it? At a societal level almost nothing ever gets done at scale if there isn't money in it. You remove the financial incentive and things atrophy, new investment stops replacing old, etc.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#23

Post by cucumber3732842 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #20
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm". Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk. On a personal or organizational level there is no point in making investments that will turn profit over the course of decades if over the ~5yr horizon there's there's always the looming risk that the government will kick your craft out of the country at the behest of the pe…

Tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, real estate development companies, banks, and others plan for decades. People also lend money and invest in equities like index funds to plan for decades.

None of those industries create the material or social plenty that make us all richer.

You cannot eat real estate or stock options, the medical industry is a drag on us all though obviously you can cherry pick examples where things don't look perverse.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#24

Post by WillAdams »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #10
embedding-shape wrote: post #5

How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every…

This is one of the saddest aspects of our societies being optimized for maximum short-term gains. In the past, master craftsman would own their own shop and pass it down to their apprentices, leaving a tradition and legacy that could last hundreds of years. This dynamic is becoming increasingly rare.

Yeah, my great aunt's bridge partner's husband had a cabinet shop which I used to hang out in after school when I missed the bus --- learned a lot by osmosis just hanging out and helping and doing odd chores.

When he passed away, his wife rented the shop out, to a drug addict who pawned off all the tools he could sneak out in his car.... when there was eventually an auction, not much was left, but I did at least get to buy an (empty) toolbox he had had me assemble from scrap lumber (which I still have on my workbench as a remembrance).

That said, for a flip side look at this sort of thing, consider the case of Charles Babbage trying to get his Analytical Engine made and the dispute over who owned the tooling, him or Joseph Clement, with the latter winning because at the time, a workman owned his tools, even if they were specifically constructed for a customer's project.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#25

Post by lmz »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #12
logseman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their status and whatever wage they commanded depended on training as few apprentices as possible.

Incorrect. I don't think I've met one person that were actually good at their job but didn't wanted to share the skill. It's because management didn't value it. They put the veteran on on more jobs rather on moving them to training, because short term it's more profitable, and mid term it's easier to poach veterans off competition rather than train them in house

How do you explain guilds restricting supply then? (The most common example is Physicians).

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#26

Post by KPGv2 »

bob1029 wrote: post #7
embedding-shape wrote: post #5

How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every…

It's sad but at the same time there is a sort of optimization that tends to occur each time the magic trick is rediscovered. Often it is not possible to separate the technique from the man. Things like riding a bike or flying a helicopter come to mind. A lot of what makes a master good cannot be written down anywhere. There isn't anything tangible to actually lose. How would you write a document that describes to som…

You don't need to write it down to pass the knowledge down to an apprentice.

Your bicycle case is a great example. People don't learn to ride a bike from a book. They receive in-person instruction of exactly the type the comment you're responding to was writing about.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#27

Post by BoxOfRain »

Towaway69 wrote: post #13
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the saddest aspects of our societies being optimized for maximum short-term gains. In the past, master craftsman would own their own shop and pass it down to their apprentices, leaving a tradition and legacy that could last hundreds of years. This dynamic is becoming increasingly rare.

This is relative. In two generations, the concept of "master craftsman" and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm". It is only because we know and can compare that we judge. Remember, when we were hunter & gatherers, before becoming bound to the land and tilling that land, we had different gifts and talents that have all been lost. For better or worse. Or closer to home: barely…

Black and white TV left enough of a cultural impact that despite not living through that era, when I got a black and white e-ink smartphone recently I joked that if I were to watch the snooker on it I'd have to judge the green by its proximity to the pink.

Also the BBC still issue black and white TV licences, I suspect my phone is eligible for one! Still about 3.5k of them working apparently.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#28

Post by simonsarris »

embedding-shape wrote: post #5

How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every…

Yes, this seems to happen a lot in small companies. It seems less inevitable in big ones but it still happens. You would think at a minimum AA would want to hire a journalist or similar simply to shadow him for a year, get him to dictate everything (so that he has to do as little extra effort as possible), and publish a sort-of manual from the accumulated wisdom.

The point of hiring someone specifically to do this is that he might simply want to keep on working, uninterrupted by apprentices or other demands, so the recorder must be a second person dedicated to knowledge maintenance.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#30

Post by lotsofpulp »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #23
lotsofpulp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, real estate development companies, banks, and others plan for decades. People also lend money and invest in equities like index funds to plan for decades.

None of those industries create the material or social plenty that make us all richer. You cannot eat real estate or stock options, the medical industry is a drag on us all though obviously you can cherry pick examples where things don't look perverse.

Am I being trolled? People live in buildings developed by real estate development companies, people take life saving and life extending medicines made by pharmaceutical companies, and people communicate and navigate using the electronics made by tech companies.

The things they create (and not exclusively they, obviously the country as a whole creates too) directly lead to the share price increases and dividends that allow many or most people in the US to maintain purchasing power.

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