Why do we pay a journeyman more than an apprentice? Tradition? Goodness of our hearts? No, of course not. We pay a journeyman more than an apprentice because we expect to get more from the journeyman than from the apprentice. A journeyman (presumably) knows more about the craft, doesn’t have to spend so much time concentrating on doing the little things, and has gained enough experience to avoid some of the common pitfalls that slow the apprentice down substantially.

But things get interesting when we get to a master. Why do we pay a master more than a journeyman? Is the master so much more experienced that he can avoid the pitfalls into which a journeyman stumbles? Perhaps. But the main reason we pay a master much more than a journeyman is due to the leverage a master can exert if properly positioned.

A master mechanic turning wrenches is just as wasted as a master electrician stripping wire. Can they do it? Absolutely! Is it a valuable use of their time that benefits from the leverage they can exert? Absolutely not. Where the path from apprentice to journeyman makes a person competent to do a single job, the path from journeyman to master makes a person competent to handle multiple jobs at once. Pay one master electrician a lot of money, and he can organize the labor of many journeymen and apprentices to do many jobs in parallel. The master’s time, then, is most efficiently spent spot-checking and giving high-level guidance to the journeymen, who in turn spread the work out amongst themselves and their apprentices. In that way, many jobs get done with just one well-paid master organizer and many lower-paid journeymen and grunt apprentices.

This is leverage in the trade world. It applies equally to engineering. Why do we pay a mid-level engineer more than a junior engineer? It’s comparable to a journeyman versus an apprentice, and a senior-level engineer is a further extension. By the time we get to staff and/or principal-level engineers, that is where the leverage comes in.

And that makes me sad.

For the last 19 years (sheesh, it’s been longer than I thought!), I’ve been an engineer, working my way up from junior to mid-level to senior to… whatever the hell I am now. A large part of me is clawing its way to stay senior-level, to get to continue doing the individual contributor stuff. Fortunately, Systems gives me a different type of leverage, one where I write requirements that enable multiple branches of Engineering to work together. I write a few words, and a product appears. Now that’s leverage. But the reality of my situation set in last week, right after I finished reading Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (and admittedly, I was put into the right frame of mind by The Goal, which I read right before it): my value to my company is not that I can write mediocre code, solder reasonably well, and design boards at a decent level. (I’m not bitter; it’s just that the jack-of-all-trades designation is of little comfort as I get older.) Yes, it is valuable that I can do those things; it’s valuable that you can throw me at a problem, and I will generally stick. But where my real value comes in at this stage of my career is in acting as a lever. Rather than designing boards, I should be mentoring others to do it effectively. Rather than writing requirements myself, I should be training others to do so and then harnessing teams of engineers to move towards a common goal (hopefully aligned to corporate interests…).

But that means that the “fun” time—time spent coding or designing and testing boards or (to a lesser degree) writing requirements—must fall by the wayside. If I want to provide maximum leverage to my company, I should behave more like a staff/principal engineer and less like a senior engineer still clinging by a pinkie to individual contribution.

There is one other option. It’s still not “maximum leverage”, but it is a form of leverage: I discovered last week that Claude in my hands is a beast of a thing: writing code, running tests, troubleshooting issues… not quite automatically but getting there. It really is like a junior developer (that happens to write better embedded send and receive threads than I do). Despite spending time in Management a few years ago, I never really felt the “click” of leverage until last week. The idea of a bionic arm resonates, where with a simple movement, I can reach out and move a fully loaded semi as if it were a die cast model. Perhaps this is the promise of AI that everybody is searching for: the idea of nearly infinite leverage. You enter a simple prompt for a product idea, marketing pitch, or new world order, and machines do all the work. That might well be maximum leverage, after all.

I am a bit torn on this: an extrovert, I am not, and that part of me says, “With luck, I won’t have to resort to orchestrating the activities of a dozen junior engineers.” But, I am cognizant of duty and of the next generation, and that part of me says, “Training an AI to do this instead of the next generation is self-serving and short-sighted.”

Whether I like it or not, I owe it to future generations to quit being such a recluse. 

Levered advantage
Needs a suitable fulcrum.
Then lever the world.