Work

Unless you work for the Big Kahuna—Microsoft, Google, Amazon—you are not doing engineering. You are doing technical work: translating human intent into machine action, over and over. For decades we called this “engineering” because it used logic and code. But engineering implies discovery, creation of new laws. Most technical work is the application of existing laws to existing problems. It is craft. It is skill. And when you accept this, you stop waiting for the perfect solution and start learning how to conduct imperfect tools toward coherent outcomes. …

The Title Trap asks: what are we actually paying for? This essay answers it by defining three substantively different practices in knowledge work. The problem is not that people use “engineer,” “technologist,” and “technician” interchangeably—it is that we have made it impossible to call anyone anything else. I. The Profession That Lost Its Names In medicine, the distinction is clear and enforced by law. An MD and a Nurse Practitioner are both valuable. Both are trained professionals. They are not interchangeable. They have different training, different scopes of practice, different liabilities. The system is designed so you cannot confuse them. …

In traditional engineering—civil, mechanical, structural—a “Senior Engineer” is someone the insurance company will let sign off on blueprints. If those blueprints fail and a bridge collapses, there is liability. There are lawsuits. There are corpses. The title is not social; it is a legal and physical fact. It is directly tied to how much you can be trusted, which directly tied to what you can earn. A Senior Engineer can be trusted because the product is permanent and failure is irreversible. …

The public conversation about AI and work is stuck on the wrong question. “Will my job be replaced?” is the framing everyone reaches for, because it has a clean visual: a robot taking a specific seat. The headlines love it. Goldman: AI to replace 300 million jobs. McKinsey: half of all work activity automatable. The displacement frame promises an event — an announcement, a layoff, a press release — and the policy answers it suggests are familiar: retraining, universal basic income, regulation. …

Revised on 2026-04-28 to v1.1. See revision history below. Look at any AI-skeptic feed in 2026 and you’ll see the word slop doing heavy work. It names something real: low-entropy, mass-produced text without an author behind it, flooding feeds, search results, comment sections, product reviews. There’s now a small genre of essays explaining why this is bad for civilization. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are slop themselves. I want to ask a different question. Not whether AI slop is bad — clearly some of it is — but why we’re so confident we can recognize it. Because if you squint at a lot of professional life, much of what we produce on a normal Tuesday already qualifies. Legal boilerplate. Corporate memo-speak. Quarterly reports that survive only because nobody reads them. Status updates that say nothing. Standardized medical notes whose function is mostly forensic. …

In Airplane! (1980), Lloyd Bridges plays Steve McCroskey, an air-traffic controller running a disaster on the ground while a single pilot with food poisoning tries not to kill everyone on the plane above. McCroskey is on two phones at once. He’s barking at his wife. He’s pivoting to a subordinate mid-sentence. He’s drinking coffee, then cigarettes, then amphetamines, then glue, in that order. Every fifteen minutes or so, the camera cuts back to him and he delivers the same line with a slightly different noun: …