What happens when you're gone?

"After you've gone and left me crying
After you've gone ain't no denying
You'll feel blue; you'll feel bad
You'll miss the bestest mamma you ever had."

The passing of Bob Pease and Jim Williams highlighted a problem I've been worried about for some time: What happens when you retire? Or, assuming most of us probably won't retire in the traditional sense but keep on doing what we do best, what happens when you die?

In many disciplines, the institutional knowledge that's been built over decades vanishes. For the next generation, it's as if they're standing on a dock that suddenly collapses and before they realize what's happened, they're underwater, sinking like a stone.

Most executive managers pooh-pooh this transition, insisting that their training programs have ensured a continuance of this institutional knowledge. Or that new knowledge is more important than old knowledge because technology is ever-changing. You and I know from experience that that's a load of crap, and this is especially true in the analog design world. Executive management has to say this because if they understood the importance of institutional knowledge and technical expertise, they wouldn't have gone into management!

I talked with old friend and PCB guru Lee Ritchey this spring, who has a cat bird seat to another of these design areas that will suffer when you're gone: high-speed board design.

He said:

"It’s a problem now. John Zaszio and I were talking about this. He has the same problem. The company he works with hires people who 'design things.' When he gets them in, they can’t read a schematic, don’t have a clue about high-speed power issues. He’s almost a voice in the wilderness. He’s the one guy out of 30 who can things built. If he’s gone, they’re up a creek. I don’t know if management has thought about that."

Management, in Ritchey's eyes, is not graduating from the right programs.

"All the management are computer science majors. They don’t know about fields and waves and that tech you have to have to do high-speed design. So they don’t know when they’re getting in trouble until they fail."

Passage of time
Mentoring today is just a warm memory (how many commenters in the past couple of weeks wrote in about how much they learned from Pease and Williams?); time-to-market is a marketing-department crack addiction rarely based in reality; and you can always throw more bodies (preferably from low-wage tech centers) at the problem, sort of like the Somme in 1916. That worked well. Not.

Now, on the other hand, because our cohort here is precisely that experienced, bearing-down-on-retirement-age type, these views could simply reflect the old guard grumbling about being the old guard. ("Back in MY day....") And new solutions, methods and tools arise that we never anticipated that often make the old ways of doing thing--the old knowledge--irrelevant tomorrow. When I was a kid, being able to do your multiplication tables quickly in your head up past the 13s was a badge of honor. Today, you just need to know how to tap buttons after hitting the "on" switch.

In journalism, a new generation of reporters is coming onto the scene adept at new media and technology. That's fantastic. But do they know how to really dig up real stories or have the patience for it? Who is teaching them how to butter up the county clerk to get that special phone call or text message when a certain filing comes in?

In engineering, new talent comes into companies every day with academic knowledge and tools you could only dream of back in the day. But who will be there to help them anticipate the corner cases, management nonsense and technical hurdles you've suffered through and learned from?

Does it matter?

Or is that sound we're hearing a creaky dock?