Friday Notes #104 — The Price of Experience & Being Relevant

Here’s a short story.

A giant ship's engine broke down, and no one could repair it, so they hired a Mechanical Engineer with over 30 years of experience.
He inspected the engine very carefully, from top to bottom.
After seeing everything, the engineer unloaded his bag and pulled out a small hammer.
He knocked something gently. Soon, the engine came to life again. The engine has been fixed!
A week later, the engineer mentioned to the ship owner that the total cost of repairing the giant ship was $20,000.
"What?!" said the owner.
"You did almost nothing. Give us a detailed bill."
The answer is simple:
Tap with a hammer: $2
Know where to knock and how much to knock: $19,998
The importance of appreciating one's expertise and experience… because those are the results of struggles, experiments and even tears.
If I do a job in 30 minutes, it's because I spent 20 years learning how to do that in 30 minutes. You owe me for the years, not the minutes.

— Author Unknown

I relate a lot to this story because of my late father and my late mother and the professional life they had (and endured). I heard so many stories when they were discussing (or arguing) about client prospection or when they had to justify the charges they were asking for their work. I always felt sorry for them about that. At the beginning of my father’s career, I could understand the lack of experience as being a solid argument to challenge pricing on a project but after thirty or forty years? No way.

Thankfully, I’m not subject to these challenges for many reasons. One of them is that my job is in a high-demand field and is highly respected and valued by the population in general. The information technology field looks arcane and even mysterious to the vast majority of people and business owners. They are willing to pay the bills when we fix their business problems.

But now the question is: with AI being all over the place (it’s coming near you, if not already there, pay attention), how long before I’m being challenged myself? I recently had a conversation with a few people (using Wavelength) who are anxious about the increasing place of AI in our society. I’m not anxious yet, but I can understand their point.

👉🏻 Disclaimer: This blog post was entirely created by the author and is free of any AI-generated content. 🙂

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading me. 🙏🏻

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