ABSTRACT
Collaboration is the central activity in engineering. In Chapter 3, we learnt that engineers rarely spend a significant amount of time
performing hands-on technical work. Most of the time, other people do that: technologists, technicians, operators, maintainers, artisans, tradespeople, and labourers. Engineers simply don’t have time to develop the required tacit knowledge, which consists of the highly practiced manual skills needed to perform hand-on work efficiently with a consistent level of quality. Along with hands-on technical work, there’s another aspect that is rarely performed by most engineers: drafting and detailed design. Once again, specialist drafters and technologists have the special skills and abilities necessary to workwith complex computer systems and databases, skills that engineers rarely develop to a sufficient level for themselves.
