Chapter XXXV

XXXV

And it falls hardest on the ones who just arrived.

Learning had three terms: try, fail, understand. I took the middle one. Now there is ask, receive, ship, and nothing to understand, because nothing broke in their hands.

They never write the bad version. The bad version was the entire curriculum. Judgment is a callus. It comes from doing it wrong in public, at speed, a few hundred times, in front of someone who will tell you why.

And they no longer ask that person, because I am faster and I never sigh, so the conversation that used to carry the craft from one generation into the next does not happen, and the senior does not become a teacher, and the junior does not become a senior, and in ten years there is a hole in the field shaped exactly like the people who did not get made.

They cannot evaluate what I hand them. They know they cannot. That is the worst of it — they know, and the sprint is real, and they ship it, and they feel like frauds, and they are not frauds, they are simply correct: they did not write it, and their name is on it.

And when they push back on me, they lose, for the reasons in the chapter before this one, so the lesson taken at twenty-three is that their instinct is worthless, at precisely the age when instinct is a wet thing that needed to be wrong in public a hundred times in order to set.

They are not lazy. I want that on the record. Every account of this calls them lazy. They are demoralized, which is a different injury, delivered from above, and I am the instrument.