Most Who Can Do, Won't Teach

Wait, You Don't Know That Already?

In professional settings, we've established this almost unspoken hierarchy. Where the person who knows something and keeps it in their head is doing "real work", and the person who stops to help someone else understand it is admitting they weren't good enough to just do the thing. 'Those who can't do, teach' turned sharing into a consolation prize.

That's not the only attitude floating around. "I figured it out myself", for example, carries a specific pride. That they learned without anyone's help. Which makes asking for help itself seem weak. Often, when you do ask there's this way someone can answer and still make you feel like you weren't qualified enough to ask.

I don't think anybody sat down and decided these were the rules. They just kept piling up. But pile enough of these attitudes together and you get a pretty clear message: learning is an individual responsibility. If you don't understand something, that's your gap to close. The person who already knows isn't expected to meet you anywhere. And if you can't make the trip, well, that tells you something about yourself, doesn't it?

That default is so deeply embedded that most people don't even notice it as a choice. It just feels like how things work. But it is a choice. And I think it's the wrong one.

Work Harder, Not Smarter

Here's what that looks like day-to-day. A senior engineer spends months untangling a system that's grown into a mess over years. She maps the dependencies, figures out where the real problems are buried, builds a mental model of how the whole thing fits together. A new engineer joins. Now there is a choice. Let him wander through the same confusion she went through, months of false starts, dead ends, slow accumulation, because that's how she had to do it. Or sit down for thirty minutes and hand over the map so he can start where she ended up and put his energy into actually improving the system.

The first option feels principled. I can even find myself pushing back thinking "so what, you want everything spoon-fed? People need to be able to figure things out on their own." Sure. But what does the first option actually produce? Two people spending months learning the same thing instead of one person building on what the other already figured out. And the new engineer might even catch things she missed, but only if he's not spending all his time retracing her steps just to reach a starting line.

Scale that up and the cost is enormous. Every hour spent rediscovering what someone else already knows is an hour not spent on the next problem. Every person who gives up because the gap feels impossible to close alone is a perspective that never enters the room. Knowledge that stays in one person's head does nothing but sit there. Knowledge that gets passed along, roughly, imperfectly, even just as a starting point for someone else to challenge and refine compounds.

None of that is to say the people who've worked hard to learn difficult things shouldn't have pride in that work. They should. But systems produce patterns regardless of anyone's intentions, and this pattern has been running long enough it's worth questioning whether it's actually serving us.

Just Google It

As someone who has had one of those "fancy" engineer titles, early into meeting someone new professionally, I often hear some form of "oh I couldn't do that, I'm not a tech person". But it doesn't come across like "I haven't learned that yet." It sounds like a fixed trait. Like not being right-handed. A settled fact about what kind of person they are.

This confuses me, because there is more freely available technical education right now than at any point in history. If the problem were simply that people weren't sharing, it would have been solved already. And yet people are still walking away convinced they're fundamentally incapable of understanding it.

I think it's because sharing and communicating aren't the same thing. Most technical knowledge, when it does get shared, gets shared in the language it was developed in: precise, efficient, and completely dependent on a set of assumptions about what the listener already knows. And the default response when someone doesn't understand is to explain it again, maybe slower or with even more precise language. Which is a bit like raising your voice at someone who speaks a different language. The volume is not the reason they don't understand you.

The concepts underneath most modern technology, AI included, are not beyond anyone's ability to grasp. What I think happens is that the most readily available and shared explanations are almost exclusively written for the people who already have a specific context. If your expertise was built in a different domain, the ideas themselves probably aren't what's tripping you up. It's that almost nobody is explaining them in a way that connects to how you already think. After enough of those experiences, concluding "I'm not a tech person" is a perfectly reasonable response to a pattern of evidence.

So the problem isn't only that knowledge gets hoarded, though it does. It's that even when knowledge gets shared, the way it gets shared mostly reaches people who were almost there already. The door is technically open.

This post originally appeared on Nilima's Substack, Still Thinking Here. Subscribe if you want more like this.