The part of the job the manual does not carry.
Tacit means the part you cannot write down: not the procedure, which is in the manual, but the feel. Where you slow, how you load it, what you do when the job is not what the drawing said it would be. You have been paid for your time in that seat for years. Nothing has ever paid you for that.
A large excavator in the yard, boom raised · The group's own photograph
Tacit means the part you cannot write down.
The manual carries the procedure. The person carries the rest, and the rest is what this is for.
It is an old word for an ordinary thing. A tacit skill is knowledge you have and cannot hand over on a page. You could put a green hand beside you for a season and still not get all of it across, because most of it is not made of words. It is made of what you have already watched go wrong.
Anyone can read the manual, and the crew still asks for one person by name.
How to start the machine, the order of the checks, the reach of the boom, the settings for the ground you expect: all of it is in the manual, and anyone can read it. A person who has read it can sit in the seat. They are not yet the person a crew asks for by name.
The one who is asked for has something the manual does not carry. Where they slow, how they load it, what they do when the job is not what the drawing said it would be. Nobody taught it to them from a page and they could not put it on one. It shows on the ground and nowhere else.
What can be written down
The procedure. The limits of the machine. The sequence of a job and the drawing it is cut to. The rules of the site. All of that is written already, and it belongs to whoever wrote it. A person who works only from it is qualified, and interchangeable.
What cannot
The feel. The bottom is under water or under the bucket. The mat moves when you load it. The face is not what the drawing said. How a person deals with that is where the skill is, and it shows in what does not happen: the track that did not break through, the bank that did not slump, the load that did not swing.
Anybody learns the five moves in a week.
On an excavator the cycle is dig, lift, swing, dump, return. The moves are the easy half of it. The technique lives in the joins between them, and in the pass where the ground does not do what it did last time.
Write those five on a page and you have described a machine anybody can run. What you have not described is the moment the swing begins to ease, the reason this pass is taken shallower than the last one, or why the operator got out for a look on the way back to the face. None of that was ever in a manual, and none of it was ever in anybody's file. A day on an excavator, dig to return, is set out one move at a time on its own page.
The excavator, a day from start to stop
The drawing was a plan, and the face is a fact.
The person in the seat finds out first, and what they do about it is the part no page ever carried.
Building a rock causeway in shallow water, a person walking the line · The group's own photograph
You are known for what does not happen.
Ask a crew who they want on the wet job and they will not give you a number. They will give you a list of things that did not go wrong.
The list is the machine that did not go in, the trench wall that did not slump, the old line nobody marked and nobody cut, and the truck filled in fewer passes because the face broke for this operator and not the last one. Every one of them is a day a crew remembers and a timesheet does not.
On a good day a careful operator and a lucky one look the same on a timesheet. The difference shows on the other days. A careful day leaves nothing behind to point at: the bank held, the line was not undercut, the machine came home. Nobody writes that down, and until now nobody could.
The best operators are known for what does not happen. A record can show that. A score cannot.
On bad ground every measure you could rank by turns on you.
Buckets an hour rewards the operator who does not stop to look. The careful one works slower, corrects more, and reads as the worse one right up until the quick one is in the water. Feeling for a bottom you cannot see takes constant small movement, so the person doing it best looks the busiest and the least sure.
So nothing here is a score, and nobody is picked from a ranking. People are asked for by name, by somebody who has seen the work, and the name is the measure that holds when the ground does not.
Wages pay for your time, and nothing has ever paid for your method.
What a person knows has never been property. It has been a good reason to employ them, and it has never been more than that.
An hour in the seat has a price on it and always has. The knowledge you carried into the seat does not. It earns for whoever is paying you while you are sitting there, and it earns nothing at all on the days you are not: the days off, the season you are laid off, the winter in the shop, the year your back finally has an opinion about it. The day you retire it walks out the gate with you, and the crew starts again with somebody who has to learn it the long way.
A good deal of it has been given away already, for nothing. Every apprentice who sat beside you got some of it. Every green operator who asked why you were not in a hurry got some of it. None of it was ever worth a dollar to the person it came from, and it should still be passed on. What is new is that a record of it can now be paid for as well.
The law is no help either. It protects a thing somebody wrote or drew, and it has never protected a way of cutting a slope or bringing a process back into band. So what is written on this site is not a claim to own what you know. What is written here is a payment obligation and a licence: you keep the skill, we hold a record of it under licence, and you are paid for every hour that record is in use.
A careful day leaves nothing behind to point at. Until now nobody could write it down, so nobody ever paid for it.
The seat is becoming recordable, and whoever records it first sets the terms.
For as long as there have been machines, what a person knew about running one lived in the person and went home with them at night. That is ending.
A day in the seat can now be recorded from outside the machine, checked, and built into something a machine can carry and run again in another seat. Somebody is going to do that, on your machine or the one beside it. The question is no longer whether it gets recorded. It is what happens to the person afterwards.
It will be recorded
A machine can be taught from the seat now, and the people who sell machines know it. None of that waits for anybody's permission and none of it is under your control. What is under your control is the paper you are asked to sign before it happens.
The terms are set early
The first arrangements written for this will be the ones everything after them is measured against. Written by whoever sells the machine, they come out as a one-time fee, a clause nobody read, and no way out. Written the other way round, they come out as the covenant, the agreement set out in plain words on this site: paid by the hour, your name on it, free to end.
Ours are written the other way round
The person is named, paid every hour it is in use, able to see the hours and able to leave. The first recordings come from our own crews on our own machines, so the awkward questions get found by us and not by you.
What a machine that learns actually is, what it would learn from a record of a person working, and what it still cannot do without somebody in the seat, are set out on their own page.
Machines that learn, and what that means for the seatA way of working is our name for your tacit skill once it is recorded, admitted and built.
You will meet those four words on every page of this site. They mean your way of running that machine after it has been recorded, checked and built into something a machine can carry, with your name on it.
The skill itself stays where it has always been, which is in you. What the site names is the article that gets licensed, counted and paid for, and it is worth knowing what has to happen to a day's work before there is one.
Recorded
A session is one recording of one person working, from the press of start to the press of stop. The kit sits on the controls the machine already has. You run the machine as you always have, nothing of ours is wired to it while you work, and it comes off afterwards and leaves no mark.
Admitted
Before anybody builds from it, the session goes through a written check and comes out admitted, or refused with the reason named: a field missing, a consent that was not live, a set-up that cannot be shown. In plain words, a gap in the record, an agreement that was not in force on the day, or a fitting that cannot be shown in a photograph. Refused is not a criticism of you. Every reason is about equipment or paperwork, and no check anywhere grades how you worked.
Built
We build a way of working from admitted records only, and we do it away from the machine. Nothing is learned on a machine while somebody is running it. What reaches a machine is a release, which is the finished article with a named person's signature on it, and nothing else crosses from us to a machine at all.
Under your name
It is licensed under your name, for the family of machine it was taught on, and a family is a kind of machine rather than a model number. A person on the crew picks it by name before a job and writes their own name on the choice. That act starts the count, the hours it was in use, and those hours are what you are paid for.
So there are two things with nearly the same name, and the difference between them is the point of this page. Your way of working is what you do in that seat, and it stays in your hands whatever any paper says. A way of working, as this site uses the words, is the recorded, checked, named article built from it. That one is held under licence, it earns by the hour, and you can take it back.
Whoever gets asked for by name has one.
It is not a test of how good somebody is. Plenty of good operators are interchangeable on the ground they work, and plenty of ground makes anybody look good.
The question is narrower than skill. When the job is the one nobody wants, whose name comes up? On a good day a careful operator and a lucky one look the same on a timesheet. The difference shows on the other days: the machine that did not go in, the bank that stayed up, the pad that came in on grade the first time. People who have stood beside that work ask for that person again, and they ask by name.
There has to be a lever, a wheel or a pedal between you and the work.
An operator's lever stays put while the bucket moves. So what you did to that lever, and what the machine did back, can both be watched from outside the machine, with no wire to it. A trowel is the work. It goes where the plaster goes, and anything fitted between the person and the trowel changes the plaster.
The rule says nothing about how much skill is in a job. Plastering takes years to learn. It says only whether a record can be taken without touching the thing being made. Where there is no lever, wheel or pedal between the person and the work, there is nothing here to record, and no page on this site will pretend otherwise.
Heavy equipment. Earthmoving to a drawing. The wet job. The seasonal seat nobody can hire for. The board and the crane. In every one of them somebody is asked for by name, and in every one of them the work is done through a lever, a wheel or a pedal. Wherever nobody is asked for by name there is nothing here to license, and no page on this site will tell you otherwise.
The trades, seat by seatIt is not a ticket, a score, a manual or a number.
Four things people reach for when they try to explain this, and none of the four is what the word means.
A ticket says you are allowed in the seat.
Your tickets say you have been trained and you are permitted to run the machine. Everybody on the crew carries them and they are the floor rather than the difference. A tacit skill is what you have on top of every ticket you hold, and there is no card anywhere that carries it.
Nothing here grades how you work.
There is no rating, no ranking, and no list sorted by anything. The checks a session goes through are about equipment and paperwork, and no check anywhere grades how you worked. We do not sell one operator's record against another's.
A manual is the half that was always written down.
The procedure, the limits, the sequence and the drawing belong to whoever wrote them, and anybody can read them. A record of the procedure is a manual. A record of the person is a session, and a session is what is licensed.
Buckets an hour measures the routine.
Fuel, cycle time, idle time: every one of them measures the part anybody can do, and every one of them turns on you the moment the ground goes bad. The thing worth recording shows up as nothing happening, and nothing happening has no number beside it.
And it is not you. Nobody is hired for the day, nobody is sent to your site, and nothing here ends your work. Everything you know is still in your hands tomorrow, on your own machine, for your own employer, at your own rate. What changes is that a second thing can earn while you are doing something else.
The pass where the routine broke and a person put it right.
The routine is the part anybody can do. The record is for the rest of the day.
A line of excavators working a cleared corridor in winter, booms up along a strung pipe · The group's own photograph
For the owner, the operator and the people who can say no.
The part of the job you cannot write down is yours and it stays yours. What can be licensed is a record of you working, held under licence, run under your name, paid for every hour it is in use, and ended on notice at no cost to you. You are asked first, and told what is recorded, in plain words, before anything starts.
The hand you could not replace is the one this is about. Your own operator teaching your own machine stays yours and goes nowhere else. A specialist's way of working, licensed by name for the job nobody else wants, runs only after somebody on your crew has chosen it by name and said go. The rate is on the covenant.
Nothing on this page reaches a machine. A tacit skill is a fact about a person. What is built from a record of one proposes and never authorizes, a person on the crew clears every job, and nothing of ours is connected while a person works.
Nothing described here is an ownership claim over a technique. The law protects an authored work rather than a method, so this is built as a payment obligation and a licence over a recording, and a recording is information about an identifiable person. We give no legal opinion, and you should not accept one from a vendor.
Now see how a day in that seat is recorded.
The next page is what a person standing at the machine would see: what the kit is, where it sits, and what happens between the press of start and the press of stop. If people ask for you by name, write to us as well and we will tell you what a record of yours would be, and whose.