Engineering, at its best, is repeatable, testable, transferable between people because it's written down as a rule. That's exactly what the razor unit's makers had. What they didn't have was design judgement - the thing rooted in observation rather than specification, that knows when the rule has stopped serving the purpose it was built for. They applied technical rationality to a problem that needed reflection instead, and the result was an object with exact tolerances and n

Somewhere this quarter, in a talent review, a manager will describe an engineer as T-shaped. Heads will nod and a box will be ticked. The engineer, who is not in the room, will spend the next year receiving work shaped like the letter rather than shaped like their ability. Nobody will check whether the label was accurate, because it does not feel like a claim. It feels like an observation, but it’s neither.