The excavator first, on home ground.
If you run an excavator, this is your seat, in the words a crew uses on it. Every trade on this site is a seat somebody asks for by name. The excavator comes first because it is the machine the crews sit in, on home ground, doing work that is often blind. If the agreement, the roster and the pay cannot carry a skill here, they cannot carry one anywhere.
The crews run it, on home ground.
The family's crews and home ground come first. On this machine it is a fact of the yard rather than a preference.
This page is one seat, in the words the crew uses on it. If you want the short version of what a tacit skill is, why nobody ever paid for it, and what we call it once it is recorded, admitted and built, the plain page carries it in a few minutes.
What a tacit skill isHome ground
The crews and the ground are the family's, and the work is real work with a real bottom to it. Nothing has to be staged for a recording, and nobody has to be asked to work in front of a stranger. When something goes wrong it goes wrong at home, at the family's cost, with the crews deciding what to do about it.
Levers and pedals
The operator acts through levers and pedals. They are a fixed surface, they stay where they are while the work moves, and the record can sit on them without changing how they feel. A control that does not behave as it did before is not fit to record, and it is checked before any kit is fitted.
Blind work
Much of it is done without seeing the thing being worked on. 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 it is where the skill is, and on this machine it is on show every day.
Iron we already know by its habits.
The machines are in the yard at home, and the crews know every one of them: which stick is slow to settle, which swing brake grabs, which one wants a warm-up before it will feather. A first recording needs a machine the crews know that well, so a surprise in the record is a surprise in the work and not in the iron.
From the walk-around to the last bucket, the day is an ordinary day.
You press start and you press stop. A recorded day on this machine has a photograph at each end of it and nothing of ours in between. What changes for the person in the seat is nothing. What changes for the crew is nothing.
The walk-around
The person who will run the machine walks around it as they do every morning. Nothing of ours is wired to it: no harness cut, no controller touched, no power taken off the machine. Every control has to behave exactly as it did before any kit was fitted, and that is checked first.
The photograph, and the morning check
Before the first bucket, the disconnected state is photographed, and the photograph goes into the record where it cannot be swapped out quietly. The recorder is checked before the first session of the day, and that check is kept with every session made under it.
Start
The record starts when the person in the seat says so, and not before. Nobody starts it for them, and nothing starts it on its own. Until they say so, the machine is a machine with a person in it and nothing else.
The work
The person runs the machine as they always have. The bottom is found the way it was found yesterday and the swing is eased the way it always is. Where the routine broke and the person recovered, a note is made against the clock, so the place where the technique showed can be found again later. The note is about a moment, and it carries no opinion of the person.
Stop, and the photograph after
The record stops when the person says so. The recorder comes off, photographed before and after, and leaves no mark. The machine goes back to work as it was, with nothing of ours on it.
Signed, then admitted or refused
The day's sessions go through the same written procedure as every other, and each 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. No reason on that list is about how the person worked, and a refused session is kept with its reason rather than thrown away.
Two photographs, one at each end, and an ordinary day's digging between them.
Nothing on the day is AI learning from you. Whatever is built is built later, away from the machine, from sessions you said yes to and are paid for every hour they run, and what is built is a tool that runs under your name. You own your skill, always and forever. Nothing here takes it, buys it, moves it or learns it out of you. We make the tool. You own the skill.
Everything a session carries is on the page about the record. The boundary a person can walk up to and check, and why the photograph is the part that matters, is on the page about how it is recorded.
An ordinary day's digging, with a photograph at each end of it.
Nothing of ours is wired to the machine, and what changes for the person in the seat is nothing.
Dig, lift, swing, dump, return.
In plain words the cycle is a few moves, and anybody can learn the moves in a week. The technique lives in the joins between them, and in the pass where the ground does not do what it did last time.
Dig
The bucket goes into the face and comes back full. The technique is the break-away: the teeth are in, the load has to come free, and it has to come free without stalling the machine or lifting the tracks.
Lift
Before the bucket comes up it finds the bottom. On a grade you cannot see, under water or under spoil, the bucket is feathered along the bottom until it reads right through the levers, because nothing else on the machine can read it.
Swing
A full bucket at the end of a long stick wants to keep going. Easing the swing so the load does not throw the machine, and the machine does not throw the load, is where a good operator looks slow and is not.
Dump
The setting down. Spoil placed where it will not run back into the cut, a load eased onto a truck rather than dropped into it, a rock set on the slope rather than let go above it.
Return
Back to the face, and a look at what changed while the bucket was away. Water coming in, a wall that moved, a mat that walked. The next dig starts with that look, not with the levers.
Read only the headings and you have a machine anybody can run. Read what sits between them and you have the reason certain people are asked for by name.
The part that sits between the headings has a name. Tacit means the part of a job that cannot be written down, and once it has been recorded, admitted and built, this site calls it a way of working.
A tacit skillMost of the work is done on something you cannot see.
A drawing shows a bottom, a slope and a line. The ground shows you a bucket of what it is made of, one pass at a time.
A bottom you cannot see
Under water, under mud, under the bucket itself. The grade is found by what comes back through the levers and by what the last bucket brought up, and it is found again on every pass because the ground under it changes.
Wet ground
Ground that carried the machine this morning may not carry it after lunch. Water comes into a cut from the side you were not watching, and a firm bottom goes soft under the tracks while you are looking at the face.
Mats that move when you load them
On soft ground the machine sits on mats, and a mat moves when you swing a full bucket over it. The seat tells you before anything else does, and the answer is in the swing, not in the mat.
A face that is not what the drawing said
Rock where the drawing said clay. A lens of sand where the wall was supposed to stand. An old line nobody marked. The drawing was a plan, the face is a fact, and the person in the seat finds out first.
Because the ground is half the story, the record carries what the ground did as well. Everything else about the record is on the page that describes it.
The same bucket on different ground is a different job.
A drawing describes a finished surface. The ground has an answer to every move, and on this machine the answer is what the person in the seat works with all day.
It carries you, or it does not.
Frozen ground carries a machine that would sink in the same place in spring. A bottom that held the tracks all morning goes soft under them after rain, and the first warning is a lean the seat feels before the eye sees it. The person who feels it stops before it goes.
It stands, or it lets go.
Clay stands in a wall that sand will not, and the same clay stops standing when water finds the back of it. A wall that slumps takes the spoil with it, and the pipe, and sometimes the machine. The order of the cut and where the spoil is set decide which it will be, before the wall has any say.
It breaks, or it fights.
Some ground comes away clean at the teeth. Some has to be worked, corner by corner, until the load lets go. Frost puts a lid on ground that was easy last week, and a boulder that was not on the drawing turns the next pass into a new plan.
It drains, or it fills.
Water runs into a cut from the side you were not watching. A trench that was dry at the start of the day is a pond by the end of it, unless the person in the seat cut for the water before it arrived, and cutting for it is a decision nobody on the drawing made.
A crew does not ask for a name because of the machine. They ask for it because of the ground: the pond job, the wet trench, the face that stopped agreeing with the drawing. So the ground, the material and the weather are noted as the crew found them, and years later nobody has to remember what the ground was doing that day, and nobody has to be believed. None of the three is a field the record requires. When one is missing it is noted as missing, and the session goes through.
The routine is not where the skill is.
Off a berm with the boom over the water, every pass is a correction. The record is for the pass that stopped being routine.
A number would rank the best operator last.
Everything you could count on this machine turns on you the moment the ground goes bad.
Buckets an hour rewards the operator who does not stop to look. The careful one works slower, right up until the quick one is in the water. A count of corrections reads the skill as its absence: feeling for a bottom you cannot see takes constant small movement, so the person doing it best looks the busiest and the least sure. Fuel, cycle time, idle time, every one of them measures the routine, and the routine is the part anybody can do.
The skill shows in the moments the routine breaks and a person recovers. A wall starts to go and the bucket is already there. The mat shifts and the swing is already easing. The face comes up rock and the plan changes before the next pass. None of it shows on a timesheet, because the result of it is that nothing happened.
Nobody is picked from a ranking. People are asked for by name, and on this machine the name is the measure that holds when the ground does not.
The best operators 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.
- 01The machine that did not go inWorking off a berm or a mat at the edge of water, the machine stayed on top, because the person in the seat felt it start to go and stopped before it did.
- 02The trench wall that did not slumpA wall that stands does not get noticed. It stands because the cut was made in the right order, the spoil was set back, and the water was watched.
- 03The line that did not get undercutThe old line nobody marked is still in the ground, because the bucket went in slow where the ground felt wrong and the operator stopped to look.
- 04The bucket that did not come up emptyA face that would not break for the last operator broke for this one. The break-away is a feel, and the person who has it fills the truck in fewer passes than the person who does not.
- 05The day that did not stopThe job kept going when the ground changed, because the person in the seat changed the plan with it instead of waiting for someone to come and look.
Nothing to see, and everything to feel.
Off a berm the bottom is a rumour. The bucket goes down until the levers say it has arrived, the load comes up until the machine says it is enough, and the swing is eased because the ground under the berm moves with it. A person who can do that is asked for by name, and there is no number anybody could put beside it.
A way of working is licensed for the family of machine it was taught on.
It is not offered for the machine parked next to it, and not for everything the person could run.
What is licensed
A record of how a named person works in this seat: what their hands did, what the machine did back, and what they were looking at when they acted. It is licensed under their name, for a job. Even Steven owns it, for them, and the skill it came from stays theirs.
What it is offered for
The family of machine it was taught on. An owner tells us what they run, a listing is found by that family, and it is chosen by name before the pass by a person on the crew, whose own name goes on the choice.
What it is not offered for
A machine it was not taught on. If the family does not match, no listing shows. A dozer's blade, a grader's moldboard and a rock truck's box are other seats, and an operator who is good in all of them is asked for by name in each, not carried across from one.
Plenty of the people asked for by name on this machine are as good on a dozer, and the crew knows it. It is a fact about the person, and it stays with the person. What is recorded and licensed is narrower than the person: a named way of working, for the family of machine it was taught on.
The trades, and the machines the instrument is written forDoes this replace you.
It is the first thing anybody asks in this seat, and now that the machines are learning it is asked harder. A machine running your way of working still has a person on the crew who chose it by name on the morning of the job, wrote their own name on the choice, and can stop it.
A way of working proposes and never authorizes, so a machine running yours still needs a person on the crew to clear the job, on the day, and a person at the machine who can stop it. Whether anyone sits in the seat while it runs depends on the machine and is the owner's call, not ours. What is fixed here is that you are paid for every hour it runs, wherever it runs, under your name, and that you can end it. How many seats an owner runs, and who sits in them, was always the owner's call and it still is. What runs is a tool we made from your record. The skill it was made from stays yours.
A listing carries the name, the family, the ground and the count.
When a way of working from this seat is held in the repository, this is what its listing says, to the owner looking for one and to the person whose name is on it.
A listing from this seat carries the name, the family of machine, the work and the ground it was recorded on, the sessions admitted under it, who signed its release, the hours it has worked and whether it is in service, ended or withdrawn. What each of those means is on the repository page.
The first of them come from the family's crews, on the machines at home, in this yard. The repository page says what the Tacit Tessera register is, how a listing is found by the family of machine, how one is licensed, and what the repository refuses. Your own record, session by session, is behind a door that is yours and not your employer's.
The person the crew wants on the wet job.
Every crew already knows who this is. The one who gets sent to the pond job. The one whose trench the inspector does not argue with. The one who is sent to look at the ground before anyone is sent to dig it. The one the owner calls when the drawing and the site have stopped agreeing. None of them got there by a score, and none of them keeps the name by one.
If that person is you, your page says what stays yours, what you are paid, how you check the count, and how you end it. What you know in this seat outlasts the days you are in it: the licence, the money and the right to end it pass to your family for as long as the licence runs, and it is something to leave behind. The position is ruled, and the clause is with counsel. What sits in the seat with you while you work, and what does not, is on the page about the record. The trades that come after this one, and why, are listed together.
Over the years, and what you leave behindFor the owner, the operator and the people who can say no.
Your own operator's way of working, taught on your own excavator, goes nowhere else, and it is still theirs: you are charged for the hours it runs, they are paid the half, and they can end it. A specialist's way of working, licensed by name for the wet job, runs only after somebody on your crew has chosen it by name and said go, and you are charged for the hours it is in use, on the same record the person being paid reads. The rate is on the covenant.
This is the seat we start with, and we start with the crews at home. You are asked first, and told what is recorded, in plain words, before it starts. Your name stays on it, you see the count as it is written, and you can end it on notice at no cost to you.
The recorder watches from outside the machine, and a photograph of the disconnected state goes into the record before and after. It cannot move a machine or stop one, it is not an interlock and not a guard, and no part of a safety case rests on it. A way of working proposes, and a person on the crew clears every job.
We give no legal opinion, and you should not accept one from a vendor. What is licensed is a record of how a named person works, owned by Even Steven for that person, and the skill it came from is never bought. The points the agreement is being built around are on the covenant, and nothing is signed yet. Where a union or a works council has a say, the instrument takes that second signature rather than working around it.
Tell us which job they ask for you on.
If you run an excavator and people ask for you by name, or you own the machines and know who they ask for, write to us.