for the sake of, ahem, interoperability with industrial economics: what this thread calls "process knowledge" is generally called "tacit knowledge" by economists. The invention of the term is attributed to Michael Polanyi, writing in the 1950s and 1966s.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_kn…

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If that worker knows enough about downstream customers' processes, they can contact one of those customers and offer the chips for use in a lower-end product, which can save the fab millions and make millions more for the customer.

This just happened to Apple, who seized upon a lot of "binned" microprocessors that were headed to the landfill and designed the Macbook Neo (a new, cheap, low-end laptop) around them, salvaging the defective chips by running them at lower speeds.

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The result? Apple's most successful laptop in *years*, which has now sold so well that Apple has exhausted the supply of defective chips and is scrambling to fill orders:

macrumors.com/2026/04/07/macbo…

Process knowledge is squishy, contingent, and wildly important in a world filled with entropy-stricken, off-spec, and stubbornly physical things.

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Apple is Reportedly Facing a 'Massive Dilemma' With the MacBook Neo

The all-new MacBook Neo has been such a hit that Apple is facing a "massive dilemma," according to Taiwan-based tech columnist and former...

^{Joe Rossignol (MacRumors.com)}

Work with a machine long enough and you'll develop a Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feeling) for the optimal rate to introduce a new load of feedstock to it after it runs dry. Even more importantly: if you work with that machine long enough, you'll have the mobile phone number of the retired person who knows how to un-jam it if you try to reload it too fast on your usual technician's day off. This kind of knowledge can mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy.

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So why isn't process knowledge given the centrality in our conceptions of what makes a corporation valuable?

After reading Wang, Farrell and Davies, I formulated a theory: we ignore process knowledge for the same reason we exalt "IP," because process knowledge *can't* be bought or sold, can't be reflected on a balance-sheet, and can't be controlled, and because "IP" *can*.

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Process knowledge is far more important than "IP" (just try creating a vaccine from a set of instructions *without* the skilled technicians who have already spent years executing similar projects), but process knowledge is spread out amongst workers and *can't* be abstracted away by their bosses.

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Your boss can make you sign a contract assigning all your copyrights and patents to the business, but if you and your team quit your job, all that "IP" will plummet in value without the people who know how to *mobilize* it:

pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/pro…

"IP" isn't just a case of "you treasure what you measure" - it's also a case of "you measure what you treasure."

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Recently, I hit on a positively *delightful* Tumblr post that illustrated the importance of process knowledge, and the way that bosses systematically undervalue it:

tumblr.com/explorerrowan/81309…

This post is one of those glorious internet documents, a novel literary form for which we have no accepted term.

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Reblog by @explorerrowan · 4 images

💬 6  🔁 39461  ❤️ 50387

^Tumblr

It comprises 4 sections: a screenshotted Twitter thread made in reply to a throwaway post; a Tumblr reply to the screenshots; another Tumblr reply to the first; and a chorus of more than *38,000* replies, and hashtags added to it. I have no idea what to call this kind of document, in which some people are reacting to others without the others ever knowing about it, but also which is also written by so many authors, many of whom are explicitly interacting with one another.

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It's a "hypertext," sure, but what *kind* of hypertext?

Whatever you call it, it's amazing. As noted, it opens with a Twitter exchange. The first tweet comes from an online dating influencer, "TheEcho13":

> I interviewed a gen z girlie 6 months ago and in the interview she told me that she does not like a challenge, has no interest in career progression, prefers to just do repetitive tasks and will never complain about being bored.

> I hired her.

xcancel.com/TheEcho13/status/1…

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In response, Viveros (a content creator from Alberta and one of the 4m people who saw the original tweet), replied with a short thread about the value of people like this, who "keep the lights on and the business functioning at everything from restaurants to post offices but now nobody’s interested in hiring them":

xcancel.com/TheViveros/status/…

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These are the "lifer[s] who can teach new people how everything works, who knows what’s up in the system, who knows what the obscure solutions are, and who can help calm down the asshole regulars because they know them more personally." In other words, the keepers of the process knowledge.

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When this screenshotted exchange was posted to Tumblr, it prompted Blinkpatch, who describes themself as a "genderfluid," "ancient" "drifter" who pines for "solar-punk flavored revolution" to reply with a brilliant anecdote about their stint working as a dishwasher:

weaselle.tumblr.com/post/79089…

At 16, Blinkpatch was hired as a restaurant dishwasher under the tutelage of Claudio, a 60-year old "career dish pit man."

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blinkpatch

Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every...

^{weaselle (Tumblr)}

Claudio had washed dishes for his whole life, reveling in the fact that he could get work in any city, at any time.

When Claudio realized that Blinkpatch was taking the job seriously, the training began in earnest. Claudio asked Blinkpatch if they wanted to be able to clock off at midnight at the end of each shift, and when Blinkpatch said they did, Claudio laid a lot of process knowledge on them:

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> This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

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> If you don’t have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it’s done every single time? You can’t do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you’ll do 160 loads.

These are the parameters, the kind of thing any Taylorist with a stopwatch could tell you.

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But Claudio went on to explain how that extra idle minute would translate to chaos in the kitchen, as the cooks ran out of pots and the servers ran out of plates, and how they would take out their frustrations on the dishwasher. To optimize that dishwasher, Blinkpatch would need to have a reserve of bulky, machine-filling items that could be run through the machine any time a load finished before there was a sufficient supply of smaller items.

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If they failed at this, Blinkpatch would be washing dishes until 2AM, rather than clocking out at midnight.

Blinkpatch's takeaway was that dishwashing was the bottleneck the whole restaurant ran through - and how that meant that Claudio, who was "unambitious" by conventional standards, had the best understanding of the restaurant's overall operations of anyone on site. He was the keeper of the process knowledge

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This reply prompted another response, from "Marisol," a "haunted house actress and accidental IT person" who told the story of her time working at a medical office that specialized in mental health and addiction recovery:

tumblr.com/marisolinspades/790…

The company was in the midst of standing up its own purpose-built facility, and the CEO was working intensively with the architect to design this new building.

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When Marisol - the receptionist - happened to be consulted on the near-final design plan, "it took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out."

First: "The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout. It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall." This meant that she couldn't "keep track of the patients who are waiting."

The architect and CEO wanted to know why she couldn't use the sign-in sheet to manage this.

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She explained not everyone signs in - people there for a check-in or group therapy need to be directed to the other side of the building, while "some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach."

The CEO and architect asked whether this happened often, and she replied "every day." They didn't believe her. Nor did they believe her when she said that the receptionists needed to have continuous access to the chart room throughout the day.

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They insisted that since charts for the day's patients were pulled in the morning, it would be OK to house them through two sets of locked doors, a five-minute walk away (that way, workers wouldn't be tempted to "goof off" in the room). They wanted to keep the chart room locked, with the key entrusted to the CEO, who would supervise every entry.

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Marisol explained that charts were pulled continuously, any time there was a crisis or a patient had a question for a nurse, or when a patient came in due to a cancellation. All told, reception went into the chart room 20-30 times/day. The "goofing off" they thought workers got up to in the chart room was "when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time."

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The CEO and architect were still disbelieving, so Marisol had them sit with her for an hour. They didn't last an hour - they left, taking the blueprints with them.

The punchline: Marisol bemoans the fact that she wasn't given more time with those blueprints, because then she might have spotted that they'd forgotten to include *any closets*, including closets for the janitors.

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As a result, all their cleaning supplies and holiday decorations were stolen from the cabinets in the bathrooms that they were forced to stash them in.

Marisol blames this on a "CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it."

This is doubtless true - but we can generalize this, to "a CEO who didn't appreciate process knowledge."

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I've come to believe process knowledge is the *most* undervalued part of our society. So undervalued that business geniuses like Musk think you can fire skilled lifers from key government agencies and simply hire new ones if turns out you cut too deep. So undervalued that Trump thinks that you can simply stand up new factories in response to tariffs, and that "training" will somehow allow people to go to work making things that haven't been produced onshore in a generation.

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Working in a low level government job for years taught me that process knowledge is the only thing that was keeping things remotely running.

A typo in the instructions for how to handle certain paperwork (changing a 450 to a 451 means it would be sent to the wrong *department* for example)? Can't be corrected until the next revision. You just have to know.

Process explanation in your handbook literally impossible due to not having access to some information/enough time due to production requirements? You can get the information needed elsewhere, it just requires knowing what to look for.

There's not a single task that I did in the multiple government jobs I've worked that could be done just by reading the handbook. This is even with jobs that seemed to be simple and objective, if you didn't have the muscle memory to open envelopes fast enough or the automation script written by that one guy in the next team over you weren't going to make it.