Lars used to spend his mornings at a glass foundry in a small town outside of Copenhagen, watching the way the molten silica responded to the breath of the apprentices. He wasn’t the fastest glassblower in the shop. In fact, if you looked at the ledger kept by the floor manager, Lars was consistently in the bottom third for production.
He didn’t produce as many vases as the twenty-somethings who had lungs like bellows and a desperate need to prove their worth. But Lars was the only one who noticed when the temperature in the annealing oven drifted by three degrees-a variance that wouldn’t show up for hours until the glass began to shatter from internal stress.
Volume Produced
Long-Term Survival
The Taylorist Paradox: High immediate output often masks a critical deficit in systemic resilience.
He was the one who would tap a young blower on the shoulder and adjust the angle of the pipe by a fraction of an inch, saving a three-hour piece of work from ending up in the cullet pile. When the shop eventually moved to a strict “pieces-per-shift” incentive model, Lars was the first to be “downsized.”
Within , the shop’s breakage rate tripled, and the brand that had stood for a century was sold for parts to a conglomerate that didn’t care about the shimmer of the glass, only the volume of the shipping crates.
The Ghost of Scientific Management
I spent three hours yesterday in a Wikipedia rabbit hole researching the history of Scientific Management, specifically the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor. He’s the guy who, in the late , decided that every human movement in a factory could be timed, optimized, and turned into a math problem.
It’s a seductive idea. It’s the reason we have dashboards for everything now. We want to believe that if we can’t see it on a bar chart, it isn’t happening. But as I read about the “Schmidts” of the world-the laborers Taylor used as his prime examples of efficiency-I kept thinking about a veteran electrician I know named Miller.
Miller has been pulling wire since the days when people thought knob-and-tube was the height of sophistication. He works for a medium-sized firm that recently decided to modernize its operations. They rolled out a new software suite that tracks “Technician Velocity.”
It measures everything: drive time, time on site, materials used, and, most importantly, tickets closed per day. On paper, Miller looks like he’s retiring in his head. He’s at the bottom of the leaderboard. Just above him are the kids he spent the last three months teaching how to properly bend conduit so it doesn’t look like a chaotic bird’s nest in a basement.
The Blindness of Technician Velocity
The dashboard sees that Miller spent four hours on a job that “should” have taken two. What the dashboard doesn’t see is that Miller spent ninety minutes of that time explaining to a junior tech why the bonding jumper in that specific sub-panel was more important than just “making the light turn on.”
It doesn’t see the moment Miller stopped the kid from over-torquing a lug, preventing a hot spot that would have smoldered into a house fire from now.
I have to admit, I was wrong about this for a long time. Early in my career, I was a devotee of the “measure everything” school of thought. I used to argue that a fair workplace was one where the data spoke for itself. I thought that by removing “subjective” opinions from performance reviews, we were creating a meritocracy.
Focus on current quota. Ignore invisible risks. Minimize time on site.
Mentorship included. Future-proofing the work. Methodical safety.
I even tried to implement a similar points-based system in a small firm I consulted for. It was a disaster. I focused on the output and ignored the “knowledge spillover”-the invisible transfer of craft that happens when a master stands over the shoulder of a novice.
The Anatomy of a Failed Business
My friend Hiroshi K.-H., a bankruptcy attorney who has seen the autopsies of more failed businesses than I care to count, once told me that the most dangerous companies are the ones that are “efficiently dying.”
“He explained that you can make a balance sheet look incredible for by cutting out everything that doesn’t produce an immediate, measurable ROI.”
– Hiroshi K.-H., Bankruptcy Attorney
You stop training, you stop mentoring, you stop the slow, methodical safety checks that don’t “add value” to the invoice. By the time the lack of quality catches up to you, the people who knew how to fix it are already gone, working for the competition or retiring out of pure frustration.
In the world of residential and commercial electrical work, this “efficiency trap” is particularly lethal. Electrical systems aren’t like software; you can’t just push a “hotfix” when a wire starts to arc behind a finished drywall.
If a kitchen renovation is rushed because the tech wants to hit their “velocity” target for the afternoon, the homeowner might not know for months. They won’t see the nicked insulation or the improperly seated breaker. They just know that eventually, the toaster and the microwave can’t run at the same time without a trip to the garage.
A Rebellion in the Tri-Cities
This is why the model at SJ Electrical Contracting Inc. feels like such a necessary rebellion against the dashboard. When you look at what a
from their team actually does, it’s rarely just about speed.
Whether it’s an EV charger installation or a complex service upgrade for a strata property in the Tri-Cities, the work is performed by master electricians who aren’t being chased by a stopwatch that ignores the nuance of the property. Every home in Coquitlam or Port Moody has its own history-different eras of code, different “creative” solutions from previous owners, and different structural challenges.
A “fast” electrician sees a wall and sees an obstacle to be bypassed. A master electrician sees a wall and wonders what’s behind it, checking the load calculations not just for the new EV charger, but for the aging panel that now has to handle a 50-amp draw it wasn’t designed for in .
They pull the permits not because it’s a checkbox, but because the permit is the social contract of the trade. It’s the proof that someone took the time to do it right.
When we prioritize the “legible” individual output, we select against the very people who reproduce the skill. We are hollowing out the trade one efficient quarter at a time. If you penalize the mentor, the apprentice learns only the shortcuts.
The Ghost in the Machine
I remember talking to a property manager in Port Coquitlam who was dealing with a recurring issue in a multi-unit complex. They had hired a low-bid firm that boasted about their turnaround time. Every time a tenant had a flickering light, a tech would be there within , “fix” it in , and move on.
The dashboard looked great. The response times were elite. But the flickering never stopped. It turned out the main distribution lug for the entire building was loose and oxidizing.
It took a veteran who wasn’t worried about his “velocity” to sit in the dark of the electrical room for an hour, listening and testing, to find the ghost in the machine.
There is a cost to doing things correctly, and that cost is usually time. It is the time spent walking a homeowner through the reasons why their 100-amp service can’t safely support a new heat pump and an EV charger simultaneously without a load management system.
It is the time spent cleaning up a job site so that a family doesn’t find a stray wire nut in their carpet. These are the “unproductive” minutes that build a reputation.
Priority
Outcome
Physics follows the laws of nature, not the quarterly report.
We live in a world that is increasingly obsessed with the “present value” of everything. We want our dividends now, our deliveries in , and our electrical repairs done in the time it takes to watch a sitcom.
But the electrical grid doesn’t care about our schedules. Copper and electricity follow the laws of physics, not the laws of the quarterly report. If we continue to ignore the invisible labor of mentorship and the slow, methodical pace of mastery, we will eventually find ourselves in a world where everything is “efficient” but nothing actually works.
We will have thousands of technicians who can follow a digital checklist, but no one who understands the why behind the wires.
The next time you see a veteran on a job site taking “too long” to talk to a junior, or pausing to double-check a calculation that “seems fine,” don’t look at your watch. Look at the apprentices. They are watching a master at work, and that is the only way the trade survives.
It’s why firms that value experience over raw speed-the kind that treat a master electrician as a guardian of the craft rather than a unit of production-are the only ones that will still be standing when the “efficient” competitors have burned through their reputation and their talent.
I think back to Lars and his glass foundry. The tragedy wasn’t just that Lars lost his job. The tragedy was that the young blowers never learned how to hear the oven breathe.
They became fast, efficient, and ultimately, replaceable. In the electrical world, we can’t afford to be replaceable. The stakes are too high, the voltage is too dangerous, and the cost of a mistake is measured in more than just shattered glass.
We need the people who slow down. We need the mentors who occupy the bottom of the spreadsheet so that the rest of us can sleep safely in our beds.