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This series, Engineer Formation in the Age of AI, explores what it means to become and remain a software engineer when AI tools are rapidly reshaping the profession. We examine the cultural forces pressing against deep formation and make the case that technical judgment, professional identity, and personal responsibility are more essential now than ever. The series offers a practical framework for engineers to develop these qualities and lead with integrity and craft in an AI-accelerated world.
Can you point to a particular moment in time when the trajectory of your career changed forever?
Not a circumstance or a decision you made or even a discernible event. A moment when something fundamental shifted that changed everything?
If you do have one of those moments, you probably didn’t recognize it at the time. I didn’t. It took 40 years for me to become aware of the importance of that moment in my career.
Drowning at Twenty-Two
I was twenty-two years old and I was in free fall.
Fresh out of an Air Force technical school, I was at my first duty station, RAF Martlesham Heath. The Heath was a tiny communications site in the middle of a wheat field in the east of England. My wife and child were in the States, waiting for me to find a place to live before they joined me.
I had done well in tech school, and I boarded the plane for England with high hopes. By the time I arrived at The Heath, the enormity of my situation had overwhelmed me. I was alone in a foreign country, new to the Air Force, new to my career, and I knew no one.
I was intimidated by my new team, who seemed to move through their tasks as if they were born with the knowledge. I had convinced myself that I could not succeed. And the prospect of failing my family was a crushing pressure that caused me to spiral into a dark place.
“I Want to Show You a Few Things”
My first week on the job was a disaster. I spoke only when spoken to, I was afraid to do anything for fear of doing something wrong, and my supervisor would later tell me that he didn’t think I was going to make it.
Then, in my second week, I arrived for an afternoon shift, plopped myself down in a chair, and avoided eye contact with anyone. Actually, I avoided all contact. Since afternoon shifts were notoriously slow, I hoped and prayed I’d be able to skate my way through for the next eight hours.
Just as I was getting settled into my usual avoidance patterns, a sergeant named John decided he’d had enough of me moping around waiting to fail. John casually walked over to me and said something that changed my life.
He smiled and said, “Come here. I want to show you a few things.”
That was it. No diagnosis of my struggles. No performance conversation. No expression of concern. No judgment. Just an invitation, low-pressure and matter-of-fact, from someone who had clearly decided to take an interest.
Neither of us knew it at the time, but those few words changed the course of my career in ways that are still manifesting 50 years later.
What followed was not a program. There was no curriculum, milestone chart, or formal arrangement. He simply shared his knowledge, his experiences, mistakes, and aha moments. He walked me through scenarios. He shared the site lore, the historical context of the unit and its place in the surrounding culture.
Over the course of about three months, he formed me into a competent technician.
The Transformation
Over those three months, something shifted in my thinking.
The technical competence came. With practice and repetition, tasks that looked hopelessly out of reach on day one became second nature. Checking signal levels on data circuits, rerouting high-priority voice circuits, arguing with maintenance that something was broken and needed fixed, explaining to colonels why their high-priority phone call got preempted.
I learned to focus on the task and not on whether I would succeed or fail.
But the real change was something I had no idea was happening.
The gloom lifted. I started to enjoy my time on shift. I was performing well. I began to entertain the silly notion that maybe, just maybe, I could really do this job.
What John gave me was not just capability. He instilled in me a sense of who I could become. Something kindled in those three months that has never gone out: a thirst for knowledge, and alongside it, an almost immediate desire to share what I had received with someone else.
I became passionate about mentoring before I had anything worth mentoring anyone about. That is how formative the experience was.
He didn’t just improve my performance. He handed me an identity.
How Did He Do It?
John was a very good technician, probably the best we had at that unit. But he was not a trained mentor or teacher, nor was he particularly outgoing. He was simply a regular guy about to rotate back to the States who felt the need to pass his expertise on to someone who had just arrived.
Why he took pity on a surly kid who was visibly shaking in his combat boots is still a mystery to me. But I will forever be indebted to him that he did.
Although John wasn’t a trained mentor, there were some things he did, seemingly intuitively, that fostered an effective learning experience.
The first thing he gave me was safety. I could ask questions, even embarrassingly basic ones, without fear of judgment. He answered every question as though it were a reasonable thing to ask, which slowly taught me that it was.
He modeled curiosity. He didn’t simply dispense knowledge; he asked questions. “What do you think is happening here?” Or, “What would you try next?” He modeled what it looked like to be genuinely curious about a technical problem, and that model lodged itself somewhere deep in how I approach problems to this day.
The third was pacing. He adjusted to where I was, not where he wished I was or where he had been when he was starting out. He didn’t throw information at me faster than I could absorb it.
He seemed to understand that formation has a speed, and that rushing it produces the appearance of knowledge without the substance.
And finally, perhaps most important: he kept coming back.
Day after day, week after week, the investment continued. That consistency carried its own message: you are worth sustained attention.
I cannot overstate what this meant to a twenty-two-year-old who was convinced that not only was failure an option, it was the only option.
Fifty Years Later
It’s been fifty years since I first walked through the gate at RAF Martlesham Heath. Across a career spent mostly in technical roles, I’ve had many opportunities to invest in younger developers. I can’t claim I took advantage of every one, but when I did, I never regretted it.
I have many regrets concerning my career, but investing time into people has never been one of them.
Formation is multiplicative in a way that output never is.
The code I wrote in my first years of work is gone. The systems are decommissioned, the companies transformed beyond recognition. But the engineers I have invested in are still out there, and some of them are forming engineers of their own.
It Only Takes One Person
Can you point to the moment?
If you can, you already know what formation feels like from the inside. You know what it cost the person who gave it to you, and you know, if you’re honest, what you owe.
If there was no mentor, no turning-point relationship, no one who said, “Come here. I want to show you a few things,” perhaps you know better than anyone what it costs a young engineer to figure it out alone.
Either way, the question that follows is the same: Who needs you to show up, right now, right where you’re at?
It only takes one person. One low-pressure invitation. One decision to invest sustained attention in someone who is struggling to stay afloat.
You can be John for some struggling engineer. You can be the person who says, “Come here. I want to show you a few things.”
And who knows? Maybe fifty years from now, that person will look back and remember the moment their career trajectory changed.
Next: Experience is not simply time served; it is accumulated exposure to ambiguity, failure, and trade-offs. The next post explores why judgment forms slowly and why, in an AI-accelerated world, experience has never mattered more.
Previously in Engineer Formation in the Age of AI: Ken explored why experienced engineers have a responsibility to help form the next generation, and what that looks like in everyday engineering work.
Read The Mark of a Professional →
