One of the biggest problems in industry is the difficulty of transferring tacit skills, especially in comparison to technical book knowledge. Across the board, it takes surprisingly long to ramp up! I’m curious how we can solve tacit skill transfer such that it’s as easy and predictable as, say, schools today teaching rote fact about world history. There also seems to be a case that economic growth will be greatly affected by people more easily acquiring skills that we find difficult to transfer today.

System Synthesis is an experiment in this domain. Users are given a hypothethical problem and asked to write a design doc – a common technical artifact detailing a plan of how to design a system. Design docs are an unusually good test of soft skills, because the writing communicates how one thinks about the problem space, and especially how naive optimism changes to learned paranoia after having experience in seeing systems fail in surprising ways.

The experience is designed to be partly shaped like a test, but crucially, it’s also a self improvement regime. Unlike other tests, where there are clear correct answers, design docs can be better or worse reasoned, but it’s uncommon for a plan to be entirely wrong. Instead, users get feedback designed to suggestively point in the right direction, according to a preset fuzzy rubric of considerations.

Click here to open the app.