Taste is the newly desired quality of engineers that's in vogue. It is used by institutions that judge talent as a new benchmarking dimension. Founders, middle managers, investors seemingly just can't get enough of taste.

But what is it? Asking 10 individuals will give you 20 answers. What is this mysterious quality?

When you consume an experience that you wish to judge, you are making a multi-dimensional benchmark.

- What is the quality of the components(ingredients, strokes, notes)?
- What of the composition of said components(formulation, arrangement, pacing)?
- How is the presentation(ambience, setting, venue)?

All experiences can be boiled down into components, composition, and the environment it is presented in.

But are you an expert in the field where you are making this judgment? Evaluator ability will determine how accurate the perception is to begin with.

This is the same for institutions that evaluate engineering. They too are making fast and loose approximations that are at best inaccurate and at worst completely divorced from reality. Thought leaders within the industry speak in vague and subjective terms to maintain an advantage against adversaries.

When Dario Amodei speaks of taste, he is speaking on his taste, his ability to discern model quality and the traits of engineers that can contribute to his organization. Institutions that are not skilled enough to evaluate such an amorphous quality seek to emulate this process. Yet even if they are fortunate enough to land an individual of high taste, the environment provided will strangle all but the most desperate engineers. The act of creation has been abstracted so far away from the evaluators, that they themselves are totally blind to what they seek to find and nurture.

Organizations themselves are also experiences and can be judged as such.

1. The people are the components.
2. The structure is the composition.
3. The industry is the environment.

Institutions that represent or are themselves organizations of low taste will unconsciously perpetuate this culture indefinitely. This is why the talent they seek will never stay for long. Good ingredients are destroyed in poor compositions. Great compositions are destroyed in unfitting or hostile environments. Rich ambience is destroyed with the absence of substance.

So after all this, what is taste? When we make this approximation, what exactly are we judging?

Taste is a judgment of ability. Those who have the luxury of rendering judgments, are rarely creating. The development of taste within a domain requires a total submersion that executives and middle managers rarely enjoy.

For engineers, this means that the development of this quality is inevitable and perpetually strengthens. It's very freeing to worry only about the quality of one's work and placing oneself in the strongest composition and environment.

For organizations, the evaluators need to be individuals who are close to the act of creation. Exactly how this talent is deployed is also important. Is your organization skilled at composing teams, culture, and work environments?

Either way, it won't matter who you find. An organization with strong composition can make masterpieces with even middling talent. The opposite is also true. Top talent poorly deployed is pointless.

As the size of organizations shrinks due to rising force multipliers on strong individual talent, the value of taste grows. Roles that existed to enhance the productivity of engineering are now collapsing into it. To embrace this opportunity, it's important to now develop rigorous taste across these once-separate domains.

This feels like a once in a lifetime thing. Grow more, see more, demand more for both yourself and others. Who knows when the curtains will close, but until then we are still on stage. We are watching human engineering enter its final act. Rise to the occasion and see the horizons that those who came before you could only dream of. For it is a privilege to see human creation through to its finality.