How a Dishwasher Realized He Was an Engineer

Grease an inch thick, corners roasted until they were like cement. At thirteen, washing sheet pans felt like trying to wash tables in a sink. The steel wool caked up, the water turned so greasy there was no line between clean and dirty. The pan was destined to be dirty for eternity.

Mary Fran knew better. She was tough and fair, so she didn't hesitate to correct me. First you used the tool she kept by the sink — a spackle knife — to scrape as much as you could into the trash, not the drain. Then hot soapy water and steel wool. The tough bits soaked for a few minutes before the spackle knife came back out. If you could bear hotter water, the job got easier. You ran the whole thing like an assembly line, each step in succession, and by the time you circled back to the first pan it had loosened enough to finish.

I'm sure that wasn't the first system I ever learned, but it's the one that stuck. A tool meant for construction had a place at the dish sink. A sequence that avoided pitfalls that made the work harder. A process that thought about what would happen later while you worked now. I didn't realize it then, but kitchen work was shaping how I thought.

At fourteen I could work the flat top — half the time still too short to reach the back without singeing my chest. One day a regular ordered a cheesesteak, and as Mary Fran walked toward the grill he stopped her: “Do you mind if the kid makes it? I like the way he does it.” Afterward, Mary Fran asked me to show her how I made mine. She had been cooking longer than I'd been alive, and she wanted to know my system.

In that moment I realized systems were agnostic, they cut through the noise. They didn’t care about your age, your title, or your experience. They cared about output. The more that resonated, the more systems became my religion. To top it off systems didn’t have feelings — a system isn't upset when it's discarded for a better one. It just isn't anymore. So that's what I did. I adopted systems, refined them, borrowed the best from the people around me, and threw out the versions that stopped serving me well.

A few years later I went to college to become an engineer. Not because I loved systems — I didn't even have the words for it yet, “systems thinking” or “first principles.” I just wanted to build great big things: bridges, buildings that reached the clouds. Instead I burned out, changing majors and stacking co-ops, confused about why I didn't love it the way I expected to. I dropped out and went back to food, the thing I had never stopped loving on the side. I told myself I didn't want to be an engineer. Really, I was just defining the word too specifically.

Years of kitchens followed, and the systems always came with me. A period that meant a lot to me was when I started as a prep cook at a steakhouse that hadn't opened yet. The head chef took a shot on me despite my lack of fine dining experience, and because we were an opening team, everyone's opinion carried weight. My systems turned out to be worth something. I planned bain-marie layouts around reach, so building a dish took fewer motions. I pushed for base preps that could branch into four or five menu items, so one item carried more utility and moved off the shelves faster. In an industry where margins are thin, every one of those advantages counts. And for my effort I was sous chef within a year.

The promotion changed what systems meant to me. They got me here but it was no longer enough to use them — now I had to teach them. I'd tell cooks to time themselves peeling potatoes for mash and try to beat yesterday. Find the wasted motion. Peel onto the cutting board and dump the skins in one move instead of being hunched over the trash can. Flip the peeler backward and flick your wrist instead of taking big wasteful strokes. I wasn't teaching them how to peel. I was teaching them to see inefficiency and build their own systems against it.

That road eventually led to opening a restaurant in Philadelphia for Iron Chef Jose Garces, where I was hired primarily to refine protocols in a new kitchen. My expertise was extended to other restaurants under his direction as well. It was the end of the kitchen life for me though. The hours made me feel fifty years older, and my love for food couldn't keep me running on adrenaline and caffeine forever. So I packed up my systems and took them elsewhere, hunting inefficiency in new industries, always iterating.

In recent years, I got more into code. I had made small game mods before and could put together a website, but I wanted something more. I wanted to build systems others could pick up and use that didn’t need lessons. The ChatGPT moment had already happened by this point. Then Claude Code debuted, and for a moment it stifled my enthusiasm. I thought I was too late.

Using it flipped my perspective in less than a day. I wasn't too late — I was early. Here was a powerful tool everyone seemed to be running from, and I decided to run toward it, the same way I ran toward the internet as a kid. I was building things I couldn't have dreamed of a year earlier: game mods in minutes, a personal finance app to replace my intricate spreadsheets, pulling apart sections of code to learn how it worked. Problems I used to wish I could solve became problems I wondered if I could solve that day. What could I build to bring my systems to life?

Only in writing this does it all make sense. I never got the degree, and no title has ever proclaimed it — I had just been defining the word too specifically. Cleaning sheet pans, peeling potatoes, organizing a bain-marie, using these new AI tools: it’s all the same thing with different clothes, systems. Maybe I became an engineer somewhere along the way, or maybe I always was one. Either way, I'm still doing what I've always done. Iteration after iteration, refining my systems, as an engineer does.