# [[What I Learned from the Silicone When I Fixed My Windows]] *December 15, 2025* ##### Principles of craftsmanship for when corporate careers stop making sense We knew we had to fix the seals on the windows in our current flat the day we moved in. From across the room, you could see the silicone had turned completely black. We tried to ignore the issue for some years, but [[Systems Build in Calm Are Tested in Storms|now with a kid around]], it was about time to face the necessity of redoing the seals. I had imagined it to be a quick job. Just apply some dedicated anti-mold cleaning agent, wipe for some time, and then the seals would be clean again. Unfortunately, as it turned out when I got closer for the first time, it would not be as easy. The mold had completely eaten into the sealant surface. Mold and Sealant had become one. Cleaning with whatever kind of agent would not bring any improvement. In that moment, I realized it would be a real project. The old seals had to go out, new seals had to go in. YouTube made it look like five clean steps to a perfect seal, a quick job. Eventually, I took up the challenge and started with removing the first old seal. After some minutes of struggling I realized this would take some time. The old seal was sitting hard and sticky in the gap between the wooden window frame and the glass. I had to apply a lot of pressure with the scraping tool and my elbow started to hurt quickly. More often than not, the force applied would make the scraping tool slip out of the gap and leave ugly scratches on the wooden frames. But then I realized I could be more strategic about the preparing carpet knife cuts to loosen the old seal. First, do one cut in parallel to the wooden frame. Then do another cut in parallel to the glass surface. This would free up a big part of the old seal. Now we were getting somewhere. *I realized I need a new motivational engine for my work. [[Stoic Unsettling|Doing a job that pays the bills]] is not enough. While reading and thinking on new ideas for maintaining my professional identity, I keep going back to the old idea of Craftsmanship. It seems to make sense to revisit craftsmanship (a dominant professional identity BEFORE the Industrial Revolution) now, when economies in the West are scrambling to reform their business models for a time AFTER industrialization. Corporate careers seem to be dead, big factories are running empty, large scale layoffs don't even make it into top news anymore. An updated idea of craftsmanship could be a sustainable professional identity for this time, an alternative to common but dated corporate archetypes.* While scraping along, you should pay close attention to the feedback of the scraping tool moving across the gap. If it went easy, you knew the gap was almost empty besides crumbs you could clean away later with the vacuum. If the scraping tool would get stuck at some point, you knew there was a stuck bit of old sealant that required more attention. Eventually, I was able to pull out large chunks of old sealant in one go. To really get rid of all the moldy sealant, I had to pay additional attention to the corners of the window frames. There, some leftover sealant had squeezed into the corners, which by now had turned completely moldy as well. To clean up the corners of the window frame, I had to take the carpet knife for some deep cuts into the healthy material to get out all of the mold from every corner of the window frame. *Many like to call themselves crafty without really knowing what it is about. There are many definitions floating around, ranging from nostalgic hobbies to decent jobs to almost mythical ideas of the whole of mankind being unified in their aspiration to do great work. Whimsical pottery painting may be called a craft. Craft beer brewing wants to be a craft. The excellence of the late 20th century Japanese manufacturing often has been attributed to a culture of craftsmanship. And going by popular opinion, the only way to write effective prompts for LLM is to "craft" them. If craftsmanship is to have any worth today, it requires a precise definition. Obviously, a relevant professional identity built on the idea of craftsmanship will expand its scope beyond purely manual work. I guess any proud renaissance carpenter would have used CAD if it was offered to him (and if he would not have been accused of witchcraft). But beyond obvious updates to craftsmanship it is worth looking back to pre-digital definitions, as there may be essential ideas forgotten over decades of fixing layout bugs in powerpoint slides. What defined craftsmanship in the first place?* Then it got serious. I had to do the first lines with the caulking gun. Of course, I chose the largest, most difficult, and also most visible window first. The bar was high, as the old seals were obviously done by a machine, straight and precise. I quickly discovered that the margin of error for this job was really, really small. First, clean the empty gap from leftover bits and pieces from the old seal. Then wipe the window surface where the seal would arrive with isopropanol. Then wipe it dry and take the shot with the caulking gun. The challenge is you can not rework a wet seal because it immediately becomes messy. Ideally, the movement would be a quick, single-touch process. The most difficult part is applying exactly the right amount of sealant material into the gap across the whole line. If you apply too much material, then it will squeeze out and create a very ugly border. I messed up a lot of windows in the beginning. *Craftsmanship may be considered any kind of work that requires the full attention, dexterity, and care to avoid failure.[^1] So basically, craftsmanship may be considered "risky" work. If the person doing the work is not putting all they have into it, it will not be a success. In many corporate settings, it is easy to arrange personal responsibilities in comfortable distance to the dangers of getting things done. Craftsmanship means choosing not to do this, but instead staying with the trouble of achieving the best outcome possible.* After constantly cursing for the first tries, I got smarter and learned about the tools and process. By cutting the opening of the caulking cartridge, you define how much output your gun has. With a bigger opening, you have a much faster material flow, so you also have to move much faster with the seal. It requires a steady hand and an intuitive understanding for the movements, because the more output you have, the bigger the mess if you make a wrong step. As a beginner, I had to use a smaller opening and move slower. It’s a bit like trying to paint straight lines with a spray paint can: move it quickly with control, you get a super clean straight line. Move it slow with hesitation, you get a shaky, drippy mess. *Craftsmanship has to be built on deep domain expertise. Right now many tend to discard the value of expertise, because the scope of what AI companies are claiming to replace is so vast. But this is a mistake. If anyone can create slop with AI, how should anybody care about slop work in future? Doing things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard" will just raise in importance, now that so many things have become easy. Doing hard things requires expertise.* The biggest challenge was to figure out how much sealant had already been applied to the gap. In the beginning, I was too careful. I used too little sealant, which led the sealing gap to be not completely filled. This would cause the seal to sink in later, leaving little valleys where there should be a straight sealing line. Then I applied way too much sealant, which can cause a mess and also just is a waste of the expensive sealant material. Eventually, I learned how to spot when just the right amount of sealant had been applied into the gap. The moment the gap is filled, the sealant will squeeze up again and leave a little bump behind the caulking gun. Once discovered, this was a clear feedback signal for how much material I had already applied. I got quite skilled at spotting this by creating a continuous chain of little bumps behind my caulking gun, knowing that I had applied just the right amount of sealant. *The kind of skills I am referring to here are not skills you can acquire just by reading a book or having an AI read the book for you. Instead it is about embodied expertise, the kind of abilities you gain when you repeat something over and over until the repetitions start to change your perception of the task.[^2] You start to discover nuances you did not see before, levers you can utilize, and details you can pay attention to. Embodied expertise ("phronesis") is essential for craftsmanship, it is expertise that changes who you are.* After placing the sealant bead, you need to smooth it to get rid of excess material. I bought a dedicated seal smoothing tool at the hardware store, but I used it like a fool in the beginning. Properly applying the smoothing tool required some fancy gymnastics. You had to move perfectly stable across the whole bead you’re smoothing, and this is much more complicated than it sounds, especially for large windows and balcony doors. But the body learned quickly. In the end, I was able to hold it quite straight with decent results. After straightening the seal with the smoothing tool, there was one final touch left: doing a last smoothing stroke with a wet finger. In many videos this is framed as the touch of mastery, and I was scared of it in the beginning. I applied too much pressure, causing the sealant to immediately squeeze out on the sides of my finger and messing up a sealing line that had been quite decent before. Then at some point, I realized the finger could apply very finely controlled pressure, and it really didn’t need much force. Only the weight of my hand was defining how much pressure I was applying on the final smoothing of the bead. So while pulling the finger across the seal, I could feel the friction that was working against my finger moving across the wet silicone. A moving hill of excess sealant building in front of my finger while I moved across the window side. The more excess material was left over, the bigger the hill in front of my finger. If I passed a spot where still some air was left in the gap, the hill of excess sealant would go smaller. Depending on how much excess material was in front of my finger, my hand went faster and slower. If there was a lot of material building up, I went fast to avoid sealant squeezing out. If the sealant was getting thin, my hand slowed down to push the sealant into the gap even more. *Beyond everything else, craftsmanship may be considered the motivation to do something well on its own terms,[^3] following the intrinsic logic and necessities of a task to execute it as well as possible. This is the most challenging aspect of craftsmanship, as it requires to challenge the outside world and its priorities. Serious craftsmanship by nature is in conflict with short term economic performance criteria and craftspeople may frequently end up in opposition to optimization attempts.* In the end, I managed to finish ten complete window seals, including two large doors. The first two windows took forever. I completely underestimated the time and effort required for this process. At some point, I got a bit desperate and was thinking of outsourcing it to a professional. But as soon as I realized there was a structural workflow implied in this work, a correct sequencing required from the materials and the geometry of the window frame, I understood that I could do this much quicker. By the end, I was ten times faster than in the beginning, and it was elevating to see this progress because I had not felt such a big performance boost in anything for some time. *This is how to be a good craftsperson:* 1) ***searching for challenging work that may fail*** 2) ***taking care of skills, honing them constantly through practice*** 3) ***prioritizing embodied knowledge as the only relevant (maybe the only possible) kind of craftsmanship knowledge*** 4) ***insistence on doing the job well, never compromise on quality*** *Hierarchical organizations and corporations still exist, but they are a relic of the industrial past​​​​​​​​​​. Navigating the post-industrial, AI-augmented work life requires new paradigms. Starting with an idea of more-than-manual craftsmanship is worth a try.* I could have called the landlord to save time and money. This operation was probably far beyond what a tenant can be expected to do on his own in terms of maintenance. But it was already too late, because my craftsman pride had been activated. I wanted this to be done for good, by myself, for the sake of itself.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ [^1]: *"[Craftsmanship] means simply workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not pre­ determined, but depends on the **judgment, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works**. The essential idea is that **the quality of the result is continu­ally at risk during the process of making**"* The Nature and Art of Workmanship (David Pye) [^2]: *"When a highly skilled person exhibits phronesis, it’s not just that they possess knowledge of abstract principles and rules. Phronesis is an artful synthesis of both knowledge and experience. In the business world, we see phronesis when skilled traders perform in concert with market conditions and when experienced corporate managers sense subtle changes in organizations involving tens of thousands of people. When a legislative reform is implemented, a politician exhibiting phronesis can envision the chain of events that will play out in every domain of his or her constituency all at once. Many masterful leaders—knowledgeable and experienced—describe systems, societies, and organizations as an extension of their body. It is a part of them and they are a part of it."* [[--Sensemaking (Madsbjerg, Christian)#Sensemaking gehe zurück auf die aristotelische Phronesis eine kunstvolle Synthese von Wissen und Erfahrung]] [^3]: *"“Craftsmanship” may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society–but this is misleading. **Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.** Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship."* [[--The Craftsman (Sennett, Richard)#Craftsmanship is the desire to do the job well]]