Study the Full Score (An AI Allegory)

Georg Solti wanted to conduct. He trained at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest under Bartók, Kodály, and Dohnányi — some of the greatest musical minds of the 20th century — but his eye was always on the podium.

Then life intervened. The Nazis rose. Solti, Jewish, fled Hungary in 1938. He landed in Switzerland, where wartime rules prohibited him from conducting. So he played piano. Concert after concert, year after year, not the role he wanted — but he kept going deeper into the music from every angle he could reach.

After the war, he worked his way up through opera houses in Frankfurt and London. Not famous. Not consecrated by the classical establishment. But building.

In 1958, a Decca producer named John Culshaw needed to do something nobody had done: record Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle — four operas, fifteen hours — not as a live capture, but as a studio production that used stereo the way a director uses a camera. The era’s great Wagner conductors were unavailable. Furtwängler had died. Karajan was signed to a rival label. Culshaw needed someone who could conduct one of the most demanding works in the classical canon and think fluently in a medium that barely existed yet.

He picked Solti. Trained from the instrument up, from the rehearsal room out, from the individual voice to the full orchestra. Not the most celebrated name. The one who’d been building in every direction.

It’s been voted the greatest recording ever made. Twice.

The engineers being shaped right now are going to build the systems that matter most over the next twenty years. But the ones who get the biggest opportunities won’t just be the most technically gifted. They’ll be the ones already moving along more than one path.

Technical careers run on three tracks. Deep subject matter expertise — the kind where you own the hard problems. Technical leadership — coordinating work, making calls, helping a team move faster. Architectural thinking — understanding how systems connect, how decisions compound, how what you build today becomes someone else’s constraint tomorrow. In the before times you could build a career on any one of these.

The rules are changed. Pursue all of them, with intent. Your job or curriculum will cover one, maybe two. Fill the gaps yourself. (An open source project is a rehearsal room you can walk into today.)

The AI era is your stereo recording — a genuinely new medium, not just a faster version of the old one. Most of the senior engineers you’ll work alongside built their careers before it existed. Some will adapt. Others won’t.

Go deep in your strongest axis first. Build credibility there. But spend real time in the other two — take the project that stretches you toward leadership, think about the architecture even when nobody asked, understand the full system, not just your corner of it.

Building across all three tracks is harder than specializing. It’s supposed to be. The difficulty is what makes the people who do it rare — and rare is what gets you the call when the moment comes.

Culshaw didn’t need the most famous conductor. He needed the one who’d kept going deeper. Solti was 46 when that call came. He conducted for forty more years.

Don’t wait to study the full score.

Original content written with the editorial assistance of Spiral.