Perhaps the best fictional description I came across is Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts: https://www.tor.com/2010/11/22/air-war-in-the-stone-age-poul...

It's an SF book, you have a small group trying to survive in an alien world at war. The guy who pulls them through is the canny merchant, who marshalls the skills of others and negotiates their salvation.

I think the narrator in the book was the engineer - and so was the author, Poul Anderson.