Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Question for the IT guys

For any of you IT fellas I need to pose a question. Do you realize when our eyes glaze over and we start answering, uh huh, uh huh, that you half left the fairway, overshot the rough and are somewhere out in the impenetrable jungle?

I'm not particularly stupid, depending on whom you talk to, but both our IT guys seem to think they need to impart their wealth of computer knowledge anytime a question is asked. It takes about two sentences before I'm so lost a PLB wouldn't be able to save me. Is this just our IT guys or do they all do this?

That's standard practice. It's payback for all the wedgies they suffered in high school...

It comes down to these guys are just insecure. -or perhaps a tad immature. I remember that phase years ago when feeling the need to be told how smart I was.

I go to meetings where people feel they have to contribute something to be relevant even if it means repeating things already solved. Some folks actual feel they have contributed by doing this. Those that understand they aren't contributing stop doing it and, if mature, learn to ask the simple or obvious questions others are afraid to ask for fear of looking less than knowledgeable. Can't tell you how many times half way through a meeting I will ask something as stupid as- what the hell does this four letter acronym actually mean? You know THIS one in the meeting agenda title. So often people open their notebooks or break out pens to write the answers down. In younger days I just assumed everyone but me knew the answers.

Nowadays I am ofien a little older than others in meetings and I will stop down at some point to ask younger folks if they understand exactly what this particular system does or who it affects?? Almost always they seem very glad to have someone do this.

Before I turned 30, I had a fund manager take me aside and tell me that my biggest professional hurtle was going to be toning down my language and tailoring it to my intended audience. I took it to heart. I'd gone the first decade of my professional life trying to get across that I competent, and not worrying about talking over folks' heads.

Two years as a network sales engineer got me a long way to that goal.

One of the milestones in my life was having a young supervisor at the solder factory tell me that, although I was the smartest person he ever knew, he really appreciated that I always listened to him, always took his opinions seriously and always talked to him like I respected him. In that same job, I always made those high priorities in my hiring decisions and tried my best to encourage that with my guys. I recently found out my most junior subordinate just celebrated over a decade of work at his current employer , so some if it must have sunk in.

Yes, I know what you mean. I will tell you that your IT guys are inexperienced and need the proper mentoring to get them communicating on the right wavelength.

Shaman- looks like we were typing at the same time- and we seem to agree with the root cause.

Had two different iT dudes in our bldg get busted for kiddie porn within 5 yrs.

A 3 rd guy got fired for coming to work after close of business and sleeping in his office cause his wife was beating the chit outta him at home.


Must be something else with these type individuals.

Our IT guys are exceedingly competent. They can both track down problems and actually fix them. I just don't need to know all the intricacies of how the network is configured or what complicated computer gymnastics they had to perform to execute the repair/installation. I joke that if you ask either one of them what time it is, they'll tell you how to build a clock.

"But in the town it was well known when they got home at night their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives." Pink Floyd re: teachers

Looks like it goes for IT guys too.

Guys,

I didn't start this thread to bash IT guys, just maybe poke a little fun at them. The crimes mentioned above are not isolated to IT guys. Having retired from corrections I can tell you those crimes happen all across the spectrum of income levels, job skills and races.

They all do it.
These nerds speak a made up language only other nerds can understand. Way back when "Pong" was hi tech, these creep-a-zoid, couldn't get a date, bespeckled, nerds needed a way to make themselves feel superior to average people.
Thus was born the Esparanto of computer science.
Many years ago, a nerdette was teaching me a new system at work. She said " When you execute the command, You will populate the field" She said this four times because my reply each time was "huh?" The last time I asked her to speak plain [stupid?] english and she said "when you push "enter" the information will show up" WELL THEN, WHY THE FUGG DIDN'T YOU SAY THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE?. Things went downhill after that and school was over!

So when speaking to a nerd or nerdette, just remember that these creatures are genetic mutants who would not be able to survive one day in a REAL job. Pretend you're snapping their necks for fun or pushing them out of your boat or some such thing.

Current technology is built on years and years of lesser technology (you can do DOS command line on Windows 7 and I expect 10). It's pretty hard to give a useful explanation in 280 characters even with nerd jargon.

To try to answer seriously, it's not that they are trying to baffle with BS or impress anyone with their knowledge but that like so many people from all areas, they don't know how to communicate in a way the listener can understand.

I get emails from entry level people through upper management that show a serious lack of an ability to communicate; to impart useful information to the reader. Many people assume that everyone swims in their stream of consciousness and knows just what they're talking about so they use undefined pronouns or leap into the middle of an explanation simply assuming that the reader or listener has been in on things from the beginning. "Hey, can you get me those files he's asking about?" Okay, who the hell is he and what files are you talking about?

Often people in technical fields will use jargon and acronyms unique to their area without once trying to explain them or determine if the reader has any idea what they mean - the jargon may be proper but since they are trying to explain it to someone outside of that field their communication is improper. IT is a technical field and sometimes you need to be technical, just like an electrical engineer or a medical technician would need to use language specific to their fields. Would someone think an EE was being a smartass or brainiac if they discussed resistance or ohms or whatever it might be?

To put the shoe on the other foot, how many times has someone reading this tried to explain something in their field - from plumbing to logging to home repair to graduate level chemistry and the person they are talking to is not well versed in that subject. So you keep using terms that are commonplace in your line of work but unknown to others, and they still don't understand. So you just get mad and assume the clueless idiot you're talking to is just a clueless idiot so you start talking down to them and insulting them in words, tone and body language.

So you either use correct language or you dumb it down which has its own problems.

It's hard to know who knows what, you see it here all the time. Someone asks a question and someone else tries to explain it in the simplest terms possible, then the OP gets huffy about being talked down to. Okay, why the hell didn't you include in your question an explanation that you've been doing this particular thing for 30 years and are well grounded in the basics? That's the questioner's fault.

Instead of getting angry and assuming the person you are talking to is just trying to be an ass hole, if you don't understand just tell them you don't understand and could they explain that in layman's terms? If the person can't do that then that is their fault for not being able to communicate well.

So why does the last device on a bus need to have terminator resistors and the other devices can't have them?

You could say so signals reaching the end of the bus don't reflect back which tells you nothing, really, if you don't know transmission line theory. Then we have to have an understanding of the particular bus technical specifications and the theory behind that. So let's summarize several years of study from somewhat diverse fields into a few sentences that a man on the street can comprehend?

I had that problem just a few days ago here on the fire. A guy here, can't understand I'm a hardware guy, not an IT guy. I use preloaded software, and preset options and mode. I do not EVER need to write code! (Which is good, since basic and a little machine language is as far as I got in college. )

Maybe this will help.

Terminators are needed on the end of the bus so that data doesn't hit the end of the bus and bounce around like rubber balls in a concrete room.

In that example there is no need to explain 'why' unless you are teaching a technical class!

A design engineer might need to know why, the support guy probably doesn't need to know why but the more he learns the better for his career. The guy needing support only needs to know "the last device on a bus need to have terminator resistors and the other devices can't have them" at most!

Rarely are IT problems explainable in layman language. To become a good IT dude you need to make it your life, eat, sleep, and dream IT! it takes a lot of time to keep up with new and emerging tech.

I was in IT fo awhile and got so sick of doing nothing else I decided it was time to move on.

Hardware guy too, I like to design around micro controllers. And that means programming in Assembler or C. So IT stuff was keeping my desktop, etc. going. But now you can get even 8 bit MCUs with WiFi and/or USB integrated so you're stuck doing IT stuff (which to me means anything networked).

I like programming the desktop too, engineering software is sorta like engineering a hardware project. And I end up with neat little programs that does what I want the way I want. Not unpleasant with a modern high level language like Python.


I'm not an IT guy but every time I try to help somebody out with anything electronic they in one way or another ask, "Why is that?" Besides liking to educate, if you can't explain it you get the skunk eye like they think you're BSing them.

And there you go!

A lot of times, that lame IT guy is trying to explain the "why" behind the "wherefore" in an attempt to help the customer.
For better or worse, few people really care about all that and the IT guy is wasting breath.

As they mature, they'll learn to just give task-oriented instructions and skip the rest unless asked.
Pity the fool who asks!

It's a catch 22.

Either we answer the question in a way most people can understand, at which point the answer is so vague, generic, and meaningless as to sound patronizing and condescending; or we give a correct answer that is full and complete, that sounds condescending because people don't understand and stop listening halfway through.

Management is happy with the first. The trick to other people is to straight up tell them they really don't want to know the answer, just accept "because" and move on.