It’s helpful to take a few steps back from time to time to reassess where we’re each coming from on our knowledge of tech (or anything) to better communicate.
Many people are very uncomfortable with the degree to which their work and life depend on computer systems they do not understand. They feel vulnerable to computer problems, pressured into depending on more tech than they really want, and do not believe they have the knowledge or resources to remedy problems with it.
So when something goes wrong, they feel helpless. This is not unfounded, but it can often make the problem worse.
Depending on the person, this can lead to blaming or blame-dodging behavior. IT folks — did you ever ask someone what the error message was and they say “It’s not my fault!” or “It’s not my job to fix it, you’re the computer person!” … as if blame ever helped!
The “tech person” differs not so much in knowledge but in having a different emotional response to tech doing a weird/broken thing: when something goes wrong, they jump to curiosity. It’s not “I already know how to fix this” but “We don’t know what happened here yet, but we can find out.” Knowledge comes from exercising this curiosity.
But this is not something that everyone can do, because people who feel unsafe don’t typically go to curiosity to resolve their unsafety.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance begins with a discussion on this very theme, before it gets weird (weird and good)
I have worked in IT for 10+ years, IT support is 90% psycology, especially over the phone.
True that. I got tired of the tech support theatre. Fix a problem in two minutes = unhappy user. Fix a problem in a quarter hour and make it look difficult = happy user. I just want to do my job and leave without any human interaction, y’know?
Agreed. For me personally, I’ve got 3 things I do to which helps me figure out the problem most of the time without demeaning the customer or implying that they don’t have the knowledge.
1: Asking the right questions. My two most important and first ones are “What is it doing?”, and/or “What is it not doing?”. I find the question “what’s wrong with it?” to be almost entirely ineffective.
2: Talking in an appropriate technical level to the person you’re talking to. Eg, a 80 year old vs a 50 year old.
3: Using simple analogies. Eg. A CPU is like a brain, a motherboard like a body, a video card like legs to run really fast etc.
I have also found that admitting to making the same misstake yourself from time to time really helps, unlocking their account? It’s fine, it happens plenty of times for myself as well, especially since we at the IT team have four different personal accounts with different uses and passwords.
Regarding passwords, depending on what the user works with and if they use exterbal services they need to logon to, I will also offer to install a password manager for them, and set up the initial database while giving them a tour of it and how to use it, many users really liked it and used it ever since.
If only they had any idea how complex and unreliable the non tech things their lives depend on and they imagine they know are.
I agree, but also computers break differently. Using a computer is just like other everyday activities like driving a car, until something goes wrong
Imagine if you broke down, but you didn’t know if it was ‘the car’ (call a mechanic), or the road, or the traffic lights…
This describes it perfectly. I am the computer guy in the family and even work in computer repair. I don’t have any official training, all “self taught”. All I did to teach myself was to simply search solutions and apply then myself. Eventually you learn terms and some other knowledge but the biggest difference between IT and “most people” is mindset.
Even my CompTIA teacher said “IT folk are just people that know how to use Google”
Many people are very uncomfortable with the degree to which their work and life depend on computer systems they do not understand. They feel vulnerable to computer problems, pressured into depending on more tech than they really want, and do not believe they have the knowledge or resources to remedy problems with it.
About 1/3 of my customers. They mess with my electrical drawings because they can’t mess with the software and try to redesign stuff so it doesn’t have software. Or even worse they try to do it themselves and need me to bail them out. Generally I don’t make a big deal about it. I already have designs for morons so I just give them a moron special. But yeah I have lost it a few times. My job is to build systems, not to reassure idiots that I will manage to overcome their mistakes.
Computers do actually turn the world into a place of magic boxes.
To understand the problem, imagine being Joe Miller, space detective, and having to clear one of those party tents from Harry Potter. You’ve got someone with a deathly fear of doors and corners, but unlike normal space where you can eventually say “clear!”, you go into one of those Harry Potter tents and you don’t know how much of it there is. A room you just walked out of could have changed behind you, and now there’s enemies in there.
You can’t clear a space like that.
A lot of our animal sense of safety is based on “clearing” territory. We thoroughly search the cave and once we’ve seen every part of it, we can calm down, think creatively, take our time. But until we can clear it, we need to be on high alert, ready for saber tooth tigers.
Every animal, especially animals with an evolutionary history of being prey, has a need psychological need to have all the territory mapped out, before we can feel safe.
And cyberspace – the set of states and their transition pathways that a person can travel through as they use software – doesn’t work like normal space. It’s not finite. It’s not easily mappable. It’s not consistent. When you’ve cleared a room, it doesn’t necessarily stay clear. The rules you need to memorize to know whether it’s clear change from room to room.
It feels extremely unsafe UNLESS the software world can be constrained to operate in a known manner, consistently, that doesn’t change too much from context to context, that has consistent behaviors throughout. Then we can start to feel safe with it.
This is a problem for all of humanity. Cyberspace doesn’t feel safe to us. It’s exciting, for sure. It’s powerful and useful, but it is an alien world and we do not feel at ease there unless we can inhabit a small part of it that always behaves consistently. That’s the only software we can feel comfortable with. Like a calculator, or a video game. Finite, consistent behavior.
But even the finite, consistent behavior is a facade, an illusion. Depending on our tech culture, we always have some degree of fear that the “space-like” consistency of the software we’re using is actually a thightly-constrained magical illusion. You might think you’re in your own house, for instance, but you’re really in some wizard’s illusion.
Cyberspace, even the extremely well-regulated parts like apps we use every day, are places built and controlled by wizards, and there might be sneaky shit going on behind the scenes. What might appear to be a magic-free zone might actually have magic happening just subtly, in a way meant to mimic consistent reality.
Tech people presume that normal people think about how technology works
They don’t even try to conceptualise how something on their phone gets there from the internet or ‘the cloud’ - when things stop working they don’t think about the fact that their an app on their phone is using a network connection to a router, which distributes an internet service that connects them to a server, that is running a program, on which they have an authenticated account…
They wouldn’t even know where to begin with troubleshooting, it’s just ‘broken’ and they get frustrated
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And for many people, computers are basically at that level. As long as it works, it’s convenient magic.
honestly it’s magic even when you understand it. Computers are pieces of rocks drawn on with runes in rare mineral ink, infused with lighting, and then made to do maths by generations of magicians perfecting the translation from the primal language of what can be only described as a pulse of being only made apparent by the times when it’s not being, to words humans can comprehend, then with that maths they somehow they create illusions of entire new worlds, and did I mention they can telepathically communicate with other magical rocks? all through mystical waves all around us created by beacons big and small in key locations. Previously, to talk with a person on the other side of the planet, a single attempt to communicate would require months, if not years, now? seconds. if not less. Computers are magic.
You can hardly call them rocks. Sure, they are Si based, but it’s so beyond purified and rearranged, that you should think of it as just any other chemical plating. I loved that my engineering degree covered a bit of the basics of computers, math and and logic, because I actually can conceptualise the different levels of computation and abstraction that are required. Starting from how theoretical logic works, binary logic gates, machine code, programming, protocols, networks, as well as the physics of radio communication and electricity. It’s mind blowingly hard to fully understand but I can say I don’t find it magical at this point.
Here’s the difference you’re probably not understanding about your self: people don’t need to know everything about everything, and they couldn’t if they tried.
A very small part of my job involves lubricating large industrial fans. Easy enough. What grease should we use? Hang on to your fucking panties
Lube or grease? Lithium-based? Urea? Composite? What was used previously? What should have been used previously? Have you ever done sampling? What’s the vibration frequency?
Did you know there are people with PhD’s in grease composition?
I bet you never even realized that was a thing.
So no, I don’t know what TCP/IP means, or what port and protocols are or what the hell a subnet mask is. I don’t even know what I don’t know. And that’s okay, because YOU know. Doesn’t make you any smarter than me, any more than it makes a grease expert smarter than either of us.
Nothing I said was critical of anyone, any set of skills, any profession. I’m glad that you have specialist skills, everyone does because no-one can know everything
I was responding to a particular question about technology, and how non-techies approach it. I explained in another comment that this complexity in technology is fundamentally different from many other fields of everyday experience
If the industrial fan stops working, they call you, and somewhere between the power point and the air they want to move is the problem you can fix and diagnose
If someone can’t see their cat photos, it could be anywhere from their device to their network, their ISP to the server, the programs on that server, the other server that holds the photos… Like with the fan they know the power is generally ok because the lights didn’t go out, but from that point you actually need some conceptual model of the complexity to even know who to call
part is because the technology tries to hide the inner workings for the user experience and the profit. part is because education systems dont teach any systems concepts, and if they tried to they would be hopelessly outdated. part is because repairability and support are loss centers.
There was a period of time, way back when, in which personal computers were relatively common in households, but repair services basically didn’t exist in most places. Computers were still expensive, and not really useful enough that you’d just go buy a new one when it broke, you’d either fix it or hope someone you know could show you how.
That was a time of “learn or don’t use it” (we had a pc we couldn’t use for 6 months until we figured out how to fix it) and it’s sad that it was so short, because only a very specific age group of people grew up with that pioneering mindset. Since then it’s gotten more “user friendly/foolproof” (locked down and hidden) and the knowledge of how to do stuff with it is becoming more rare on the whole.
I always sort of expected that generations younger than mine would be more tech inclined (inner workings, not just using it) but they really aren’t due to how so much of our modern tech is just… not approachable, locked, or hidden.
The primary reason is that the technology is designed in such a way that large distributed teams of people can build them without anyone needing to understand the entire structure, because the entire structure is beyond the understanding of a single mind.
A software developer wouldn’t even try to read all the source code of all the libraries their app relies on, nor the machine operations and logic operations and character encodings and chip design and the chemistry and physics of computation.
We’ve consciously decided to abstract things down to reliable interfaces, and as long as the thing behind the interface works, we can understand the interface and build on top of it.
These other reasons are secondary to this one: people don’t understand fully because we’ve gone beyond what a human can fully understand, and deliberately and consciously, decided to adopt this system of abstractions and interface contracts to allow ourselves to operate in the space beyond where the human mind can go.
I had a coworker get livid when an end user didn’t know what “the start menu” was.
Pointing out that the last version version of Windows to actually say “Start” on the start menu is old enough to drink (XP was released over 22 years ago; mainstream support ended 15 years ago) did not quell his anger.
Now that you mention it…What are we supposed to call that anymore? The…Windows menu, I guess? This reminds me that the “icon-ification” so to speak, of interfaces has made things frustrating for everyone involved since there’s no name/label for the icons to rely on to communicate what to click/tap.
Microsoft themselves still call it the start menu:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/open-the-start-menu-4ed57ad7-ed1f-3cc9-c9e4-f329822f5aeb
This, but also don’t underestimate people’s curiosity to learn a bit more about a niche topic over some beers. I love hearing about crap I understanding nothing about. I watched a PhD defence about sea slugs and it was really cool.
I work in an admin role in the construction industry. I regularly encounter seasoned engineers, project managers, and architects who don’t know the difference between a website and an app, or how to scan a QR code.
But then I remember that they know how to build a house from scratch, and I don’t. We’re all good at different things.
I think a big part of my career was shaped by hell desk IT at my uni for a semester. I know this guy is smart. He has like a bazillion papers in things I can’t even pronounce and a whole mess of awards and what have you. He can’t figure out why his printer isn’t working.
I am far from perfect but I do make an effort to remember, as you said, that human knowledge and abilities can vary so much.
