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.
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 don’t remember that very well, I just remember it describing the scientific method. I probably need to reread that.
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?
I have only worked at internal IT helpdesks, and they have been very good with regards to that, but I get you.
Then why do you have that job?
I don’t, any more. I switched to supply chain.
How do you like it?
The work’s not exciting but the money’s better and I’m sharing an office with people I like. So I think it was worthwhile.
Glad to hear it. Excitement’s for kids anyway. I’d rather have the most boring job the in the world at this stage of life. People I like and good money’s just about perfect. Also, so long as I’m not doing anything wrong on the job: lying to people, screwing people over, etc.
Not official IT, but computer repair but I insist that the T in IT stands for therapist.
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.
That’s why I got out of a support role into an admin role as soon as possible. Did not sign up to be a psychologist.
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…
soo just another Tuesday? 🥲
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”
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.
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.