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.
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.
Thank you for having such a lovely view on things
What do i get for knowing how to do both?
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.
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.
sea slugs
really coolWell thats just obvious
Hey if we’re talking about littoral sea slugs, they can be warm sometimes too
We assume that people know what an OS is, what OS they’re running, and how to install an OS.
I’ve seen it dozens of times, especially on here, where someone describes Linux, convinces the person that they’ll like it, and then gets the equivalent of a blank stare when they say ‘You just need to download the ISO and install the OS’
My mother is in her 70s, and if you set up her computer to run Linux in the same way that it comes ready to run Windows, she’d be fine after a short readjustment. If you gave her a USB stick with Linux on it, she wouldn’t get anywhere because she has no clue what she’s supposed to do with it.
She doesn’t care about the OS, as long as her browser opens and loads Facebook, letting her keep in touch with her friends.
Even as someone relatively comfortable with computers, Linux intimidates me. I want to use it but there’re so many variations and it’s a massive rabbit hole to go down; I just don’t have the time or energy to spend several days getting it set up how I want it and fixing any errors that I cause
About that last point, you don’t really need to. Internet people like to show off their customized desktops and systems, but in reality using a “just works” distribution requires very little headache and time. Except for the time spent choosing it, that is
Maybe this weekend I’ll give it a go on the old laptop
I would suggest Mint as a good distro that’s easy to use out of the box. It’s what I use on my laptop, and am switching to on the computer.
If you’re not sure though, you can try Linux in a virtual machine :)
Thanks, that’s the one I’ve seen recommended the most, I reckon
All the lingo and acronyms.
Turning it off and on again fixes so many things.
“Turning it off” today just turns modern tech to standby mode. Those who has learned the long-press to get up a reboot menu magic are chosen as the families new tech guru.
Not if you’re shutting down Windows, you have to do the restart option to really be effective. Thanks for that Microsoft, totally worth the support headache to be able to boot up in 32 seconds instead of 38.
I complained enough at my business that we turned off fast boot. I haven’t had to have a conversation about restart vs shutdown in like a year now which is sweet, but my own computer takes significantly longer to start up so jokes on me I guess.
Personally, when I’m looking around for different software, as someone that’s in-between unfamiliar and familiar with tech: if it doesn’t have an installer/executable/apk and only describes a way to build/compile from source, I have to imagine it wasn’t intended for non-devs to start with.
Yet somehow I seem to find my way to software like that occasionally. 🤷♀️
And that’s probably the case.
When someone creates a hobby project, they might not immediately have the time to spend on making a convenient package or executable because it’s still in early development, still buggy and unsupported, or it’s targeting only people capable of compiling code.
Or it uses Code that’s publicly available but you aren’t allowed to redistribute.
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.
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…
Imagine if you broke down
soo just another Tuesday? 🥲
I have worked in IT for 10+ years, IT support is 90% psycology, especially over the phone.
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.
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?
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.
I have only worked at internal IT helpdesks, and they have been very good with regards to that, but I get you.
Not official IT, but computer repair but I insist that the T in IT stands for therapist.
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”
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance begins with a discussion on this very theme, before it gets weird (weird and good)
I personally don’t think most people would even know how to make a text file on their computer without looking it up. Anything beyond usage of a Web browser and maybe connecting to WiFi is black magic for most.
I always have to explain to people that the internet and Wi-Fi are two different things.
I used to work at an internet service provider and oftentimes people would call up to say that they couldn’t connect to the internet and the problem was actually that they couldn’t connect to the Wi-Fi because the router was broken / out of range / had been turned off because they read something about 5G on Facebook. Their internet service was fine.
That’s like saying people are complaining their engine doesn’t work when it’s their drive train that’s broken.
That’s not so much a misunderstanding of the structure of the system, as that people unfamiliar consider the drive train to be part of “the engine” which is “the set of mechanical things going on inside the car that makes the wheels turn” or “everything upstream of the wheels”.
A person who can’t connect to wifi also can’t connect to the internet.
Having the kind of habits you need to keep yourself safe and private online.
Blows my mind how many people don’t consider or sometimes even reject the idea of things like password managers because “it’s too complicated”.
idk man, I know a password manager would make things easier and more secure, but it’s still putting all your eggs in one basket. If the service I gave all my passwords to has a leak or gets hacked - I’m fucked. And I don’t trust them to keep all my passwords locally and not peak in.
I’d rather a couple of my accounts I’ve long since forgotten about be broken into than for my entire digital life to be uprooted.
I have multiple passwords for the levels of security I want, bank is the most difficult, e-mail is close second, then we have mid tier passwords for things I care about personally but wouldn’t really have big consequences if lost, and then the password I personally saw leaked on a russian hacker forum that I use when a webstie insists I need an account to be graced with their service lmao
Just use a password manager that keeps a hash of your database only. They can’t peek since the data is encrypted.
That’s why you take several steps to ensure security. 2FA on everything. A different email address specifically for your password manager. A keyword suffix that you add to the end of every password. So even if someone gets into your password manager, they’re not getting into any of your accounts. Unfortunately proper security takes a lot of effort these days.
2FA is shite, I hate having to keep my phone on me at all times. I’ll just stick to my flawed system, it’s not the most optimal but I have all my unique and important passwords written on a piece of paper hidden between two glued pages in my journal, and the throwaway passwords are simple muscle memory
A good password manager encrypts your passwords with your own master password (and if you don’t trust them, use an open source one like Bitwarden)—so, even if it gets hacked, your passwords are not immediately compromised. You should take even more measures, like using 2FA such as your phone or a physical key, which basically makes you invincible. Way better than remembering passwords.
I despise 2FA, I’ll stick to my piece of paper with passwords written on it. And if someone breaks into my house and steals it it’ll probably be the least of my worry at the time anyway
My wife drives me up the wall with this. She insists on using similar passwords everywhere, like Lemmy1 or Lemmy12, even though I’ve set up BitWarden for her.
To make it worse, she reset her email password recently, refused to use the password manager, then promptly forgot it again 😤
BitWarden ftw! that’s why I started using it, couldn’t remember my overly complex passwords for all the everything In the world needs a password now.
Thank you.
This post made me realize that sometimes I get a little too annoyed when other people don’t understand concepts that are completely obvious to me.I’ll have to reassess how I explain certain things, like how being connected to wifi doesn’t mean having internet. Things like that are just not graspable when someone simply doesn’t know all the steps that lie between a server and their phone at home, and that’s absolutely fair.
It’s common sense to a techie, but it’s not actual common sense, as in everyone naturally learns this as they grow up
People don’t even know what a browser is… Yet if anybody expresses the slightest frustration with Netflix or anything else, the immediate responses hey you just need to set up a Plex server.
It’s two things wrapped into one.
First, the assumption is that people know the names of the software that they use.
The second is that other people who are not techy consider it just fine to spend hours and hours creating a stopgap solution that shouldn’t have to exist in the first place. They don’t.
I think tech people have overly high expectations of the average person’s ability to pirate.
I remember when Netflix was going to raise prices and all the online comments were like “Yo ho I will start pirating!” and it’s like, kind of sounds like you were already pirating. The expectation that Netflix would lose masses of money as average people turned to pirating was always outlandish to me.
Yes, it’s simple to do, but the vast majority of people are apathetic to minor nickel and diming, especially if it’s basically automatic reoccurring fees, and are intimidated by the idea of learning 1337 hacker stuff.
Tech people overestimate people’s ability to distinguish harmful versus harmless actions. To us it seems obvious that there’s read operations, write operarios, and execute operations, and that the read is basically safe, write can lay traps for you, and execute can kill your computer or the control you have over it.
But that’s not obvious to everyone. We just tell them “Don’t run any code or give it permission to overwrite anything” but most people don’t know what the significance of that is or how to notice when a button is going to cause a write or execute.
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.
This is why scammers are so efficient, they adapt to people not knowing things because the people they’re targeting don’t. They say start menu or button that looks like 4 windows
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
Go to a website. If I say “go to support.ourwebsite.com” I expect you to do that. It blows my mind how often people manage to do a search for the URL and then ask me which result to click on.
