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.
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.
Not official IT, but computer repair but I insist that the T in IT stands for therapist.
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…
Imagine if you broke down
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.
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.
mehh, I can find wonder and magic even in things I can fully understand. It’s just a matter of perspective
That’s basically me when my car has an issue. I don’t care how it works, I just want someone to fix it.
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.
This is very well put, I was in this as well. Everything was so much more tinker-able. I miss that. I took felt that people would just be inherently more knowledgeable.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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”.
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.
Have you told her that it makes you feel unsafe?
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.
If all it keeps is a hash of your database then you can’t get any information out of it and it’s useless
You could use three password managers I suppose. Then you’d either need a rule for determining which manager a particular set of creds was stored in, or you’d need to just brute force remember it.
But one thing I discovered when I stated using a password manager is that I don’t have five or ten things I need passwords for. I have at least five hundred.
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
Basically everything.
Like, even filling out a basic Excel sheet can be difficult to some people who have absolutely no experience in it.
I had to stop watching how other people use computers for my own sanity. Even people who use computers (allegedly) 40 hours a week for the past 20 years are no better than those chimps who learned to touch squares on a screen. If a triangle pops up they start throwing shit.
But I no longer assume a user knows anything. If someone asked me what a curser was I wouldn’t even blink. The only thing that really annoys me is a refusal to try anything. I don’t even care if you learn about what you are doing, at least try what I’m telling you.
I have a coworker who had literally never used a computer his entire life before getting this job. He’s almost 50 and was hired shortly aftet me.
But he’s put in the effort. He can now type relatively fast, he knows what the file system is, what browsers do, how to send and read emails, how to send and read slack messages. He’s even starting to get a sense, when something goes wrong, whether he did something incorrect or whether the software he’s using is just shit. Tabs took him a long time to wrap his mind around but he’s getting it. All this in about a year.
Because that person care to learn. A lot of people don’t give a shit and that’s why after 20 years, some people still think a computer is a magic box.
Tabs are weird because they only make sense intuitively to someone who uses paper files, which is becoming less common
I work with people who have no email and use flip phones. Knowing how to do basic formulas in excel is something people in my industry put on resumes as a brag. I blew minds with a pivot table last week.
Then tech people will come in like “if you dont c38÷<#æ&÷>h§tg your &÷8]ă2& on your ejẅińë6÷&7g/g5 then youre stupid and support facism, you dumb corporate apologist with your basic windows platform.”
Or at least that’s what lemme feels like sometimes.
What job is that? I’d be a God there after I automate my entire workflow and just get paid for sitting on the chair.
Manufacturing, not a ton of behind the desk work required. What little office work is required is still often done on paper or on very manual entry heavy basic excel sheets.
I dont know why tech people always forget non tech jobs still exist. You definetely wouldn’t get paid for just sitting in a chair unless you’ve cracked industrial line automation in a way that should have already made you a billionaire. Still more automation of any kind would also be a good thing in a lot of plants.
Pulling a tech worker move, i’d just convince the tech illiterate boss that the excel thingy is too complicated and that i should use all the time i have to handle it while i then make some software that handles that annoying part of the job until it becomes too important that someone has to maintain it. of course, i’d write no documentation so i only know how the program works, as a leverage in case they think it would be a good idea to fire me lmao.
At that point that’s just fraud lmao.
You clearly just don’t understand manufacturing. They’d still be willing to fire you and make us use a paper and pencil. In fact if the techs that important then no it isn’t because they don’t trust it, and we’re keeping paper backups anyway.
I know that because youre in tech you think you can “out smart” the guy who can build a house with a paper and pencil, but I promise that you aren’t half as clever as you think you are.
Still more automation of any kind would also be a good thing in a lot of plants.
Controls engineer here. I will get to you eventually.
Look, I’m a software engineer, and I still fucking hate filling out spreadsheets. I’m honestly at the point where I’d rather make everything a
QUERYfunction than deal withARRAYFORMULAbullshit. Honestly, if Google Sheets could add SQL language formatting, we’d be golden.Yes. Those words. They are things.
I said basic Excel sheet.
Everything.
From the difference between WiFi, cellular data, and wired Ethernet to the ports on a computer.
People don’t know shit, and it’s getting worse thanks to the abundance of things like tablets and phones. Nobody knows anything about operating systems, file system structure or types, or even how to turn Bluetooth on.
And I am not what I consider highly tech literate. Plenty of stuff stumps me or I simply don’t know how to do. Yet I’m the family “IT guy” that has to troubleshoot and fix stuff.
Probably the worst part isn’t people not knowing. That’s fine. There’s tons of shit I don’t know. It’s the unwillingness to remember and learn about the system. That’s pretty maddening.
Also not to mention today, your computer hides shit from you. Back in the old days (around 10 years ago) you would get an error message, something you could search and understand but increasingly all you get now is “operation failed”. You get this kind of thing on Mac’s, iPhones, android and increasingly windows.
And of course phones/tablets are much more locked down and you see any of the “nitty gritty” computing, just icons and bubbles.
Windows has always had awful error codes. A BSOD with some (made up) 0x00000231a would get “Kernel gobbledygook” as the search result. Completely useless. It was and still is awful. Only by digging in to logs, event manger, and anything else you can imagine you might be able to correct the issue. However, I will offer that Windows has been stable AF since 7, and I could count the number of times it’s crashed on me in the last decade or so on one hand, and the times it did crash or was because of either a change I made or a bad driver update.
I have a love/hate relationship with Apple. I despise how everything is locked down and they spare no effort to make sure you stay in their walled garden and play with their toys under their supervision. OTOH, shit almost never breaks. Regular PC? You’re free to wreck it, and I love that.
You bring up a good point about the stability of Windows. I’ve been using Linux Mint for the past few months and am quite happy with it. However I’ve experienced at least four different times when the OS has become completely locked; I couldn’t do anything and had to hard reset. Not a deal breaker for me but it made me think about how that never happens to me in Windows any more.
The OS, or the window manager?
In 95% of cases, switching to a secondary tty(via ctrl+alt+f<n>) will give you access to find and kill whatever is hanging without requiring a reboot.
Dropping another “everything.”
There are LOADS upon loads of people whose entire understanding of the internet and tech is
1- purchase phone 2- Install Facebook 3-??? 4- profit
Once Facebook had a builtin browser there was no reason for whole swatches of the population to leave the app ever again. It seems insane to us here on lemmy but most people just… Don’t give a fuck. 🤷
How to change the input source of a tv.
This blows my mind, we’ve had tvs for a very long time. How do people not know how to do this, I get the 90yo Grandma, but, the 50yo guy living in his bachelor pad I just don’t get.
The 50 year old guy living in his bachelor pad does know how to do it
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.
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.
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
that’s why I recommend ubuntu. It’s got big market share. It’s orange. It’s linux.
All the lingo and acronyms.
The government created the Internet, not Elon Musk
I’m old enough to remember when Al Gore created the internet
I had this silly thing kicking around in me head forever. I’v always had a generally positive view of Gore and now is the time to square that circle. Thanks for your comment. It made me read more. The guy was on Futurama. He deserves that.
Apparently he pushed for money for bringing more mass adoption of the Internet. It looks like as a senator he recognized the value of the Internet before stuff like gopher existed. Presumably because of papers from the NSF. So he was important.
In some question on the news he flubbed words and said something like, “I took the initiative in developing the Internet.” That’s not a lie so far as I can tell, but boy does it sound like bullshit. It’s super close to “I invented the Internet”.
I got all this from one source so maybe it’s bullshit, but hey: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/799/708
