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PHBs Getting "Secret" IT Training
An anonymous reader writes "As if all of us aren't already already aware of this, PHBs don't know jack squat about computer technology, and they won't seek any training from their own IT staff because that would be an admission of "weakness" so instead they are getting outsiders to train them in secret." Lucrative work for the secret tutors I s'pose. I guess getting tutored in secret is better than just floundering in ignorance.
No. Floundering in ignorance is much less destructive than "a little knowledge". A completely ignorant PHB says "make me a system that counts sheep". A PHB with a little knowledge says "make me a system that counts sheep, and it should use an ACID-compliant database and J2EE, and I think XP will be the way to go..."
"YOU'D BE SURPRISED by what they don't know" says the trainer.
No one who has ever worked help desk would be.
Perhaps another reason "PHBs" might be heading to other sources than the IT staff is because the IT staff treats them with such contempt?
a good manager hires people that are knowledgeable in the field that they work. very likely, they will be more knowledgeable than the manager himself. the manager must then rely on input from these skilled people to make informed decisions. that is, if the boss doesn't know if A is better than B, he should ask the employees and find out.
if the boss does not know anything, and is embarrassed to ask more knowledgeable employees, that boss should be fired. making decisions based on your secretly-aquired knowledge that may be incomplete, wrong, or totally inappropriate for the given situation, is probably the worst thing you can do.
now, if the boss is an idiot, and the employees are idiots, well, you're probably going to be seeing some blood sucking consultants eating your company's money pretty soon.
I don't want my boss to be totally uninformed. I don't like working in a vacuum and I don't ALWAYS have the best solution. At times, believe it or not, my boss has some good ideas even though he's not as technically astute as I am in a lot of areas. Sometimes, being a little further removed from the problem can present a great solution.
God yes - you hit the nail on the head. When reading some of the posts on Slashdot, I wonder how some of these people can hold a job given their holier-than-thou genius-of-all-tech attitudes.
Get over yourselves. An informed boss can make better decisions and work easier. And, if you can help them in a way that doesn't involve humiliating them, maybe it will come back and reward you.
Consider GE, which instituted an internet mentoring program (Word doc) for its top executives, including former CEO Jack Welch.
You don't need a computer expert to teach computer basics, and the upside is that the lower level employees get executive mentorship, and the executive employees learn these tools while keeping connected to employees down the ladder. This, to me, is a much more sensible approach than seclusion, shame, and secrecy.Now watch me hit this drive.
I completely agree that people skills can set people apart. I just find a lot of techs pretty arrogant and condescending and it doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence in the people in the field. I don't mind that they don't have people skills -- everyone has limitations -- but the arrogance can be controlled.
ok, now I *understand* some people might still live in a cave and think programming the VCR is black magick, but here's my thoughts on this.
having worked under DIRECTORS OF IT that fit this profile, it leads me to ask the question. . . In a typical business model, shouldn't the boss not only know his employee's jobs, but be able to do them in most cases!? or atleast be savvy enough (i.e., we run Netware, yeah Netware XP) to hire a contractor. I'm not even going into the mcse stuff either (1 pci NIC + 1 driver disk + 1 NT box == particle engineering).
I personally take the stance that your superiors should alteast know how to operate they're own system and be computer literate enough to atleast receive a company-wide memo. we can't keep sheltering people like this. in the end it will end up, those of us who can. and the others that can't that will serve us. oh and those who can purchase those who can so they can too. IMHO.
Well, maybe if the tutorials out there spent less time being condescending and more time actively presenting the real paradigms instead of flimsy confusing stuff, it wouldn't be a problem.
:D
"What's the right mouse button for?"
wrong: "it's a context-sensitive menu enabling access to control commands"
wrong: "it's like a scrapbook in which your least used situational commands are gathered and presented for your use"
right: "it's where your less common controls go. there're even rarer ones in the big menus. it works on pretty much everything. just try it out a lot; as long as you don't pick any menu items, nothing's gonna change, and you won't hurt anything."
1) Give them a simple straightforward explanation of what it does without jargon or metaphor
2) Encourage them to familiarize themselves with the control, being careful to note when such experimentation is inappropriate, even when it's never inappropriate
Not so hard. Out of curiosity, I sat through a biug chunk of the tutorial shipped with my new commodity PC; there were some things I didn't understand, and I wrote software for a living.
Perhaps hire fewer multimedia visionaries and more teachers next time you guys write intros.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Hello:
It looks like this is a good time to look at the difference between "ignorance" and "stupidity".
Your CPA is ignorant if they don't know how to attach to a network drive. They are stupid if they use the CD-Tray for a cup holder.
On the other hand, do you know the formula for "total factor productivity?" If not, then your CPA will think of you as ignorant.
If you think direct deposit is slang for having sex then you are also stupid.
Most professionals are competent, intelligent people who may or may not have good computer skills. Don't forget that from their point of view you too might look ignorant.
Did that come off preachy??? I didn't really mean for it to come of preachy. Damm that was preachy... Ahh well..
Look, I worked IT for a hundred doctors' offices in a major metropolitan area. Doctors are no more, and no less, computer literate than the general populace. Most of the docs I spoke with were highly intelligent, easy to teach, and interested in learning how to do new stuff.
So I really don't know what you're after, here. Smart people know how to learn stuff. Lots of docs are smart people.
Incidentally, most of those doctors' staff people were similarly teach-able. I think that the assumption that people are unable to learn how to drive a computer is due to the fact that lots of people are bad at teaching people how to use computers.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Having seen it from both sides (Dad's a doc who dabbled in programming in college, I do web apps for docs), I'd say a lot of the blame rests squarely on IT's shoulders.
:-p
You can tell when the UI was done by a programmer with no usability training... things are just counterintuitive, non-obvious, etc.
Yes, some docs are computer imbeciles... but their job is to fix people, not to sit taking computer training. Make it Incredibly Freaking Obvious (TM) and it's easier for everyone.
Don't get me wrong, the first thing I do when getting a new Mac is to get a mouse with a scroll wheel for it, and that usually involves a right-hand button as well.
The important bit for be is that I can see the difference in almost all Mac apps, I get the most "useful" commands, as opposed to Windows apps where more often than not I get commands on the context menu that are not available anywhere else.
For a long time, on Macs, you had all kinds of "accelerators", but they were only that: you did not need to memorize obtuse key combinations (different for each app, of course), but you could run most of them with just the mouse (except for text entry). This is completely opposite to my experience with Windows software, where many times, you can activate a function or feature only through a context menu or some key stroke combination.
Otherwise, I completly agree: making often used functions more readily accessible for the power user is a good thing, and you can use the right.hand-button on your mouse just like that in Mac OS X.
Oh, and one last thing: "experimentation unless it's 'inappropriate'." Although there's quite a few occasions where there's no undo, Apple's Human Interface Guidelines require (or at least strongly suggest) undo features at all possible levels, so as long it's undoable, it should be OK.
That would have worked a few years ago, when computers were still a bold new frontier. Think about the Old West--at first rugged individualist cowboys and adventurers are rewarded, because the place was so empty that ability to deal with nature was more important than ability to deal with your neighbor. In fact, people probably went out west because they couldn't stand their neighbors back east.
Think about how much of America was built by people who couldn't stand their old neighbors. Even the native americans must have really hated China at some point.
Then, as things began to get crowded, the same sort of business men and politicians from back east began to rise above everyone else, and the cowboy lifestyle began to decline.
It's the same with computers--first it was dominated by nerds like you (and possibly me...) who were really good with machines. But as there got to be more and more of us, and as the machines got more and more reliable, then yet another frontier starts to close, and making people happy once again becomes more important than making machines go.
Now, the mature thing for folk like us to do is to either find a new frontier, or accept the world as it is, and try to improve our social skills as best we can.
Yet before I do that, I'd like to take a moment to shed a tear for the death of yet another frontier, yet another chance to make the American dream a reality. The American Dream, by the way, is that one can improve one's own lot in life simply by doing a better job, through physical or intellectual effort, rather than by kissing the asses of whatever feudal lord happens to be dominating our lives at the moment. That individual worth could somehow beat out nepotism and favortism. A sweet, yet elusive dream
And before I allow Stockholm syndrome to completely overwhelm me, I lament how much of humanities effort is wasted in the collective solipsism advocated by so many people who reply to you--the opinion that physical reality outside humanity is of less importance than social reality within humanity. A society which believes that itself is the most important thing in the universe will experieince very limited growth.
Maybe we need to advise President Bush of this service. He clearly thinks that the reason US Computer Programmers suffer unemployment is that they have not keep their skills up to date. That is why he supports H-1B and L-1 Visa programs to import "Qualified Workers." (Speech about 45 days ago) Maybe he will open up H-1B and L-1 Visa programs to replace these clearly obsolete and moronic obviously unqualified CEO's etc. But if he does, he may have to realize that their claims of "No Qualified Americans," only apply to Management and definitely not the the Software Engineers they lay off to raise their wages.
For the Ignorant H-1B and L-1 are US BICS(US Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Services part of the Department of Homeland Security) [An onxymoron] Visa programs designed to allow companies to bring in massive quantities of Aliens and pay them substandard wages while avoiding US Payroll Taxes either all or part such that they can complain bitterly that there are no "Qualified Americans" while they bask in the wads of cash they save on taxes. It is as simple as understanding that Americans must markup their wages 150% or more to pay the taxes and the companies and their employees (Aliens) don't have to pay these taxes or the markup via these programs. Read Corporate Welfare!
Bush thinks that Americans should have to compete against Tax Exempt foreign Labor and that it is only their lack of "Qualifications" that makes them unemployed. Bluntly ask yourself, if you have the choice to buy a product from one person who charges $1000 and another who charges $2500 for the same product which would you buy? The answer is obvious. American Labor is not more expensive, it is our Government that is more expensive.
To illustrate: If GE which is Outsourcing to China $5 Billion this year and saving $1 Billion buys in the USA it cost $6 Billion. The States and the USA take $3 or more Billion of that money. The Labor only got $3 Billion. In China the Untaxed Labor cost $5 Billion. Thus the US Labor was $2 Billion Cheaper than in China. It is not US Labor that is the problem. It is the IGNORANT MANAGEMENT who is like these guys getting private tutors to even know how to use the machines of modern work while laying off Americans who are well qualified that is the problem. These are the same men who are killing Education Benefits for working people. They are the same ones who testify in front of Congress that there are "No Qualified Americans" to fill their jobs.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.