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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?
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.
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
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.