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Are You Annoying?
cweditor writes "This Computerworld article looks at some habits of people in general and IT pros in particular that can drive co-workers crazy."
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Some kind of new 21st century discrimination? I have to be in IT to be annoying? huh? HUH? HUH?
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
The problem is IT people can interfere with my work, but what I do doesn't affect them. For example, I'm a scientist. I know Linux inside and out and have been using it at home and elsewhere for over ten years. Yet, I don't have root access to my *own* Linux PC at work, which is behind the firewall. So whenever I need something installed, I need to ask IT, wait weeks, explain what's needed ten times to different IT people, and my productivity is hindered. As far as I'm concerned, IT is more or less useless, as I could do their job in addition to mine. And of course they know that -- that's why they don't give root access to us scientists.
Annoying behaviors are tricky because what annoys one person may sail by another. "You can say the same thing the same way to two people, and one person will say, 'Damn, that's annoying,' and the other person will not think anything of it,"
So what do you do? Keep the conversation dumbed down, filled with small talk? I always laughed at the comercials for television shows that said "we'll be talked about at the water cooler tomorrow, make sure you're not the one that misses it". Maybe that is what most people want? I don't buy it.
I try and not talk above anyone. But I don't want to talk down to people either. My solution is to explain things in the simplest way. It is like when I was in college and I knew this one guy who was smart. But I would never ask him for help with anything because he always made things 100 times more complex than it was just to show everyone how much smarter he was. Nobody liked him, not even other nerds. Lets call him Steve for arguments sake. If anyone asked Steve for help, even something as simple as 2+2, Steve would decide that calculus was needed to solve that problem. He then talked so fast, most of the time, to make sure you could not keep up. When Steve saw the confused look on the persons face, a grin would form on his face and he would slow down long enough to mockingly ask "can you follow this, it is really tough stuff you know, so hard". And you could never send him an email without getting it back, grammer corrected. What a prick.
I guess my advice is don't be Steve. Don't be that guy.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
This all reminds me of a poll reported on by the Register about how end users don't see themselves as responsible for their own actions when related to IT. Relevent quotes: -One in five people surveyed said they are "too busy to download anti-virus updates". -Depressingly, nine in ten of the workers quizzed believe that have no part to play in preventing the spread of viruses, preferring to leave responsibility to "their IT department, Microsoft or the government". With this kind of attitude, it is no wonder IT workers get sufficiently frustrated so as to be "annoying".
That's exactly why I don't give them the choice to ignore errors, if at all possible. I work on a help desk for a decent size petrol company and write several pieces of software for use by end lusers of the corporate network (mostly marketing/sales type stuff).
Wherever there's a high rate of failure, or probability that an error message may occur, I make it mandatory to take a screenshot (using another utility I wrote) of the software that's running on screen, which gives them an ID# for that pic. If they don't have an ID# that passes the hash, they don't get a ticket logged, it's required when they try to log them via Web, or when they call and ask us to open the ticket.
"No ID#, sorry sir/ma'am, you'll have to get that error again, this time click on the camera icon down by the clock on your Desktop, and it will give you an ID#, call us back when you have that!"
Saves 200+ calls a day, and ensures you KNOW what the issue is before wasting any time just trying to reproduce the 'problem' which normally would only require round-filing an ID-10-T form.
The article associated with this thread revolves around the idea that arrogance on the part of IT is a counterproductive and destructive trait. I disagree.
The insecure user who wants everything handed to him will always have his/her sensitibilities offended by someone who is more confident. This is just the way it is. Some people are smarter and more intuitive and some people are more dumb and sensitive. For example, the IT guy might read up on technology to become more capable. The insecure dumb user might write a goofy passive-aggressive article on annoyance in the workplace.
I'm sick and tired of wussy, insecure people who think that half of my job is to make them feel better about themselves. That's BS. My job is very specific and technical. You want your system working? Fine. You want your ego stroked at the same time, or you want me to back up your intent to pass the buck for your own screw-ups to someone else? Forget it.
It has become a NECESSITY these days in large IT departments for the technical crew to maintain an aire of superiority, especially over dumbass users. It's the only way we can get these morons to think twice about some of the many boneheaded decisions they make each day which get them in trouble which cause them to come crying to us to fix. This doesn't happen out of the blue. IT respects some people in a company, and others they don't. The latter group usually monopolize IT time with a plethora of little fires that competent people would never have created - and almost always these are things not related to the company or the employee's job.
The only way to deal with the 5% moron users who monopolize 80% of IT resources is to make the experience of dealing with IT unpleasant enough that they're forced to actually pay attention. They aren't treated with pseudo-contempt at first, but they prove their worthiness to be subject to BOFH treatment over a long period of time where they continually waste IT time.
If I'm "annoying" to you, it's a safe bet I'm annoyed because I asked you to follow simple, industry-best practices to make both our lives easier and you have repeatedly failed to do so. I'd bet the guy who wrote this article was the one guy in the office that continually clicked on every attachment and icon he could target. And finally he incurred the wrath of IT who had had it with his irresponsible behavior.
Who's more irritating then?
I could run circles around one of our IT people and I have no training in the fields whatsoever.
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
As much as you're going to hate this, most users are not toddlers and don't deserve to be treated like they are. The IT tech wants to know the nature of the problem, ie what steps were taken to cause the problem, but in many cases the user will refuse to give any specific diagnosis that will help aid the program. If we were talking about children, they would have an excuse, but we're talking about adults who are refusing to co-operate because they are frustrated or lazy.
If my steering wheel broke on my car, I would phone up the dealership and say that my car was broken and they need to fix it. If they asked what part of the car was broken, I wouldn't shrug and say only "I can't drive it" and "It was working yesterday". If something more complex broke that I didn't understand I would try to describe the symptoms of the problem, what I was trying to do, how it didn't work, and what steps I could take to reproduce that problem.
Many users call technical support without doing that -- they blame IT support as being the reason their computer is broken and berate them. If they would take into account that the IT tech is trying to learn about the problem in order to fix it and needs to know what exactly doesn't work and how to reproduce it, that would eliminate the confrontation. It's common courtesy, not to imagine more efficient -- but people like you insist the problem is with the person trying to do their job and not the person acting like a child with a temper.
501 Not Implemented
I personally think that the most annoying thing about some people in IT is their total absence of verbal skills.
For instance, in a previous company where I worked, some of the IT employees could only communicate to other people in the same office via HotMail Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger or some other instant messaging tool. *EVEN* when the person they are talking to is sitting less than a yard away.
And when you try to talk to such people using normal vocal means, they would give you a blank stare, a long pause where they attempt to remember how to talk and eventually they may find it within themselves to say "Umm... can you IM email instead?"
Very frustrating!
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
And IT folks often require the "right" decision, says Gerry McCartney, CIO at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in Philadelphia. "[They] have difficulty between shades of gray," he says. "Sometimes there are a lot of 'rightish' answers," and insisting that there's just one can be annoying.
I'm a big personality types guy and this to me screams J (as in judging, where judging types like things decided soon). Some say that fields like IT also cater to the conceptualist type, which is NT. And, if we were to run with the geek stereotype, we might as well add in I for introvert.
What do we have? INTJ. The most stubborn, self-centered, self-righteous, logical type of them all.
INTJs are one of if not the rarest personality type in America. To me, the article sounded like these thinking, judging, intuitors should be more sensitive to the rest of the population, which is the majority. But, if the INTJs are the minority, shouldn't the majority be mindful of them and their communication styles?
I'm an INTJ, so I'm inclined to say that my view makes perfect sense and is right even if you say it's not. But it doesn't seem too illogical to me to have the rest of the world be aware of how others communicate. Maybe I like my IT departments cold, decisive, and geeky.
I'm just trying to stick up for the minority, because just like the general geek persona, INTJs are often stomped upon for others who just don't "get" them. They don't mean to be cold or unclear. Far from it, actually. Being an NT, they value utility more than a whole lot of other socially positive attributes. But at the same time, some users just aren't being clear themselves or aren't being useful, so that in itself is frustrating, especially for a person who already has communication problems from the get go.
Peppering conversation with technical jargon... oh my!
What about peppering conversation with business or marketing jargon.
It would seem to me that the message of the article is it's ok for business, markerting and financial types to act according to type, but God forbid that a techy should act according to type.
Business discussions use business language.
Marketing discussions use marketing language.
Financial discussions use financial language.
Technical discussions must now use baby talk, lest we annoy... read, expose areas of ignorance... within the other disciplines.
Who's annoying?... Writers of pap populist biz articles.
That only works if there really is a problem.
I once dealt with a situation where I had a group of users who would have vague computer problems usually "the network is slow" or some other difficult to verify gripe whenever they weren't in the mood to work.
I got my ass chewed so repeatedly over this crap that I invested a massive amount of time and effort in monitoring these users, and documenting their supposed slow downs, and so when the end of the month rolled around and my monthly asschewing commenced I could produce reams of documentation proving that there were no problems.
Did not make me very popular with about half the building, but I was dead tired of taking the heat for their sloppy work ethic and sheer incompetence.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Almost. If someone tried to kill themselves by jumping off a bridge and failed, and then a rescue helicopter was sent out to pick them up instead of a coast guard boat because they were worried about running him over, and then they accidentally dropped the bird on them while trying to fish him out of the drink, that would be irony :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I used to work with an IT guy that was apparently on the path to BOFH-dom. Whenever people used him as a crutch to get a little work slowdown, he'd actually find a problem. And that problem almost always required them to do extra work...maybe they'd lose that report they've been working on for a week, maybe all their personal configuration would get deleted. Maybe he discovered they weren't doing something frequently enough, such as updating virus definitions or backing up their data.
Sometimes he'd even go to management and have a team-wide policy put in place that required extra work of everyone on that team. While frequently using that person, by name, as an example, he'd give a nice, boring lecture on what that person did or didn't do that caused the problem, and how the problem was bad enough, in that person's own words, to cause a big productivity hit.
One thing I learned is that management loves IT guys that spotlight productivity problems and suggests lots of solutions.
sev
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Probably the best example of irony that I heard was: "It's ironic if you poke yourself in the eye putting on a pair of safety glasses".
When someone says that something is ironic, I always compare it to that. This thing about a slashdot editor supposedly being annoying and posting a story about annoying people is really nothing worth HAVING a word for. You could call him a hypocrite, or dense or something, but really nobody cares and I don't think a new word is necessary.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Certainly smarter than me. =P
I kept looking for phantom problems. They were mainly running a big database app, and for a good while, there actually WAS a problem with it. But we added about 10000% more server, and it was all fine.
It was after that, that I started getting reamed. After all, I'd suggested more server and they'd paid for it, so why hadn't the problem gone away?
The original system had run at about 99% cpu util. pretty much all the time, with bottlenecks everywhere, CPU, IO, RAM, everything. The new system generally hovered around 10% with spikes to 60% or 80% running across four processors. I checked IO and it wasn't that, I checked the network (which involved about 4 days crawling through ductwork with a fricking tone wand between my teeth. They had the best networking in the whole building---one jump from the server router to their router, and both routers were new and highly functional.
It was at this point when I realized that I was being consciously fucked. It was priceless to watch their faces as I laid out my info. Since their job was repetitive and the database ran consistently (consistently bad. fucking VB.) I could tell what they were doing by the size and duration of the spikes. I even tested it out, after hours.
It was seriously damning stuff; I could show every time they requested a new page, every time they submitted new data, or ran a query, and that stuff was consistently slow as hell. On the days when they claimed the network was slow the cpu utilization looked like a dead guys ekg. It was pretty obvious to everyone that it could hardly be slow if nothing was going on.
The week after that was probably the worst week they ever had...The average utilization jumped through the roof, hovering around 70% and their boss hadn't worked down there since the new servers had been added, so everything looked blazing fast to her.
I never wanted to be a BOFH, but there are times when I completely understand where they're coming from. Users can really suck.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
That people have a 'tact' filter. Some people filter inbound, some people filter outbound, some people filter both ways (rare), and some people don't filter at all.
Non-IT people tend to filter outbound - they don't say something for fear of offending someone. Not always the case, certainly, but by and large that's my experience.
IT people tend to filter inbound. In the days of yore, it wasn't uncommon to see discussions where "What are you, stupid?" was said, and generally it wasn't taken personally. It was just one of those things that was understood.
These days, there's more of a mix of people fitting the inbound vs. outbound filtering groups, and that leads to problems in business.
This article does a pretty decent job of highlighting one of the things I find to be the most ironic about IT personnel (and I have been one for almost 15 years now) - they tend to get into the business because they don't have to deal with people and don't want to. Yet IT work these days requires more interaction with people, not less.
Take Directory Services technology; according to Burton Group's studies, implementation of directory services technologies is 80% politics and 20% technology. The technology isn't really that difficult, but getting agreement between the various groups who own parts of the data about who owns particular pieces of data requires a fair amount of negotiation and people skills.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
I know this thread is laid to waste... but I need to vent, so deal with it...
Around my cube I have 8 neighbors...
1) 20s White Male - listens to his headphones and drums on his desk with his pens... occationally kicks the back of the cube every few beats... likes to talk to his mommy and wife or both at least every 60 minutes. Thinks that in order to speak with non-native English speakers you need to yell at them loudly. Did I mention the customers he supports are in Taiwan?
2) 20s White Male - not annoying at all... yeay!
3) 50s Fat White Male - eats non stop during the day... favorite food is apples, so I listen to him crunch apples aaaaaaaalllll day long. All the fiber tends to make him a bit flatulant... he's shameless when letting them rip... they're loud and stink and he "giggles" after a loud one... occationally calls out "sorry!" if it's loud and instantly smelly.
4) 20s Asian Female - Probably the most attractive female in this section of the building... which means she has non-stop male visitors who come by to "say hi"... when she's not talking, she's eating and making disgusting slurping noises...
5) 40s White Male - nice guy... makes some weird noises occationally, but 99% of the time he's quiet...
6) 40s Asian Male - very nice guy... clips his nails at his desk... yeeeeccchhh
7) 50s White Male - laughs like count dracula (not a joke, he's just a freak), looks like the news reporter on sesame street when he talks (i.e. jaw stays stationary and the top of his flops and pivots while he talks). Clips his nails at his desk... big problem there-- he gets distance out of the nails. I've found one laying on my desk and/or floor occationally. I've vowed to beat him to death with a power cord if one lands while I'm in the cube.
8) 40s White Female - Very nice, but has a very long and drawn out "fake" laugh that she uses constantly... gets on your nerves if you're already stressed out from the other freaks.
We also have at least "cougher" on any given day... which is someone who has a combination of AIDS/TB/Polio/Herpes and is coughing as though this is the last 10 minutes of their life...
whew... I feel a bit better... I like to think that I'm like #2... I don't make any noise... I stay off the phone except for business, and even then I try to stay quiet... never listen to music loud, and when I do listen I don't drum or pump my leg to the music... never eat at my desk or perform personal grooming acts...
If you truly believe, or can prove, that a disproportionate percentage of IT workers are "annoying", perhaps you're missing a much more pervasive underlying cause? Perhaps you should investigate the prevalence of giftedness, High-Functioning Autism, Asperger's Syndrome, and similar traits within the technical segment of the industry?
Further, I'd suggest that those who aren't so "afflicted" had better learn to be more tolerant, because IT and in fact the whole of science and engineering would not be what it is without these people, pleasant to work with or not; THEY have the talents that more pleasant and tactful - but average - people lack. The entire history of scientific achievement owes its very existence to these extreme Yin-Yang social outcasts, stretching back to naked-in-the-street Archimedes and beyond.
As a pc field tech, I deal with users on a daily basis, often in their homes. Quite often they will start out with 'it doesn't work' and be reticent about describing the problem, because they feel stupid in the face of unpredictable, incomprehensible technology, and a geek that is obviously massively smarter than they are. These are often people who are extremely competent in their own fields, and have no reason to feel intimidated by *my* intelligence! But they do anyway.
I find that if I drop back, listen to their problems--usually starting with the effect on their work--and then gently start leading them into the actual symptoms, they open right up. They want to feel understood, and they want to be reassured that they didn't do something awful to it. And even if they did, it could happen to anyone.
And it doesn't take as long as it sounds, either. You can have them singing like canaries in minutes with the right attitude.
I suspect *not listening* is the biggest problem IT people have. People often won't hear your questions until they've said what they want to say because they're upset. Only when they feel you understand their feelings will they begin to cooperate with you.
My mother taught me a valuable lesson about selling.."shut up and listen and they'll tell you exactly how to sell to them." Or talk to them.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted, then used against you.