Computer Jargon Too Difficult for Office Workers

slashflood writes "Most office workers find computer terms such as javascript and jpeg just as difficult to understand as a foreign language, according to a new survey. A poll of 1,500 staff by recruitment firm Computer People showed that three out of four wasted more than an hour every week simply finding out what some technical term meant. 'A massive 61% don't understand the difference between gigabytes, kilobytes and megabytes and as a result have sent e-mails with huge attachments that have blocked clients' systems.'"

Comments

don't blame the office worker community

[yagu]

My experience has been that office workers (non-IT) are not the only ones who are confused by IT jargon.

From the article:

• Among office workers 26% aren't sure what a firewall does and therefore have been tempted to turn it off.

  Yeah, well a LOT of IT people don't really know what a firewall does either. I've cringed at some of the definitions of firewalls I've heard peer IT workers give for firewall. And, of those who have an inkling, I would not be surprised at all if 75% of IT workers don't really know how and why firewalls work.

• A massive 61% don't understand the difference between gigabytes, kilobytes and megabytes...

  I've seen IT people play fast and loose with these terms too. I've been on projects where estimations are off by 1 to 6 magnitudes because some erudite IT person didn't understand the differences. (I got an emergency call one time because an entire project was going to get canceled because a team member had confused baud (bits per second) with Bps (bytes per second, combined with parity bits, essentially a magnitude difference) and had said what we were attempting would kill our network. I walked them through a pencil estimate and put them back on track that night with an estimate of bandwidth within 2%.

• Around 48% are confused by different kinds of files like Jpegs and PDFs and don't know how they should be used.

  Again, find me an IT team fo which the majority knows this, too. It's amazing how many times jpg's vs. gif's vs. pdf vs. pbm, etc. are selected mostly on the basis of only what the person involved knows.

• further 23% are not sure whether to upload or download - requiring further conta ct with the IT department for an explanation.

  yeah, good luck getting consistent answers on this one. Again, my experience, IT people can be amazingly clueless about the notion of "direction" and server-side vs. client-side technology.

• Nearly 75% of people said they spend more than an hour every week simply trying to find out what something means in order to finish a task, according to the survey by recruitment consultants Computer People.

  Yeah, me too! The IT jargon is inconsistent, overloaded, pseudointellectual, and obfuscated. It's a constantly moving target making true currency in technology jargon a royal pain-in-the-ass.

• And it isn't just the older generation who feel out of the loop - more than one in two (54%) office workers under 30 have made a blunder because of confusion over the meaning of IT jargon.

  This is NOT a surprise. As may be inferred from my previous points, IT "experts" probably reach this level of blundering also.

The fluid and obfuscated universe of IT jargon has long driven me crazy. And foisting it on the lay community is a crime -- it's fscked enough in the IT universe, who the heck would expect the user community to spend the time and energy to stay current. I would like to think in an industry as driven by rigorous technological underpinnings the language would distill to a more formal, stable, and consistent language. Unfortunately, that's not been my observation.

Theory(?) The language is less driven by the technology and more by the commercial/business bent, thus pushing all in IT to distinguish themselves with the best and most sophisticated sounding terminology. (Just my theory.)

The other side of the coin

[frodo from middle ea]

Me and my office mate back from 4 years, use to play a little game, when we got bored of programming.

We would try to explain "what we do", in simple lay-man's terms, It was not as easy as we thought it would be. Expecially if you are working on stuff like lax parser, CORBA,.

There were times when we couldn't even begin to describe what we do, without using some kind of jargon or other. As we got better in the game, we narrowed down what terms we could use and , by the end of 3rd year, we weren't even using the term computer in our description.

It worked wonders for me, at my next job interview. My would be boss asked to describe my current job (which involved building and distributing a J2EE app using perl scripts ) , to sombody like a stock broker. When I did, he told me that's the best answer he has ever heard from a techie, and I got the Job :-)

Re:Its not just computers.

[AKAImBatman]

How many words specific to a washing machine do you need to know to operate one?

Washing Machine: Hot cycle, Cold cycle, Permanent Press, Colors, Whites, Dry Clean Only, Gentle, Cotton, Polyester, etc, etc, etc.

I hate to say it, but those things are damned hard to operate properly.

? Most of us drive every day, yet many don't know the jargon for the parts of what a car does.

Car: Accelerator/Gas, Brake, Shift, Gear, Mile(KM), Miles(KM) per Hour, bucket seats, overdrive, fuel efficiency, gallons, gas tank, windshield, wipers, wiper fluid, oil/lubricant, glove compartment, tire rotation, coolant, etc, etc, etc.

And yes, you need to know these things to operate it.

We just want to turn the key and go somewhere.

If you think about that for a moment, you'll realize that you won't get very far. Plus you have to understand what a keyed ignition is first, not to mention the steering wheel, the gas, the brake, the shifter... ;-)