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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.'"
Its not just computer jargon that is confusing
I still don't know what TPS stands for.
I laughed myself sick reading this article...especilly the oh-so-helpful second page, entitled 'what it all means'.
Here's an especially good one from the list:
With 'helpful' articles like this, us IT professionals should remain in demand for a good long time. ^_^
But seriously, a good IT professional isn't one who's good at explaining the jargon, or getting laypeople to understand the technical isues...it's one that takes care of the issues for the laypeople, so they don't need to worry about them. A correctly managed IT department should be all but transparent to the other people in the office. Everything should just work, with the IT guy making certain the users' needs are met before they even know what they are. In a correctly managed facility, the IT guy's phone should almost never ring.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Among CIOs, an amazingly large number of them think that office workers should have the permissions to turn their firewall off.
A massive 61% ... have sent e-mails with huge attachments that have blocked clients' systems.
A massive number of mail administrators don't know how to configure their mailservers thus allowing this to happen.
I could go on...
In other news people have trouble understanding lawyer speak, medical terms, names of car components, how to build a house to proper code, publishing industry slang etc...
I guess that means people just have to learn eh?
Some people don't need to know what javascript is. They just want to use their computer to type documents and read email. I'd say a good portion of business users need their computers for just that.
As far as sending huge files goes, they still don't need to know the differences between file sizes. People shouldn't be sending large documents through email anyway. A few megs at the MAX. Public drives or a webserver for anything else and the users should be educated on that.
Has anyone else had a friend that works in an office enviroment that is extremely paranoid call you up screaming that the hackers have their port?
$fortune
Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
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.
And a massive 99% of people don't need to understand that. Mail servers should be designed to ignore e-mails of a larger size than they can handle. It's not up to the users to understand KB, MB, GB, mail server loads, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, SSH, whatever.
Their understand lies in doing their jobs effectively, whatever that may be. When my doctor refers to medical jargon I may not know what it means and may be confused (I'm generally well versed in my particular conditions) so do you really expect them to understand what the jargon in your field is?
Blah.
This is why I like to throw in the term "flux capacitor" every once in a while when I'm explaining stuff to end users...
Proper computing education should be mandatory for high school graduation and equivalent. Not knowing this kind of information in today's world is the equivalent of being illiterate. You wouldn't hire an illiterate person to read books all day. So don't hire a computer illiterate person to sit at a computer all day.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Your average office worker is lazy and doesn't want to learn what those terms mean.
The terms aren't the problem; it's the fact that your average cubical dweller simply doesn't want to learn them.
I've personally explained how to fix a the same problem several times to the same person, yet they keep asking me how to fix it every time it comes up. If they'd simply listen the first time and learn how to do it rather then noding the whole time maybe they'd be able to help themselves once and a while.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
They don't seem to understand basic instructions, either. "Don't open any suspicious attachments, especially from someone you don't know." == "Open anything! It's fun! Oooh, pretty smileys!"
I know nothing
Visio, visio--powerpoint PCX GIMP tar c++ RAM. Outlook? Gigahertz!
Well, a more appropriate decision would be to train those that are tech-clueless and help them learn more things about technology. Firing employees because they don't know something they never learned seems a bit harsh, especially since most of those employees could become quick learners at technology.
Empower IT with HR's traditional roles of hiring, promotion, and termination.
And you wonder why people hate IT departments.
Listen, this "holier than thou" attitude is just stupid. Do you know how to diversify a portfolio to meet acceptable risk according to an efficient frontier formula? Well, some of those "idiot users" do. Does that make them smarter than you? If so, should they have veto power on how you run the network?
IT people are not necessarily smarter, despite what they may think. The goal is to work together in a company, and find solutions that take into account problems that employees may have. Which also means that locking everyone's computer so they can't do anything may not be the correct solution. Maybe, just maybe, users occassionly have a need that you're going to have to work extra to fullfill. That's why you were hired, not so you can sit on your duff and complain about all the work that users make for you.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
My secretary just came in and said "my email is broken" Well rather than ask her what the problem is I just went out to see. Seems what one of her stupid Cursor/screensaver/spyware/smiley things locked up and borked the system. I just hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete and ended Outlook, Dog thing (not sure, don't ask) and another unnecessary program. It gave me no real problems and I walked away. She asked what I did, I just say "I am not sure". See the problem is not that they don't get it. The problem is that we try and explain it to people who won't get it. She's 60 and never going to know the difference between 1 GB of Ram and 1.21 Gigawatts. Trying to explain it to her only wastes both our time.
Actually, this is normal.
...
Every field has its jargon that is virtually undecipherable for outsiders.
Think about medicine for example, and the names of medical conditions.
Or think about botany, or construction engineering.
Where the problem lies is that unlike the above fields, computers have become pervasive, and embedded everywhere.
If computers have remained in mainframe rooms with an army of programmers and operators, this would never have been an issue. It became an issue after the PC was invented and made it to every office and every home...
Live with it
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
My boss has been using computers since the early 80s, and was a tech journalist during that time. He still doesn't even understand the simple concept of a zip file. I don't think it's just the jargon that's too difficult. I think it's simply that computers are too difficult for many people. And no, I don't think that dumbing any of it down will ever make it better. I really think it's just that some people out there are too dense to begin to understand anything remotely technical.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
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.'
Give 'em all 28.8k modems, that'll teach 'em!
My experience has been that office workers (non-IT) are not the only ones who are confused by IT jargon.
From the article:
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
This is partially a side effect of not understanding the metric system. Cue Grandpa Simpson's quote about gas milage. While certainly a mail administrator can configure this to avoid overflowing their own system, the end user will still generate a complaint as to why they can't send mail. The real misunderstanding is file size comparisions. For example, if you didn't know how big a "gigabyte" was, you might think one or two gigabytes wasn't very large (as far as emails go).
PC Load letter? What the %*&# does that mean!?
You can tell I'm an aries because of my ram.
Using a computer is part of any kind of office job, and plenty of other non-office jobs these days. It's along the same lines as using a phone or sorting through a file cabinet or any other common office tool.
Think of it this way... Worker is given work -> worker does something -> worker produces finished product. That something might include alphabetizing files, or driving their car, or hammering in nails. If the worker couldn't read, couldn't drive a car, or couldn't use a hammer, we'd call them unqualified to do their job. We'd wonder why they were ever hired and when they'll be canned. How is using a computer different?
They would if it was gigadollars, kilodollars and megadollars.
This is not a jargon issue, this is bad math.
Alvaro
If "Computer People" has a staff that doesn't understand these terms, perhaps they should change their name. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it sounds like they're doing piss-poor resume screening.
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 :-)
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
I've flipped jobs more than I'd like to admit, but I usually land in telecom. Despite that these jobs are all in the same specialty and usually java development work, I still spend months trying to understand what's going on in a group meeting. Every worksite has it's own culture (e.g. terms, in jokes, personalities) and much of it has nothing to do with technology.
I'm not talking about ceding total control of the organization to IT, but allowing IT input into HR decisionmaking. If everyone in the company is my "customer" and I have to make them all happy in order for good "total customer service" to happen, then the head of IT ought to have the capability to hire/fire/promote all of these people. It's only fair.
Oh. Well then, accounting should also have a say in hiring. (Including tech people.) As should the mail room. Not to mention the cafeteria staff. And let's not forget the janitorial staff! It's very important that people who understand how to properly read the recycling labels are chosen! After all, it's only fair.
Either train them, get them a "seeing eye dog" IT monkey to follow them everywhere and do things for them, or fire them.
I agree. Has your department taken proactive action to see that all the employees are properly trained or have the support they need?
And, yes, I believe I could manage a risk portfolio. If I can figure out how to manage IT security risk, I can figure out how to manage a company's financial risk position. It's not really that different, just apply a the same types of reasoning and information gathering to a different set of scenario parameters and information.
Oh, good Lord. If that were true, you'd be out making all the money you need, not stuck with "idiot users" in a job you obviously hate. BTW, here are the computations for Modern Portfolio Theory. Knock yourself out. I hope you know where to get the data from and how to adjust the frontier for a variety of inputs, investment styles, tax limitations, bonds, and mutual fund products. (Not that you're likely to know what an investment product is. They're all stocks, right?)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
So... if the worker is working a 40 hour work week, then they are essentially saying that they are spending 1/40th of their time learning the commonly accepted terminology used on what amounts to being their primary productivity tool. And I can see the term "wasted" being used if they were never going to use the words again, but I would hope that once they've learned the word and its meaning that it will stick for a little while.
If they were going to be an auto mechanic would they be "wasting" their time learning the terms "torque wrench" or "floor jack", as well as what they mean and how to use them?
At one point the article says:
'It's like driving a car - you don't have to be a mechanical engineer to drive and most people will learn something about the mechanics of cars, like what the spark plugs or carburetors do. But with the computer people have not got to the point where they are willing to lift up the bonnet and have a go themselves.'
The analogy is faulty. They're not being asked to swap out the hard disk, install a new video card, or bump up the RAM, just know the basics of their tool. In a large corporation the computer is the equivalent of a fleet car or other company asset the employee is being allowed to use. If the employee wants to "lift up the bonnet and have a go themselves" they need to buy one with their own dime and learn. I'm sure most desktop support people have had more than enough experience with repairing systems from users who decided to "have a go themselves". To continue the broken analogy, a driver that doesn't know the difference between an accelerator pedal and a break pedal probably shouldn't be driving.
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.
I've spent huge amounts of time trying to work my way through labyrinthine HR policies, Employee Manuals, and other detritus of the corporate world. It comes with the territory when you have to deal with something new.
Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC.
I feel much better now. Does the author mean Microsoft Excel? If this is what the writer of the article thinks "Excell"does then much of the tone and content of the article itself becomes clearer. And the HR department shoulldn't be hiring people who are this easily confused.
1) good idea. Ignorance of computer terms may be frustrating to those of us who use them fluently, but know-it-alls who overuse jargon (in any field) to appear smarter to novices are just assholes.
2) is Manging Director of Computer People Adam Fletcher's real job title? Is IT Director jargon? ;)
"Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!"
I can see this from both sides. On one hand, it's easy to say "Users need to *learn* the basics. If they're going to just say "I refuse to be bothered to learn what a megabyte is!" - then maybe they need to work elsewhere!" On the other hand, there's a strong argument for setting up a more user-friendly environment that makes a lot of this unnecessary. (EG. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Apple's Mail application in OS X is smart enough so when you tell it you want to attach an image to your message, it asks you if you'd like it sent "Small, Medium or Large size" and auto-scales to one of 3 reasonable preset sizes suitable for emailing. If this became standard behavior for all popular email clients, most of the problem of clogging mail servers with huge graphics attachments would disappear.)
Like most things, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Educate the users on *some* of the jargon, but try to construct an environment where as many technical details are invisible as possible, so they only need to know a few basic concepts to function in the office.
The biggest obstacle I see these days is the tendency for smaller or mid-sized businesses to try to cust costs on I.T. - eliminating full-time I.T. support staff, in favor of going with a service contract or a part-time worker. This does prevent the problem of paying someone to sit around and surf the web, etc. while they "wait for something to break". But it also causes such things as the situation mentioned in the article where users could simply "turn off their firewall" or make other harmful system changes. (EG. Can't send out my email!? Hey, maybe it's my network card settings! I remember the support guy at home walking me though that stuff in my "Control Panel" under "Networking" when I called for help with my DSL!. I'll try changing some of these numbers around in here!) Users are given more "administrator-type" system privileges due to the lack of real, full-time I.T. staff, and they begin tinkering with things, knowing it'll be a while before they get help otherwise. Then you've got much worse problems....
and half the population have IQ's below that...
He's actually right, you know. Kilo, Mega, and Giga meant exactly what he said-- powers of 10. We computer-folk have been mis-using them for years to refer to nearby powers of 2, and there are new prefixes we *should* be using to avoid confusion. The "new" prefixes were published by the IEC in 1998.
for this:
1GB = 1024 MB = 1048576 KB
you should be using:
1GiB = 1024 MiB = 1048576 KiB
Where the GiB, MiB, and KiB stand for Gibibytes, Mebibytes, and Kibibytes.
Do I use them? No. They sound funny, and like many programmers I'm cranky and stuck-in-my-ways. But you should be prepared to accept that the standard "power of 10" usage of the SI prefixes mega, giga, and kilo you were taught in college science classes is indeed correct, and that the way we've been using them is an awkward legacy kludge that grafts a second meaning onto a widely-used standard.
Obligatory link.
Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC
What is Excell and what does this mean. I have never heard of it, but aparrently I should have it, because otherwise programs won't run on my PC.
My favorite comment though was the PDF- a document that can be read on any PC. Oh yeah? Can it be read on the PC that doesn't have a PDF reader on it? Hmm!
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
I was going to post about my visit with my mother and the argument we had over computers. Then I saw your post.
My mother gives people legal advice without being a lawyer: "Save your money, here's a website that will make a durable power of attorney for you that you can print out and sign."
My mother gives medical advice without being a physician: "Here, take these pills for your cold, they really helped my thyroid problem."
My mother knows next to nothing about cars, but that doesn't stop her: "My check engine light came on, could you replace my alternator while you're down this weekend?"
Building codes: "You don't need a building permit, it's just a porch!"
My mother seems to know everything. Thanks to the wonderful technology of email forwarding, she now knows even more! "Barbara sent me this mail about how to prevent identity theft, so I scraped my signature off of all my credit cards and peeled off those magnetic strips."
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Here's my take on this thread.
First, regarding Modern Portfolio Theory: Most people are very prone towards the "If I don't know how to do it, it can't be hard" mentality. I certainly am.
Second, I think IT's mission is far different from that of the janitorial staff, the mail room, etc., and that it's makes more sense to give them some measure of control than your mockery would indicate. But I think it would make more sense to just give IT some measure of control over the policies governing computer use within the company, and then treat violations of those policies as seriously as any other violations. This seldom happens, because the people in charge of setting policies don't understand the computer system well enough to understand the sort of hassle that some violations cause.
For example, the IT department might be allowed to say, "You should be storing your files on the network, not your local hard drive. We will not assist you in recovering data not stored on the network." Given that policy, if the CIO loses his spreadsheet because he insists on keeping things local "so he can access them faster", any complaints and threats of termination should fall on deaf ears.
Another example: If an otherwise competent person keeps hosing the network by running suspicious executables, that person's manager should be willing to recognize the inconvenience this causes. It shouldn't be up to the IT department to fire the guy; it should be up to the guy's boss to recognize the overall effect the behavior is having on the company, and do whatever it takes (disciplinary action, new IT procedures, etc.) to ensure that the IT people can keep the infrastructure reliable.
As it stands at many companies, IT people take the blame when the users trash the network, even though the management won't give the IT people the tools or authority needed to keep them from trashing the network. Sometimes, it really is a case of people needing to do X with their computer, even though forbidding X would make administration much easier. IT folks can be insensitive to business needs. But other times it's just a case of management not wanting to be told how they can and cannot use their computers, and figuring administration can't be hard because they don't know how to do it.
It's tricky to strike a balance between those competing needs.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Just another Tango Lima Alpha, that's Whisky Tango Foxtrot.
My sister's response when asked how often she had the oil changed in her car: "when it runs out."
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Mostly they don't look at how big the file is in the first place. Or realize that it is a big file.
I had a group of users who had a one page MS Word file that they were using as a template that got broken somehow and it became 12 Megabytes. When they got a complaint from a recipient who was on a modem they asked me to look into it.
I remade the file and it was 43 kilobytes. Then I showed them the way to figure out how to check the size and spent the next hour explaining about file sizes.
New cameras are also very much to blame but nothing is more to blame than XP's default way of dealing with big images and just shrinking the image view. They have no idea that the files are huge, and have no desire to learn about re-sizing, compression, file formats.... Mailserver be damned I am going to send this collection of worthless pictures anyway, I just got this cool camera and I am going to use it.
Yes, you should, if you want to make sure that every time you click "send", your new mail really will "appear" in your friend's folder thingie.
> If I shouldn't send a large attachment (individually or in aggregate) my client software should tell me so, and prevent me from doing it, in the same way that an airline will stop me from bringing on a 3 kiloton suitcase rather than letting it get put on board and crash the plane.
If you don't know that "weight" is a property of matter under the force of a gravitational field, and why it's important to pilots, you're going to be frustrated when you exceed it.
Dialogue 1:
Airline: I'm sorry, we can't take the four of you, at 350 pounds apiece, plus your 200 pounds of luggage, in this Cessna.
Moron: Do you know who we are? We paid for our tickets. How dare you discriminate against us? You put us and our golfing equipment on that plane or I'll personally sue your airline into the ground!
Airplane: *crash*
(Granted, any pilot that lets such passengers board his aircraft deserves to crash with 'em. But the point is that an educated customer isn't going to be a moron, because they're going to be willing to listen to the error message "you weigh too much", and they're going to be capable of understanding it, and they're going to be able to take corrective action, by either taking two flights, by chartering a bigger aircraft, or by leaving some of their luggage behind.)
Similarly, if you don't know that "size" is a property of "files", and why it's important to sysadmins, you're going to be frustrated when you try to send big ones.
Dialogue 2:
Client: I'm sorry, I can't send that attachment to everyone in the company. It's way the hell too big.
Moron: This software sucks. Hey, sysadmin! I want to use a better mail software, the one you use! We make the sales this company relies on, and you answer to us! Either I get to email this DVD to my golfing buddy right now or your ass is fired!
Server: *crash*
Same problem. (And same comments about an admin who lets himself get browbeaten into blowing up his own server :)
There's a happy medium to be struck - but ultimately, it can't be solved only through clever UI design. Some user education is going to be required.
Computers have existed in the office for only 20 years, and have changed pretty radically over those 20 years. They're complex devices, and you have to understand at least some of what's going on under the hood to know what's common between a TRS-80, a Sun workstation, and an AMD64 running XP.
We had the same problem with automobiles in their first 20-30 years. The electrical starter, automatic choke, and the automatic transmission are about the only "new" UI developments for automobiles in the past 50 years. (The difference between EFI and carbureted engines didn't affect the car's UI.)
Ironically, we're seeing the usability problem more often in automobiles today than we did 20 years ago - it's not about being able to change your own oil, it's about knowing that oil needs to be changed, regardless of whether your engine was designed for oil changes every 3000 miles or 10000 miles. 50000 miles later, having never had an oil change, the car dies, and the user blames the auto manufacturer for the sludged engine.