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

Its not just computers.

[suso]

Its not just computer jargon that is confusing

I still don't know what TPS stands for.

Re:Its not just computers.

[Eslyjah]

I still don't know what TPS stands for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPS_report.

Re:Its not just computers.

[AKAImBatman]

"Test Procedure Specification" as defined by IEEE 829, mostly used in government work.

And as far as I'm concerned, workers need to get used to the jargon or take a hike. Measurements and particular jargon abound in all walks of life. If you're making cookies, for example, you need to understand a cup, teaspoon, pint, etc. (or liter and the like if you're not American). If you build a shed, you need to know what a foot or meter is, don't you? In those disciples, you also need to know things like what a hammer is, or a mixer. Computers aren't any different. No one is asking that the average user understand coding, but understanding things like storage space is a requirement.

Re:Its not just computers.

[op12]

I still don't know what TPS stands for.

Didn't you get that memo?

Re:Its not just computers.

[stonedonkey]

Measurements and particular jargon abound in all walks of life. If you're making cookies, for example, you need to understand a cup, teaspoon, pint, etc. (or liter and the like if you're not American). If you build a shed, you need to know what a foot or meter is, don't you? In those disciples, you also need to know things like what a hammer is, or a mixer. Computers aren't any different.

True, but a computer is a device, not a tradecraft. Furthermore, unlike a device like a car or pocket calculator, it is a platform for entertainment and productivity, and it is far more complex than both and truly requires an additional vocabulary to operate it efficiently. And the complexity isn't necessarily the hardware, but in the lack of standardization, the abstraction of the interface, and in the necessities of modern security. The home computer is still a novelty to the general public, believe it or not. Partly because it's still a relatively expensive investment and prone to all kinds of exploits, tricks, and scams as soon as you connect it to the Internet.

Think about evertyhing you must put in place to properly secure a Windows PC, for example. First, you must install a virus scanner. For the majority of users, this *is* a must, because they really aren't savvy about e-mail attachements, message spoofing, and shady-looking websites. Then you need at least a software firewall, which pops up a prompt the first time each app request a network connection -- and the prompts aren't always very informative. Win32 Generic Host Process? Um, okay, I guess. Either that, or you get a router, and that requires hooking it up with the modem and the computer. And God help you if you need to start forwarding ports and setting up wireless encryption. Then there's IE's default settings that allow browser helper objects, referral IDs, and every cookie that gets thrown your way.

So what to do when you don't even know what a firewall is? When you aren't aware of the importance of shrinking down that huge "jpeg" you took with your digital camera before mass mailing it to all your friends and family who have email addresses? There's a lot of technical awareness that /. takes for granted, but it's important to remember that we represent a very small percentage of the populace.

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... ;-)

Re:Its not just computers.

[Enigma_Man]

A lot of people complain about automotive analogies, but I really like them:

Knowing about files and their sizes is a basic part of operating a computer. That's like driving a car and not knowing that you have to change the oil.

Not anymore. Any new car you buy, they tell you to bring the car in for service every 3000, 5000, or what-have-you miles. They don't tell you every specific thing they're going to do. They might not even necessarily mention that they're changing the oil. Obviously most people have been brought up enough around cars to realize that you need to change the oil every so often, but that's often the extent of their knowledge. If you bring up other maintenance, like flushing of coolant, suspension alignment and greasing, brake fluid changing; a lot more people will know a lot less information about it. While it may be obvious to an auto-enthusiast, people just don't know what they have to do, which is why manufacturers have "service intervals" where they do _something_ and your car continues to work. It stands to reason that most people probably need something like this for thier computer, something that automatically scans/protects/assumes things for them, such that for 99% of people, their computer "Just Works", just like for 99% of people, the service you get at the dealership so your car "just works" is ok-happy-fine.

-Jesse

Article misses the point

[TripMaster Monkey]

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:

• Excell - this helps to run programs on your PC.

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.

Re:Article misses the point

[Nos.]

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.

I think you came very close to hitting the nail on the head, but instead walked away with a brusined thumb. For most of us, understanding the issues that these people don't understand is common knowledge to us. We can take the time to explain these things to our customers or we can fix the problem, we can explain how to avoid similar problems in the future, or structure the environment to avoid them. To me, a "good IT professional" is one who recognizes what the customer wants and provides. Having worked a few help desk and similar type positions, I can tell you that some people don't want the problem fixed, they want to understand the problem. Others don't care, they just want it to work.

Now, there may be other obstacles to providing exactly what the customer wants. Most help desks don't want you spending 20 minutes on the phone with someone explaining why sending Grandma who's on dial up, 20 pictures from your 8MP digital camera may not be a good idea. However, I've always found that taking the time you have available to explain things at the level the customer wants, results in a much happier customer.

I said customers, but this of course can apply to anyone for whom you are working on a problem for. This also applies outside of IT. When I had someone in last year to clean our ducts, I spent a lot of time talking with him to find out what I could do to reduce dust and such in the air and picked up a lot of valuable information that has saved me money since then. Next time I need the ducts cleaned, I'll be calling him back because he was willing to pass on information and experience to me.

Re:Article misses the point

[nine-times]

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.

This is only sort of true. Sometimes users have to know some jargon. Sometimes users have to understand the technical issues well enough to avoid them. A real helpdesk pro (or anyone that deals with customers/users) will avoid jargon when possible. When technical issues need explaining, a good IT professional will distill the issues into a couple simple metaphorical ideas, making them no more complicated than they must be, and expect that the user probably won't remember the explanation for next time.

Some users even insist on knowing why. You tell them you can't send an EXE through the e-mail system, and they ask "why?". You tell them it's a security issue, and they say, "so?"

Some users won't accept any explanation they're given if it keeps them from doing what they want, and that's the real measure of your skill. How well does your helpdesk tech deal with the belligerent CEO who is completely irrational and has unrealistic expectations? If your tech can walk away, without giving in to the unrealistic demands, but also without the CEO feeling insulted or ignored, your tech has just earned his paycheck.

So what am I saying? Forget the education angle. Users can't be educated. The real key to helpdesk interaction is to keep your users happy and feeling good about their computers, so that when you tell them "You can't do that," you won't really have to explain why (with all the jargon). They'll just believe you.

I'm barely joking.

Users aren't the only problem

[MoxCamel]

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

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...

News at 11...

[Steamhead]

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?

Re:News at 11...

[Tackhead]

> 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?

And that's the fundamental problem. Most people these days not only don't think they have to learn, they don't think they should have to learn. (And why, indeed, should they? Since the 1970s and 1980s, their teachers pretty much gave up teaching in the name of boosting self-esteem. If self-esteem is something everybody has - that is, if it's not something earned through performance, then everybody can feel great about themselves even though they're a bunch of ignorant fuckspittles who'll be first under the water when the revolving hurricane comes.)

Every time you hear someone say "I shouldn't have to read the manual to figure out how to use it!", you're seeing another example of the problem.

Abort mission, they have the port!

[Namronorman]

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?

Have fun with it!

[MudButt]

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...

Re:Have fun with it!

[stlhawkeye]

I do that, too. When there's too much technobabble jargon being bandied about in meetings, I said, "Do we have the 1.21 jigga watts for the flux capacitor?" At least one person always thinks I'm serious. I also frequently suggest that we solve any given problem by degaussing the main deflector dish or reversing the flow control to the plasma relay conduits.

Education

[Apreche]

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.

In related news

[SlayerofGods]

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.

Well

[Ikn]

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!"

Jpeg png, javascript T-1

[Rinzai]

GIF USB IT, Java Ethernet Perl. PHP? Jpeg bandwidth kilobyte, iPod Bluetooth nano buffer kilobyte!

Visio, visio--powerpoint PCX GIMP tar c++ RAM. Outlook? Gigahertz!

Re:Jpeg png, javascript T-1

[Mr. Bad Example]

> Jpeg bandwidth kilobyte, iPod Bluetooth nano buffer kilobyte!

You bastard, my mother is a saint!

Re:Simple solution

[AKAImBatman]

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.

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.)

Re:WTF?

[eMartin]

"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."

I don't get this.

You suggest blocking emails past a certain size, but you don't think people need to understand those sizes?

How are they supposed to know whether what they are trying to send is too big or not?

Re:WTF?

[CyricZ]

Having a mail server simply ignore messages greater than a certain size will no doubt cause just as many problems as it will solve. Now the user will wonder, "Why the hell didn't my email get sent?" and chances are they'll hassle their IT guy or administrator about being unable to sent their mail. Either way, it will be their lack of very basic knowledge that is causing the problems. And until they acquire such knowledge, perhaps the best thing to do is for them to not use such systems at all.

Re:WTF?

[FauxPasIII]

> 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)

If your doctor regularly says things you don't understand, and you don't bother to ask/learn,
some day you might die as a result. I would have died in July of 1996 if I hadn't been
curious at that the acronym "TBI" stood for. I was slated for spot radiation to complement
my high-dose cytoxan chemotherapy. If I had gotten the total body irradiation that was
written on my order, I would not have survived.

Jargon is fucking important. People should take the time to understand it.

Re:Simple solution

[AKAImBatman]

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?)

The answer is probably meeting the users half-way.

[King_TJ]

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....

Not so easy for you, either.

[raygundan]

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.

WTF is Excell?

[razmaspaz]

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!