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?

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.

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.

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: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.)