In my experience there are quite a few tenured professors that are brilliant in their respective fields (so i heard), but we’re absolutely terrible in teaching their it. In my case this was physics (and also mathematics where i met some of these specimens). I suspect if you understand a certain field so naturally and really excel at that it becomes a second nature it it is more and more difficult to put yourself in an outsider’s perspective. It is so foreign and unimaginable for you that someone might not understand this and that aspect naturally that you cease to be a good teacher in this.
In my experience, half of my engineering professors were terrible teachers
As an engineer, this is painfully true.
Did you try making the thing go like *gestures* “uh” then *gestures* “uh”? That way it’ll be *gestures*, you know?
When you forget a word thats relatively common to the field, it’s the worst.
Also engineers youtube
The engineer: https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg
Oh no, PTSD, I just spent the last two days doing this!? Except the last line - I did not want to state that.:-(
This physically hurt to watch. I had to stop half way through. Too accurate
That so perfectly encapsulates life as an engineer at a marketing company.
This is an engineer?
Engineer with ADHD. Especially true.
Not an engineer, but I feel this as an autistic person
Well that’s just ruuuude. I speak very goood.
Define “intelligent”. I know a lot of engineers through my job, they may be professionally competent, but … Let me give you a short example: The engineer that actually was the team leader building a huge crane on tracks parks his car behind that thing in the blind spot for the operator. Shortly before a test. There went his beloved Jaguar. Old, but true story.
Sounds like he knew what he was doing if you know anything about Jaguars.
This is also generally true for software engineers.
In my own experience, the difficulty is that you basically have to teach someone software engineering before they even kind of understand what youre saying before they believe you.
Which is basically 99% of people, especially in a work setting.
The very rare 1% of people will usually give up and go, well, youre the expert, probably you know what youre talking about.
The rest will be angered by their own dunning-krueger effect and/or ego and be abusive.
EDIT: This is 100% true when talking to a video game player, unless they are somehow also a programmer.
There are 0 exceptions to the category of someone who has only played video games. None of them anything about programming, and they will be more angry and rude than the general public.
If you can’t explain a concept to a five year old, then you’re not an expert on that concept.
As an engineer who plays games, it drives me fucking nuts how much influence forum users and streamers are given when it comes to ongoing game design. It very clearly has ruined many games, and there are times when the user base just need to be ignored. Or at least managed better.
The art in this is to know/guess where you have to dumb down things how far to get your point across.
For example, I’m often explaining Kubernetes to business people as “a layer on top of our servers, so we can define which apps we want to run and how, k8s then sorts itself out, how exactly to deploy everything”. That’s wildly simplified, but usually gives them a rough idea of what they’re dealing with.
I’ve had to endure a coworker explaining k8s by starting with manifests, then switching over to volume claims, finally something about ingresses… He was talking to a guy from a government office, whose job it was to do administrative tasks. That guy had no idea what my coworker was talking about and left the meeting more confused than before.
Unfortunately for myself at least I seem to be faaar too autistic to be able to do this.
I am good at writing code, writing queries, solving interoperability problems, analyzing large data sets, and I can even manage to present reports in ways that are statistically valid but summarized to narratives.
What I cannot handle is my bosses bosses boss insisting I use an entirely new software I have never used before to solve a problem that we can already solve with software we have, for a problem that would not be a problem if she had listened to either my boss, my bosses boss, or the leads of all the other teams who have all been saying the same thing for months.
This kind of thing has happened to me at every single tech role I have ever worked.
Logic means nothing. What matters is the high up thinks something is ‘neat’ and theres no way they can be told, directly, or indirectly, that they have no clue what theyre talking about.
Maybe it’s lame and old fashioned… but I’ve had success with explaining things with flow charts. Make some boxes to represent APIs, make some cylinders to represent DBs, etc, draw some lines to show how things connect. Pick some pretty colours, managers like that. Think more on the lines of explaining to a child how things work.
Once you have that picture you can point to things on it and say “we can add some code here, and a few tables here to provide the feature.” You can add more boxes and lines on another version to represent the new software they want to add to the flow, and they will be able to visualize how that makes things more complicated. Then talk in terms of time to maintain this new software that makes the process more complex… “My estimate is it will take 200 hours to implement this and an additional 100 hours per year to maintain it.” Yeah, it’s mostly going to be numbers you pulled out of your ass, but if your boss is the kind of person that pulls ideas from their ass, they really can’t dispute what you’re saying. And they will hopefully be capable of converting the time estimate into a money estimate themself and they will come to the conclusion on their own that your preferred approach is better on their own.
The trick is to make them think it was their idea.
Those are different problems, though. Or at least only slightly related.
Business people operate on a different plane. Not necessarily a bad one, just different. Not, that there’s no stupidity involved, but if you dig a bit (they’re often surprisingly incapable of expressing their own motivation), you’ll often find that in their reality tunnel, their decision makes total sense. And from their perspective, we are just a bunch of semi-autistic nerds who can’t even explain what they’re doing and cost ungodly amounts of money. If we complain about a decision in technical terms, they don’t understand that.
So, assuming the decision makers in your organization don’t act in bad faith or are really just stupid, try to think from their standpoint. If that helps you, think about it like an RPG. If you’re talking to a character whose entire motivation is money, you wouldn’t choose the dialog option about what a great warrior your paladin is.
For business people the relevant metrics are costs, time to market, risks. If they come around with a new software that is objectively bad, you don’t argue that you can already do that, you only need to deploy the Operator with the AbstractBusinessFactoryBuilder configured differently, etc etc. Instead, you argue, that this poses immense risks, since you’d have to redo a lot of work, which of course costs a lot of resources. Also, you could argue, that such a vendor lock in poses immense risks, since you can’t really extend the software. And so on.
Don’t start as being the hysterical autist they see us as. Try to ask, why this is relevant. What exactly do they think is the benefit? If they can’t explain it to you, say that. You’re the expert, after all. And then, give the software a chance, so your objections have a basis.
Finally, don’t forget the magic of the word “no”. There’s a good chance, that simply downright rejecting work on a change/project will actually make some people think.
This is very true. I work with a lot of software developers and most of them have huge egos. I started in a business role and moved to software engineer and am really gold at not letting my ego take over. I always take criticism and try to get better.
In my experience I have learned as much as I could from other software engineers and rarely had problems with them.
Of course their absolutely are software engineers with huge egos.
In my own experience at least, I worked with many who were very humble, and higher ups walked all over us and abused us and refused to listen to huge problems with plans we were instructed to carry out, and then we were blamed for not doing the thing that would never work in the first place.
The code when I think about it: A well structured systematic machine
The code when I try to talk about it: haha function go buuurrrrr
Idk as long as you can communicate exclusively in flow charts you can communicate with software engineers pretty efficiently
Let me share my point of view as a programmer: The average person has no clue how detailed a computer program needs to be. You may think, “this process has only three steps, yadda, flubber and diddly”, but when you sit down and try to program this, you start asking questions like “if the user removes the program during the yadda process, should we add zero flubberees into the diddlydoo and send it off or should we not send the diddlydoo, and should the user be notified? Or should we maybe try to reinstall the program and start again from the yadda? Does it make sense to keep the inputs from the flubber, or is this likely a new process that’s independent from the first attempt? Is it sensible to enter a non-integer number of flubberees? A negative number? No number at all? Do we need to tell other users that a user is concurrently doing this process?
As an engineer, the demographics of stupidity did not spare my category. Whatever this sentence was supposed to mean.
Well I ain’t stupid if my shit does work god damnit!
Ever heard of ADHD? Ya, the thought is perfectly intelligible. But as it travels to the mouth it gets mangled by six other thoughts along the way
This is why I prefer typing over texting. I can go back and proofread what I said before I say it. When I speak, all that comes out half of the time is word salad.
Also, you know, the searchable record which gets created. I legitimately don’t understand why some people insist on having important conversations in real time when that conversation just vanishes instantly into the ether once it is finished
I feel the same, and yet here I am shitposting word salad 🤷♀️
Or autism, where you are to scared to even start talking and when you do, you mumble, give up mid sentance or say somerhing wrong for no reason.
That’s not autism, that’s just poor social skills.
I know autism is the “cool” disorder nowadays but there are actual autists suffering from it.
Well I’m professionaly diagnosed, plus I have other problems, not highlited here.
The fun part about a spectrum is that it’s a spectrum.
Shit, I’m over 50 years old and it’s the first time i encounter people describing my daily chicken run through social hellscape. For once, it feels nice not to be alone.
EXACTLY. Add social anxiety to the mix, and something as simple as asking a question becomes a Herculean task because your mouth won’t cooperate.
“Ah shit, I have something else to add to what I’m talking about, I better speak faster so I don’t waste everyone’s time”
Damn. This is me. If I get it out now I won’t forget it then. So my mouth and tongue become the flash.
I work under engineers. They spend enormous effort articulating complex solutions to simple problem. If anything theyre the opposite of what this meme implies: they are very dense but use flowery language to disguise it.
I’m an engineers who works with engineers. There are no rules. You have the dumb smoothtalkers and the smart… dumbtalkers.
It’s pretty entertaining seeing management eat the bullshit some engineers give them. It’s a crime for a manager not to be technical or at least have understanding of what is going on. If you want to see an engineer fucking a manager, put a manager who doesn’t know shit about engineering.
I see this every fuckin day man. Do you work where im at lol?
I’ve also seen this. At multiple companies I’ve worked for.
It’s like this everywhere.
It’s good to develop skills in making flow charts. If you can draw what the bullshit guy is recommending and then draw what you know is a better solution, the manager might understand a little better how stupid what the bullshitter is saying. Or the bullshitter might start claiming your idea is his idea. Whatever, either way you won’t have to work on something that you know will work like shit.
If you do things right, you can have the bullshitter basically working for you. They’ll find out from you what should be done, go to the meetings make themselves sound smart by telling people how things should work… but when that matches how you said it should work, everything works out.
I really don’t care enough to tell on them. But yeha, I’ve seen people taking weeks for things that should take 1 day. If this results in my team failing and getting fired, I’ll find another job. I honestly don’t have the energy to do the job of 3 people.
Oh god is that why I’m this way?!
I spend a good amount of my day talking to these people on lemmy.
I can speak intelligently, but put a pen in my hand and ask me to write down the same thing and my hand won’t move. Tests in school involving more than a sentence were torturous. Essays were brutal. I was in school before computers were available for anything other than computer class. They did help as typing was a far easier method to get things out of my head.
