The Illiterati (was Re: Social Hacking [was: "Strong Scripting Skills" - a definition?])

Fri Jan 30 07:28:53 PST 2004

  vraptor at employees.org wrote:

>... I'd like to hear some more geek social/cultural hacking stories and
>techniques, be they engineering your self-presentation, sussing out
>the true inquiries underlying the interviewer's questions, or better
>ways to deal with the bureacracies.  I'm sure all of us could use some
>new tools to put in our bag of tricks for dealing with clients/bosses/
>co-workers (and maybe even spouses/SOs :-).
>  
>

Speaking directly to Nadine's implied question; how does one 
diplomatically, tactfully, yet meaningfully maintain a high level of 
technical communications with people who hate to read and write, and 
maybe think, too? People who, maybe, need everything translated into 
PowerPoint cartoons, before they can give it their (apparently limited) 
attention?

Put another, more diplomatic, way ... how do you deal with managers who 
want short one-line emails?

Where did this idea - that things can be expressed in single sentences - 
come from? Haven't these people ever heard of paragraphs ... chapters 
... section headings ... indexes?

My guess is that it was born in some management seminar on time 
management; it was slavishly copied by the subordinates ... and 
frequently quoted, as a put-down, to their subordinates, all the way to 
the lowest rungs of the mighty corporate ladder.

In many ways it makes good sense ... if one reads slowly, that is ... or 
doesn't like to read, or write, in general.

Such characteristics are generally associated with people whom we might 
charitably describe as illiterate. Are these people illiterate? I'm not 
being derogatory; I ask the question sincerely.

How do these people achieve these positions of power? Is there some sort 
of conspiracy? Yes .... but it is a conspiracy of circumstances ... with 
more duncery, than skulduggery.

The fact is that the owners of a company are inevitably non-technical. 
This lack of technical expertise often translates into a (usually well 
concealed) suspicion towards someone whom -is- technical.

When technical failures occur, the explanations delivered are rarely to 
the satisfaction of management. This tendency towards dissatisfaction 
leads directly towards replacing the technical management, or the 
technical management resigning, in search of friendlier people to report to.

When the time comes for the manager to be replaced, the owners and 
executives vastly prefer to have someone like themselves reporting to 
them. This leads directly to what we shall call an ossification of the 
technical management, with literate people being replaced with slightly 
less literate people.

This process can and usually is applied successively to each layer of 
management, downwards, from where it starts, until there is no one left 
in the IT department but people whom are adept at summarizing complex 
technical situations into one-line summaries, usually something like "I 
fixed it", and maybe one or two clueless, serially abused, and seriously 
burnt-out technical staff.

Because there is (in worst case scenarios) no understanding of the 
problem on either side, the situation is ripe for misrepresentation, 
finger-pointing, and fraud.

(It's also ripe for consulting and outsourcing opportunities.)

*Note*: I am not referring to people whose technical expertise is 
lacking, but whose desire for understanding is still alive. This is not 
about a lack of technical literacy; it's about an ability to receive and 
generate large amounts of information in an increasingly complex 
society, in general, and in increasingly complex business organizations, 
in particular.

I recently suggested to a VP of IT that things charged so quickly that a 
yearly IT budget simply wasn't possible, any more, for many 
organizations. (How much data will -you- need to back up next year?)

He got a thoughtful look on his face ... and I suspect he'll repeat it 
to the board.

Maybe this idea needs to be aired more widely.

Imagine if you were a car owner, and you went in to the shop to pick up 
your car, and the owner said, "I fixed it; that'll be $500." You'd have 
some questions, right?

You'd think poorly of a shop where you asked to speak to the owner, or 
the manager, to get a better idea of what had happened ... and s/he 
said, "I don't know what they did, but they fixed it, 'cuz it's not 
happening no more, right?".

 You might hesitate to return there, fearing the consequences; and 
surely you'd wonder if they -had- fixed it, or if they'd just tapped the 
engine with a ball peen hammer until the noise stopped, in some voodoo 
imatation of engineering.

And you might suspect worse; although a certain percentage of such 
voodoo engineers might be sincerely trying to help you, using the best 
technology available (to them), this state of affairs would quickly 
attract much more vicious and predatorial types, whom would 
unhesitatingly take maximum advantage of every situation they were 
involved in where a lack of understanding afforded an opportunity to 
manipulate the perceptions of all involved, to their own direct benefit.

(Hence the term, 'perception manager', as a derogatory reference to 
managers of technical resources ... whose collective reliance upon 
managing -perceptions-, instead of technical issues ... and consequent 
refusal to put things in writing [IE, use email to create business 
records of business decisions] ... are probably the single greatest 
threat to business integrity, today, bar none.)

(Investors, take note.)

(We manfully resist the urge to draw parallels between this metaphorical 
situation and certain dot-com related events your author is acquainted 
with. Perhaps others will fill the gap. :-)

Regards,

-- richard

-- 

Richard Childers / Senior Engineer
Daemonized Networking Services
945 Taraval Street, #105
San Francisco, CA 94116 USA
[011.]1.415.759.5571
https://www.daemonized.com