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Be Less Technical

sequential.dev

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Re: Be Less Technical

#31

Post by Jensson »

dgb23 wrote: post #28
nicbou wrote: post #21

I learned a lot from my early career, first when selling computers, then when making websites for small businesses (with a side of IT). I also taught Office to senior women for a few weeks. It was a delightful experience. When you deal with laymen, you get to see how complicated our world is to them. I like to see myself as their honest broker with this confusing world. This has proven a viable business strategy. If…

> If this is not abundantly clear to you, consider how clarity shapes your interaction with lawyers, doctors and mechanics. I have a bunch of friends who are or have been mechanics and technicians. They, and others I have interacted with are actually quite good at explaining things in layman's terms. Doctors are quite similar in that regard. It's an important part of their job to do so. With lawyers I had fewer inter…

Mechanics, technicians, doctors and lawyers are jobs bridging between technical and non-technical. Mechanics and doctors needs to be able to talk to laymen, but mechanical engineers and chemists who design the parts/medicine don't need to do it. Similarly you have pure developers focusing on developing core parts, and bridging developers who focusing on delivering those parts to customers/users. Pure developers are still extremely important and a viable career path that pays well, you can't say that it is wrong to focus on that part.

Re: Be Less Technical

#32

Post by Jensson »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #30
Jensson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lawyers, accountants, architects, and doctors, for instance, are expected to be able to speak with people from outside their profession. (I see wfme already mentioned doctors.) Those are frontline positions working directly with laymen though. So while doctors needs to be able to talk to laymen, the chemists working in medicine factories don't. The problem here is that we have the same title for frontline and backl…

> So while doctors needs to be able to talk to laymen, the chemists working in medicine factories don't. But they for sure need to talk to lawyers, accountants and doctors occasionally. All of those (especially the doctors /s) are laymen when it comes to chemistry.

You have frontline and backline chemists as well. Some chemists needs to be able to talk to less technical jobs, but other chemists specializes on improving the process or other technical skills.

So it isn't laymen/specialists, you have many many layers with people dumbing it down a bit in every step. Telling the specialists at the bottom of those layers that they need to be able to talk to the top of the layers is just nonsense. You need to be able to talk to people who are less technical than you, and to people who are more technical than you, so the layer above and below you, but that is it. It can help to be able to bridge more layers, but it isn't that important.

The problem with programming is that almost all those layers have the same name: software engineer.

Re: Be Less Technical

#33

Post by MauranKilom »

My advice: Practice explaining what you do to your grandma. Not all the time, mind you (she probably has other things to attend to), but it is incredibly effective at showing you how "zoomed in" you are in your work and where there is still a "translation mismatch".

I still regularly catch myself using words that I think are common or high-level enough, just to realize that they don't invoke nearly the same picture in a non-technical person as they do for me.

Re: Be Less Technical

#35

Post by MauranKilom »

Jensson wrote: post #31
dgb23 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this is not abundantly clear to you, consider how clarity shapes your interaction with lawyers, doctors and mechanics. I have a bunch of friends who are or have been mechanics and technicians. They, and others I have interacted with are actually quite good at explaining things in layman's terms. Doctors are quite similar in that regard. It's an important part of their job to do so. With lawyers I had fewer inter…

Mechanics, technicians, doctors and lawyers are jobs bridging between technical and non-technical. Mechanics and doctors needs to be able to talk to laymen, but mechanical engineers and chemists who design the parts/medicine don't need to do it. Similarly you have pure developers focusing on developing core parts, and bridging developers who focusing on delivering those parts to customers/users. Pure developers are s…

I submit that you will always interface with people who are not purely technical, no matter how technical your role. But it is in the most technical roles that it's hardest to learn how to match your language to a given audience (for lack of practice/opportunities), so I actually think these are the groups that need to consciously work on developing this skill the most.

Re: Be Less Technical

#36

Post by Jensson »

MauranKilom wrote: post #35
Jensson wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanics, technicians, doctors and lawyers are jobs bridging between technical and non-technical. Mechanics and doctors needs to be able to talk to laymen, but mechanical engineers and chemists who design the parts/medicine don't need to do it. Similarly you have pure developers focusing on developing core parts, and bridging developers who focusing on delivering those parts to customers/users. Pure developers are s…

I submit that you will always interface with people who are not purely technical, no matter how technical your role. But it is in the most technical roles that it's hardest to learn how to match your language to a given audience (for lack of practice/opportunities), so I actually think these are the groups that need to consciously work on developing this skill the most.

> I submit that you will always interface with people who are not purely technical, no matter how technical your role.

This is provably false though, I've worked in jobs where entire large teams never talked to non-technical people.

What you maybe meant is that you always talk to people less technical than you, which is true, but that is a very different statement. For example, when I worked on developer tooling at Google the stakeholders were all developers, the director was a developer, the directors for the orgs we worked with were developers, the product managers were former developers etc. There was just no non-technical people in sight. But you still need to talk to people who are less technical than you, that is still true, but it isn't true that all jobs needs to be able to talk to non-technical people.

I think many misses all the people who work in the background because you don't see or talk to them, but they still exist.

Re: Be Less Technical

#37

Post by unfocussed_mike »

shalmanese wrote: post #2

Importantly, learn to modulate the level of technical detail at which you describe things and establish trust with your intended audience that your level of technical detail matches the nature of the problem. This gives your audience a clue that when you throw around jargon, it's because there's a subtlety in the implementation detail that breaks the abstraction and they need to care about it. There's a difference be…

Right.

You can't hide the detail with a wave of the hand, you can definitely overcommunicate detail that is unnecessary, but the art of it is finding a way to explain the bit that matters in a way that makes it clear to the users that you're eliding detail that isn't important, without misleading them.

There is a very fine example of this in cinema -- the senior partners meeting in Margin Call, where Zachary Quinto's character has to explain why the firm needs to sell all of a particular asset class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhy7JUinlu0

One day I will use the line Jeremy Irons uses in this clip. I don't want to spoil it by quoting it.

Re: Be Less Technical

#38

Post by MauranKilom »

benreesman wrote: post #22
7237139812 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here - I think your interpretation (the former) is pretty spot on. I also think the less charitable interpretation is not _exactly_ wrong. The title and repetition of "Be Less Technical" are definitely not devoid of "click thirst" - but the content is intended to be more in line with "we need to find ways to talk to each other, irrespective of whether we talk to customers or compilers".

I'm flattered that the OP took an interest in my comment, and when I said "less" click-thirsty I hope I didn't come off too judgemental: whether we admit it or not we're all pretty well wired-up for the engagement dopamine hit at this point, including me and my comment. Given that you've clarified the point you were making was the one I hoped: I am interested in hearing more from you and I would gently discourage tha…

> Anyone smart enough to write an optimizing compiler is smart enough to explain how one works, at least in outline, to a layperson. There is no need for a middle-man layer of blubber between the people who need to know why to buy or not buy one, and the person who knows how to write one.

I don't think that conclusion follows from the premise. I could also mop the floor and clean the windows at work, but that doesn't mean that it would benefit the company overall. Similarly, just that engineers could in theory explain the thing they do to e.g. a customer does not mean that they should spend their time doing this. *

There's further nuance in that (in my experience) engineers tend to be, by default, not great at communicating at the right level with a lay-person (which is more or less the point of the article), and that hiring people to interface between e.g. customers and engineers comes with pitfalls and can go wrong (your point, I believe). I personally think it's best if someone who presents products to customers has a deep engineering background and has transitioned into their customer-facing role from there. But if you need to visit more customers to make more sales, hiring more sales people instead of drawing from your engineering department is probably a wise choice.

I say these things as an engineer in the trenches.

* To be clear, I have no intention of disparaging either job.

Re: Be Less Technical

#39

Post by k__ »

The gist is, be as technical as you like, but don't lose your grip on reality.

Talking with people is your interface to the rest of the world. If they don't understand you, then you're lost.

Re: Be Less Technical

#40

Post by [deleted] »

majkinetor wrote: post #17
PradeetPatel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The levels of dumbing down is near endless This is the kind of patronising attitude that will further the gap between engineers and product people. Being able to articulate technical details with the right level of abstraction, and without "dumbing it down" is an essential skill when engaging with stakeholders of varying levels.

No its not. The commenter is right. There are schools that teach people how to transmit knowledge to other people. Not only it is not for everybody but even those that finish those schools usually suck.

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