It’s helpful to take a few steps back from time to time to reassess where we’re each coming from on our knowledge of tech (or anything) to better communicate.
Basically everything.
Like, even filling out a basic Excel sheet can be difficult to some people who have absolutely no experience in it.
Look, I’m a software engineer, and I still fucking hate filling out spreadsheets. I’m honestly at the point where I’d rather make everything a QUERY function than deal with ARRAYFORMULA bullshit. Honestly, if Google Sheets could add SQL language formatting, we’d be golden.
Personally, when I’m looking around for different software, as someone that’s in-between unfamiliar and familiar with tech: if it doesn’t have an installer/executable/apk and only describes a way to build/compile from source, I have to imagine it wasn’t intended for non-devs to start with.
Yet somehow I seem to find my way to software like that occasionally. 🤷♀️
And that’s probably the case.
When someone creates a hobby project, they might not immediately have the time to spend on making a convenient package or executable because it’s still in early development, still buggy and unsupported, or it’s targeting only people capable of compiling code.
Many people are very uncomfortable with the degree to which their work and life depend on computer systems they do not understand. They feel vulnerable to computer problems, pressured into depending on more tech than they really want, and do not believe they have the knowledge or resources to remedy problems with it.
So when something goes wrong, they feel helpless. This is not unfounded, but it can often make the problem worse.
Depending on the person, this can lead to blaming or blame-dodging behavior. IT folks — did you ever ask someone what the error message was and they say “It’s not my fault!” or “It’s not my job to fix it, you’re the computer person!” … as if blame ever helped!
The “tech person” differs not so much in knowledge but in having a different emotional response to tech doing a weird/broken thing: when something goes wrong, they jump to curiosity. It’s not “I already know how to fix this” but “We don’t know what happened here yet, but we can find out.” Knowledge comes from exercising this curiosity.
But this is not something that everyone can do, because people who feel unsafe don’t typically go to curiosity to resolve their unsafety.
If only they had any idea how complex and unreliable the non tech things their lives depend on and they imagine they know are.
I agree, but also computers break differently. Using a computer is just like other everyday activities like driving a car, until something goes wrong
Imagine if you broke down, but you didn’t know if it was ‘the car’ (call a mechanic), or the road, or the traffic lights…
