brentlaminack's Journal: Dumbing Down of IT

A recent I, Cringely column made reference to the 'dumbing-down' of IT. In talking with another, even older IT guy a couple of weeks ago, he mentioned the exact same phrase. So, is IT being 'dumbed-down'? Is using the Microsoft 'point, point, click, click' approach to IT causing IT to lose the fundamental underpinnings of what's really happening?

For instance: about two years ago, I was doing a prototype for a now-defunct alternate long-distance company. They were trying to look through many megabytes of call detail files looking for duplicate lines. They were loading it into Microsoft Access to manipulate it. A 50 MB file took several hours to process. Their ideal was to get it to under an hour. I wrote a dozen lines of C as a preprocessor, and did the rest in PHP. My program was able to process the file in 2 1/2 minutes. The IT guy asked me how I did it. I started explaining about building two-dimensional arrays in memory to index the fields... then I realized I might as well be speaking Martian. He had no clue what I was talking about. This was one of their top IT guys. He knew only Microsoft tools. He had been 'dumbed down.'

Are there other examples?

Some examples

[perfessor multigeek]

Well, that's about half of what we discussed in the later posts of this thred [slashdot.org].

As I said there, part of why I left IT was this trend.

But it goes far beyond IT into everything M$ or human resources departments touch, and beyond.

Back in the day, presentations were custom done in combinations of Pagemaker, graphing software, and Illustrator and we could make them do amazing stuff. Now it's all done in PowerPoint with prebuilt templates and nobody even knows how their presentations are built.

Retouching used