Are You Annoying? 656
cweditor writes "This Computerworld article looks at some habits of people in general and IT pros in particular that can drive co-workers crazy."
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Are You Annoying?
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The answer is (Score:5, Funny)
Next slashdot article please.
Re:The answer is (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The answer is (Score:3, Informative)
Here [guardian.co.uk] is a nice story from the Guardian that might clue you in a little bit.
Oh, co-workers who correct colleagues on points of grammar and/or spelling are, in fact, annoying.
Re:The answer is (Score:5, Informative)
((please note, the usage of "you" in the following argument is defined as "you understood", the common plural usage. Not the singular usage. Or did that change?))
Ah, yes, the old "I'm too lazy to pick up a dictionary and find out what a word REALLY means so I'll just modify it" clause. While I am not picking on you in general, it does seem a custom to just change the meaning of a word. "moot", "hacker", and now an important literary term called "irony".
What about twenty, twenty-five years from now? Conversation will become more ambiguous (wait, that word still means 'open to more than one interpretation' right?). We, as a society, over time, have formulated words to more clearly define things. Take a look at any older language and you'll be hard pressed to find such modifiers as "terrible", "horrible", "fabulous", and "fantastic".
And now, just because someone doesn't feel like paying attention in English class, meanings of words get changed by the vulgar [reference.com] (definition 3). Years from now English classes will teach courses in "Irony: Not the modern kind, but the kind that employs such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect."
Why not just use a different word for what you mean? We have 26 letters, create a new word.
---
Personally, my favorite response for the mis-use of irony is: "I believe thw word you were straining for was "coincidence". Irony deals with opposites, coincidence deals with things that are related. If a rescue helicopter happened to have killed the person they were trying to rescue, that would be irony. The fact that you are a moron and mixed up the definitions of 'irony' and 'coincidence' is just a coincidence".
Re:The answer is (Score:3, Informative)
If a rescue helicopter happened to have killed the person they were trying to rescue, that would be irony. The fact that you are a moron and mixed up the definitions of 'irony' and 'coincidence' is just a coincidence".
I'm going on a limb here but if what you descrive is irony. Maybe people thinkg that its not irony because "Michael is a really damn annoying and he is trying to teach us how to not be annoying". Nice try but is it not irony if "Micheal is annoying the h
Re:The answer is (Score:3, Interesting)
Almost. If someone tried to kill themselves by jumping off a bridge and failed, and then a rescue helicopter was sent out to pick them up instead of a coast guard boat because they were worried about running him over, and then they accidentally dropped the bird on them while trying to fish him out of the drink, that would be irony :)
Re:The answer is (Score:3, Interesting)
When someone says that something is ironic, I always compare it to that. This thing about a slashdot editor supposedly being annoying and posting a story about annoying people is really nothing worth HAVING a word for. You could call him a hypocrite, or dense or something, but really nobody cares and I don't think a new word is necessary.
Re:The answer is (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate when people misuse frequently used words too. I'm ok if someone misuses a word that's not part of common human discourse, but "irony", but the concept and the word, ought to be well understood by everyone who, say, graduated high school. I give people points for getting kinda close, though, like if they use it when they mean sarcastic or sardonic. That's kinda close. I once heard someone use it when they just meant "funny" (as in, "Did you see America's Funnient Home Videos last night? This guy got hit in the nuts! It was so ironic I shot Big Gulp through my nose!"). That was really annoying, especially considering that person was college educated. I felt like having him savor the iron-y taste in his mouth after I busted open his lip.
Part of the problem with irony is that it sometimes lurks just below the surface. The poor maligned soul that inadvertantly started this thread-bash may have actually detected irony in this situation and been referencing it, leaving us readers to discover it.
SO: Say my purpose is to reduce the overall amount of annoyance in the world. I write an article, the aim of which is to do that. But my intended purpose is at odds with what actually happens; the article itself is annoying, everyone who reads it gets annoyed, and the article actually increases the amount of annoyance in the world as a direct result of my own inability to practice what I'm preaching in the article itself.
Isn't it ironic? Doncha think? A little tooOOOoo ironic?
(I can't believe I'm actually inviting mod-downs by going back to Alanis Morrissette. I really thought I was better than that.)
sev
Re:The answer is (Score:5, Informative)
Not, that would not be irony. Unless you define "irony" to mean what Alanis Morissette evidently thinks it does [lyricsdomain.com]. She's wrong and you're wrong.
Let me give you an example of irony. Take this sentence:
"ticklemeozmo certainly has grasped the concept of irony"
That was dripping with irony, get it? Your rescue helicopter example isn't irony, it's a twist of fate. In fact, your misunderstanding of the term irony probably stems from the usage:
"Fate must have a keen sense of irony to allow that helicopter to crash on the person it was rescuing"
The above is not the same as your use of the term. Allowing the helicopter to crash on the rescuee might be seen as an ironic statement by Fate, if you believe Fate was in control of the helicopter in the first place. As a disinterested observer the crash holds no irony for us, and certainly not for the person being crashed upon, in and of itself.
OTOH, your use of the helicopter example in a post lambasting another poster for his misunderstanding of irony, is, in a word, ironic.
Google for more references, here's a couple to start you off:
http://www.politicaljuice.com/2004/05/defining_iro ny.html [politicaljuice.com]
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ironic [reference.com] (check the usage note)
Re:The answer is (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Irony
Use of irony
The word "irony" is frequently used figuratively, especially in such phrases as "the irony of fate", of an issue or result that seems to contradict normal expectations derived from the previous state or condition. Irony of fate
The expression "irony of fate" stems from the notion that the gods (or the Fates) are amusing themselves by toying with the minds of mortals, with deliberate ironic intent. For example
Re:The answer is (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if we end up with a better language in the long termn, language evolution will be resisted, as it will take effort and confusion to evolve it. Language is such a complicated concept that simply grasping it in the first place is quite a feat. Expecting people to then keep pace with the latest changes in it will, of course, lead to problems. You cannot expect this to be different.
In additi
Wah, wah, wah yourself :-) (Score:3, Informative)
True...and False.
It is true that English is constantly evolving. There's no question about it, and it isn't just in the area of vocabularly, either. "Billy" Shakespeare's grammar takes a lot of effort for someone raised in the 20th or 21st centuries. Point taken.
That does
HA (Score:5, Funny)
Annoying people exist everywhere. The trick is to direct their annoying behaviour at your foes.
Re:HA (Score:5, Funny)
Annoying people exist everywhere. The trick is to direct their annoying behaviour at your foes.
Doesn't Sun Tzu devote an entire chapter to that in his Art of War?
Re:HA (Score:3, Informative)
But annoying people are generally to be dismissed, executed, or sent off to die on some god forsaken hi
Re:HA (Score:4, Funny)
I don't 'restart that service', I 'spank the server' it.
I don't say 'it might be broken', I say 'it's borked'
I don't 'change some settings', I 'frobbed the config'
and the best is that instead of 'reimage' I 'swipe-and-wipe'
Re:HA (Score:3, Funny)
I would humbly ask the moderators not to mod said classes of comments up, though...
Re:The answer is (Score:5, Funny)
jf
Re:The answer is (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're annoying... (Score:2)
That's the whole point!
My co-workers were quite pissed (Score:5, Funny)
Nail clipping (Score:2)
Re:Nail clipping (Score:5, Funny)
Because he's my boss. And I'm a total pussy, so I take my gripes to Slashdot where they can be totally ineffective.
Re:Nail clipping (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nail clipping (Score:3, Funny)
Even if it's user error... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Even if it's user error... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, the help desk people generally do not have the personal or company resources to adjust the processes to accommodate the available humans. However, there are many people in every organization who do have these resources, and yet do nothing. They sit at their expensive desks jacking off and shopping instead of finding creative solutions to quality and user interface issues. They blame the wage slaves and customers for not precisely following their half assed implementation of a process. They waste company resources by making expensive wage slave replacement a part of the process. I have seen both sides of this, so I am not talking from theory.
So, if you see a problem, and cannot fix it yourself, document the problem, think of a solution, and don't just blame the people calling you.
Re:Even if it's user error... (Score:5, Interesting)
I once dealt with a situation where I had a group of users who would have vague computer problems usually "the network is slow" or some other difficult to verify gripe whenever they weren't in the mood to work.
I got my ass chewed so repeatedly over this crap that I invested a massive amount of time and effort in monitoring these users, and documenting their supposed slow downs, and so when the end of the month rolled around and my monthly asschewing commenced I could produce reams of documentation proving that there were no problems.
Did not make me very popular with about half the building, but I was dead tired of taking the heat for their sloppy work ethic and sheer incompetence.
Re:Even if it's user error... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work with an IT guy that was apparently on the path to BOFH-dom. Whenever people used him as a crutch to get a little work slowdown, he'd actually find a problem. And that problem almost always required them to do extra work...maybe they'd lose that report they've been working on for a week, maybe all their personal configuration would get deleted. Maybe he discovered they weren't doing something frequently enough, such as updating virus definitions or backing up their data.
Sometimes he'd even go to management and have a team-wide policy put in place that required extra work of everyone on that team. While frequently using that person, by name, as an example, he'd give a nice, boring lecture on what that person did or didn't do that caused the problem, and how the problem was bad enough, in that person's own words, to cause a big productivity hit.
One thing I learned is that management loves IT guys that spotlight productivity problems and suggests lots of solutions.
sev
Re:Even if it's user error... (Score:5, Interesting)
I kept looking for phantom problems. They were mainly running a big database app, and for a good while, there actually WAS a problem with it. But we added about 10000% more server, and it was all fine.
It was after that, that I started getting reamed. After all, I'd suggested more server and they'd paid for it, so why hadn't the problem gone away?
The original system had run at about 99% cpu util. pretty much all the time, with bottlenecks everywhere, CPU, IO, RAM, everything. The new system generally hovered around 10% with spikes to 60% or 80% running across four processors. I checked IO and it wasn't that, I checked the network (which involved about 4 days crawling through ductwork with a fricking tone wand between my teeth. They had the best networking in the whole building---one jump from the server router to their router, and both routers were new and highly functional.
It was at this point when I realized that I was being consciously fucked. It was priceless to watch their faces as I laid out my info. Since their job was repetitive and the database ran consistently (consistently bad. fucking VB.) I could tell what they were doing by the size and duration of the spikes. I even tested it out, after hours.
It was seriously damning stuff; I could show every time they requested a new page, every time they submitted new data, or ran a query, and that stuff was consistently slow as hell. On the days when they claimed the network was slow the cpu utilization looked like a dead guys ekg. It was pretty obvious to everyone that it could hardly be slow if nothing was going on.
The week after that was probably the worst week they ever had...The average utilization jumped through the roof, hovering around 70% and their boss hadn't worked down there since the new servers had been added, so everything looked blazing fast to her.
I never wanted to be a BOFH, but there are times when I completely understand where they're coming from. Users can really suck.
what? (Score:3, Funny)
Am I annoying? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Am I annoying? (Score:5, Funny)
I had to do it. Someone using a Microsoft browser might go nuts.
IE doesnt support blink (Score:3, Informative)
IE doesnt support blink, you're thinking netscape and Mozilla.
Man, the MS bashing has hit a new low when people are attributing Moz/Netscape stuff to MS.
http://webdesign.about.com/library/tags/bltags-b li nk.htm
No, I'm not annoying. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah, that is annoying. (Score:5, Funny)
Full text (because slow servers are annoying) (Score:4, Informative)
Irritating behaviors not only annoy your co-workers, but they can also compromise your effectiveness and even derail your career.
News Story by Alan S. Horowitz [mailto]
JULY 23, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) [computerworld.com] - Do you tell IT insider jokes that users don't understand? Do you sprinkle technical jargon through discussions with business people? Do you find that you've usually got the right answer to any problem and you let everyone know it? If so, you may be something you didn't think you were: annoying.
Everyone's annoying some of the time, says Kimberly Alyn, a corporate trainer and co-author of Annoying People and Why You're One of Them [amazon.com] (Llumina Press, 2003). But annoying behavior can have serious consequences in IT, where it can compromise your effectiveness, wreak havoc with projects and even derail your career.
Annoying behaviors are tricky because what annoys one person may sail by another. "You can say the same thing the same way to two people, and one person will say, 'Damn, that's annoying,' and the other person will not think anything of it," says Dan Bent, CIO at Benefit Systems Inc. in Indianapolis, an administrative services provider to health care plans.
But annoying behavior in IT sends ripples through the whole business. Gary Langer, associate vice president for academic technology at Chicago's Roosevelt University, explains that when IT support people are annoying, "people lose confidence, and they just give up. They stop asking questions."
Bent concurs. "You're always communicating with other people, and if you're annoying them, it reduces the likelihood your message will get across," he says.
Projects may also suffer. Jackie Palmer, a senior product manager at CRM software maker E.piphany Inc. in San Mateo, Calif., tells of participating at a meeting for a large insurance company that involved implementing process change. "The only way to do it is get [users] to buy in themselves," says Palmer. But a consultant at the meeting began to dictate what would happen. "The users became very combative," she recalls. It took several weeks of meetings to resolve the issues, and the project fell behind schedule.
If you think that you can't be annoying because you often work alone, think again. You still deal with people for support, advice and information, as well as to get a promotion, notes Gini Graham Scott, author of A Survival Guide for Working With Humans [amazon.com] (Amacom, 2004).
For the worst offenders, the consequences of being annoying are potentially dire.
"Say someone comes to you and asks you a question today, and they find you annoying," says Bent. "Maybe the next time, they'll ask someone else. Soon people stop coming to you and asking you things, and you end up without a job."
The IT Niche
IT has its own annoying quirks. Langer says some IT people label users as neophytes and then blame them for any difficulties. "The user insists their e-mail doesn't work, and the IT person says, 'My e-mail works perfectly,' and assumes the user is the problem. Users really find this annoying," he says.
Some IT people are so sure they know what the problem is that they don't even listen to the user, says Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director at IT staffing firm Robert Half Technology in Menlo Park, Calif.
IT people expect users to always know what they want, and they can get exasperated when they don't. "Business people have a right to change their minds, because the business changes," says Ellen Gottesdiener, principal consultant at EBG Consulting in Carmel, Ind.
And IT folks often require the "right" decision, says Gerry McCartney, CIO at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in Philadelphia. "[They] have diffic
Re:Full text (because slow servers are annoying) (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Full text (because slow servers are annoying) (Score:5, Funny)
if you have a tendency to blurt things out and interrupt people, tell your listeners they'd be helping you by pointing out every time you do that
Reminds me of this line from Wargames (spoken to Malvin, the stereotypical nerd):
"Remember you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively? Remember that? You're doing it right now."
Re:Full text (because slow servers are annoying) (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a big personality types guy and this to me screams J (as in judging, where judging types like things decided soon). Some say that fields like IT also cater to the conceptualist type, which is NT. And, i
Kinda stupid link.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whats so special about annoying IT people? arent there plenty of annoying people in any given profession?
Why IT is annoying (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why IT is annoying (Score:3, Informative)
I have tons of personal stuff I use installed in my home directory at work. The nice thing about UNIX software is that 99% of it can be installed anywhere, and doesn't have to be in system directories. You also don't need root to install 99% of software.
The only downside is fascist admins who discourage the practice, or filling up the disk with your copy of SuperStatistics2002 which takes up 3GB. This is obviou
Re:Why IT is annoying (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why IT is annoying (Score:5, Informative)
Although I really, honestly, believe that you could be trusted with root on your linux box at work. (and if you just send your IT guys my way. I'll be willing to vouch for you.) there are some scenarios where giving even experienced users root is a bad idea for the company as a whole.
Unfortunately, where I am is the worst of all worlds. The machines are maintained with automation tools, but they are set up poorly, so the default install is already screwed up. PC Tech support ignores Unix machines, so they are on their own and maintained by the individual users.
Re:Why IT is annoying (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't claim to have come up with the idea, but I can say that I've tried it; this requirement really does lead to fairly intelligent self-selection so long as the "sure, you can have it" offer isn't made to those who are obviously unqualified.
Phil
Re:Why IT is annoying (Score:3, Informative)
I do. But sometimes it's not so simple as just editing one line in the Makefile. Lots of software expect themselves to be in
Plus, there's the annoying limitation that our home directories are only allowed to be 400 megs. (Because they back up the home directories and don't want to back up too much, I suppose)
Re:Why IT is annoying (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why IT is annoying (Score:3, Interesting)
One of them deleted 200GB worth of data files the other day. Oops. Thank god for nightly backups.
Re:Kinda stupid link.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Kinda stupid link.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, IT has more than an abundance of, more than its share of pompous asses.
Unlike management. Or marketing.
*we're* annoying?!?! (Score:3, Funny)
The only reason I try not to piss people off at work is that I know if I lost my job and live out my dream to poison-gas my high-school reunion, it'll be more work than if I just keep my mouth shut.
Gee, I don't see anything about how annoying cab drivers, waiters, construction workers, football fans, etc, can
Re:*we're* annoying?!?! (Score:4, Funny)
The article is almost totally WRONG! (Score:5, Insightful)
BUT! There is an underlying assumption that the IT person's communication skills are sub-standard.
What if it is the OTHER person's skill that is sub-standard. Well, the easy solution is to say that if the IT person was an even BETTER communicator, then s/he could compensate for the failings of the other person.
From the article: "If I'm dealing with a [nonintuitive] person, I need to put things in concrete language. This person doesn't want abstractions."
Now, the REAL PROBLEM is that it is MUCH MORE DIFFICULT to develop expert skills than it is to develop average skills.
So it will ALWAYS be easier to blame the IT people for not having excellent communication skills than it is to realize that LOTS of people have POOR communication skills (and they're not all in IT).
Again, that quote from the article...
The person you are talking to understands ONE approach and is UNWILLING to work at grasping a different approach...
So YOU have to be able to handle BOTH (or more?) approaches, re-phrase the material in either (any?) format and be able to determine WHICH approach the other person is locked into BEFORE you annoy him/her by repeating your material.
Wouldn't it be so much easier for the other person to come up to an average level of understanding of abstract concepts?
Rather than the IT person becoming an expert in BOTH concrete and abstract forms of communication?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
NEWS FLASH (Score:5, Funny)
What is this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Annoyances. (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's annoying to me when they insist on being ignorant about the tools that they need to do their jobs, and that I'm paid to maintain. A tiny bit of effort on their part would pay huge dividends.
Why is is that people think being ignorant of how a computer works is something to be so damned _proud_ of? Nobody says "I'm car-illiterate" with a little chuckle after they wrap a sedan around a tree, but users who accidentally destroy their computers somehow think it's IT's fault.
--saint
True, it works both ways (Score:5, Interesting)
It's what people are used to (Score:3)
Here's an example - the old windows network login problem. To fix something on a clients computer at their request I needed to log in as Administrator over their lunch break. Knowing that the login prompt showing the last login would be confusing, I left a postit note stuck to the screen explaining that they would have to type their own name into the prompt. The postit note was thrown into the bin unread, and I recieved
Um...because using a computer is more complex? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the exact lack of perspective in IT people that I wrote about in another post. Just because you understand what a "command prompt" is doesn't mean everyone else does. But the majority of us knows how to push a gas pedal and steer a wheel.
Computers, unlike cars, constantly have problems that require checking the internal hardware or software configurations. Do you know how to refit your car's exhaust manifold? If cars were as flaky as computers, wouldn't you feel annoyed at the anti-social, nerdy car mechanics whose lives are spent arguing over car model brands as though they're religions, and taking time out of their oh-so-busy schedules of bitching to each other in order to fix your incessant problems?
Yeah...perspective is good.
Users! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha! Here's how that typical scenario goes...
USER: My e-mail doesn't work.
IT: What's wrong?
USER: I can't send e-mail. E-Mail doesn't work. The system must be down.
IT: None of the other 1700 employees have had any problems at all today with their e-mail. Can you be more specific about what your problem is?
USER: It doesn't work for me.
IT: Did the computer give you any error message?
USER: I think so but I wasn't paying attention.
IT: You realize that when something goes wrong on the computer, it tells you what went wrong? That message helps us know what the problem is?
USER: Yes, but e-mail doesn't work.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Users! (Score:5, Interesting)
If my steering wheel broke on my car, I would phone up the dealership and say that my car was broken and they need to fix it. If they asked what part of the car was broken, I wouldn't shrug and say only "I can't drive it" and "It was working yesterday". If something more complex broke that I didn't understand I would try to describe the symptoms of the problem, what I was trying to do, how it didn't work, and what steps I could take to reproduce that problem.
Many users call technical support without doing that -- they blame IT support as being the reason their computer is broken and berate them. If they would take into account that the IT tech is trying to learn about the problem in order to fix it and needs to know what exactly doesn't work and how to reproduce it, that would eliminate the confrontation. It's common courtesy, not to imagine more efficient -- but people like you insist the problem is with the person trying to do their job and not the person acting like a child with a temper.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Users! (Score:3, Interesting)
I find that if I drop back, listen
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Users! (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, *most* users in large networks do try their best, rarely (if ever) have issues, are polite etc and they tend to get good responses. Some (especially older ladies) basically don't even bother trying, they just expect people to handhold them all the time. Unfortunately fo
The correct responses (Score:5, Insightful)
USER: My e-mail doesn't work.
IT: What's wrong?
USER: I can't send e-mail. E-Mail doesn't work. The system must be down.
IT: I don't think the system is down. Let me see. Hmm, I can send mail. I wonder why you can't.
USER: It doesn't work for me.
IT: Did the computer give you any error message?
USER: I think so but I wasn't paying attention.
IT: Ok, let me come look at it. Maybe something is wrong with your account.
-----------
You're supposed to have an attitude of wanting to help, not proving it's not your fault. Jeez, no wonder people hate IT users, with responses like that.
-Dan
Re:The correct responses (Score:5, Informative)
Even if the user is wrong every time, it's your responsibility to help them. Some people just never learn, but if you keep helping them in a friendly way, they will worship you and think you are indispensible. When you start to write them off and act like it's always their fault, they will be just as frustrated with you and want to get rid of you.
-Dan
Re:Users! (Score:3, Insightful)
I work in banking IT. When it comes to issues related to banking I often depend on the bankers to help me understand what is a priority to them, because of my lack of experience in that area. It may be common sense to us that the error message that pops up
Re:Users! (Score:3)
No, they don't, because the user is usually a PHB. That means that they are, by definition, in their own minds, the smartest person in the department. If they weren't, they wouldn't be a middle manager. So since they can't understand the error message, none of their employees can either. Any information contradictory to this will be ignored.
High-ranking corporate users make so much more sense when you realize that they've all got massive inferiority complexes. They're absolutely terrified of anyone who ap
Re:Users! (Score:3, Interesting)
Wherever there's a high rate of failure, or probability that an error message may occur, I make it mandatory to take a screenshot (using another utility I wrote) of the software that's running on screen, which gives them an ID# for that pic. If t
The three worst annoyances in software development (Score:3, Insightful)
1. People who won't read the documentation thoroughly. "How do you use dd?" "Well, it's documented in the man pages." "I know, but I thought I'd ask you." I hate people who want to be spoon-fed the answers. Even worse are the ones who will ask you the same question a week later. DON'T TELL THEM! Make them look it up - they'll learn so much more in the process.
2. People who blame the software. "I found a compiler bug - this loop won't exit." "Um, that's because your exit test is wrong." Count the number of times a person blames the compiler, the libraries, or the operating system for problems that turn out to be their own; this count will be inversely proportional to their quality as a programmer. The worst ones find a new bug in the compiler every day.
3. People who give up too easily. Something doesn't work exactly as it seems it should, so they try a few variations - maybe - and then they run for help. "This doesn't work like the book says it should!" "OK, did you try ____. Or ____? Or _____, or even _____?" No? then why are you bothering me? THINK about what you're doing, then try to figure it out for yourself before crying for help. Perseverance is a quality all good programmers have.
Why single out IT? (Score:5, Insightful)
That annoyance is usually the fault of the annoyed because he or she is frustrated because they don't understand. Sure, there are things you can do to not be condescending towards people, but thats more a life skill that everybody should have for everyday life.
Re:Why single out IT? (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, that sounds fair.
Tell me where you work, and I will come by and tap you on the head with a pencil at irregular intervals throughout the day.
When you get annoyed, I will smugly tell you it is your fault because you "don't understand".
Or, perhaps, annoyance is the fault of the person who is too superior or condescending to bother to help or explain properly.
HTH. HAND.
Know thyself! (Score:3, Funny)
I like country music and beans, so the answer is no!
Reasons for being annoying (Score:3, Insightful)
What it doesn't mention is that what annoys IT people to no end are the people who know nothing about computers but try to interject their opinion. You know, the poeple who don't listen to you when you say don't install program X, or don't install anything, or ingeneral ignore you when you say DON'T DO THAT!.
IT people tent to get bad reps because the technology is new and people have been ocnditioned that people who know about it are nerds or geeks. What they should understand is that IT guys are the mechanics of the technical world. You don't but diesle in a gasoline vehicle beause it is cheaper. If you do your mechanic will laugh at you and say don't do that again. The same way you don't instal everything you come across on the internet because your IT guy will laugh at you and say don't do that again. The only difference is you are more liekly to listen to your mechanic than to your IT guy.
Note: you and your probably doesn't apply to the slashdot crowd at large but speaking in third person about ID10T errors is annoying at best, so you was used.
Okay, so what do you do? (Score:4, Interesting)
Annoying behaviors are tricky because what annoys one person may sail by another. "You can say the same thing the same way to two people, and one person will say, 'Damn, that's annoying,' and the other person will not think anything of it,"
So what do you do? Keep the conversation dumbed down, filled with small talk? I always laughed at the comercials for television shows that said "we'll be talked about at the water cooler tomorrow, make sure you're not the one that misses it". Maybe that is what most people want? I don't buy it.
I try and not talk above anyone. But I don't want to talk down to people either. My solution is to explain things in the simplest way. It is like when I was in college and I knew this one guy who was smart. But I would never ask him for help with anything because he always made things 100 times more complex than it was just to show everyone how much smarter he was. Nobody liked him, not even other nerds. Lets call him Steve for arguments sake. If anyone asked Steve for help, even something as simple as 2+2, Steve would decide that calculus was needed to solve that problem. He then talked so fast, most of the time, to make sure you could not keep up. When Steve saw the confused look on the persons face, a grin would form on his face and he would slow down long enough to mockingly ask "can you follow this, it is really tough stuff you know, so hard". And you could never send him an email without getting it back, grammer corrected. What a prick.
I guess my advice is don't be Steve. Don't be that guy.
Re:Okay, so what do you do? (Score:4, Funny)
That's *grammar* not grammer! Can you follow this??
Love,
Steve
Left Out Symptoms? (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally something to address this.... (Score:3, Funny)
I realize that this quote could (and probably will) generate a huge number of double entendres from the slashdot crowd, but I've seen this behavior too. Of course any irrelevant metric is just as bad (type of car, si
Re:Finally something to address this.... (Score:5, Insightful)
To which I reply:
Yes, I know there are a lot of "rightish" answers - it took me a long time to realize that, but that doesn't help when I'm the one stuck coding an answer to the problem. People understand gray areas, but computer's don't. It's a 1 and 0 thing - there's no "wacky" bit.
Even at the higher levels, it's still a problem, because in order to devise an answer, the problem must be clearly defined and I don't necessarily have the knowledge to solve an issue that's outside my field of expertise. Even acquiring a limited knowledge is a time-consuming task that is not likely to give me the finesse necessary to make a competent decision.
I could give a best guess and damn the consequences, but I'm paid to be right, not a good guesser. Not being given a clear direction or complete information is not only annoying to me, but dangerous to the company.
Very Bad Article (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is a lot of IT, particularly when programming can be abstract, this is not a problem but users as questions like "why isn't it working"
IT people expect users to always know what they want, and they can get exasperated when they don't. "Business people have a right to change their minds, because the business changes," says Ellen Gottesdiener, principal consultant at EBG Consulting in Carmel, Ind.
The problem here is that business people know thier business, and say "i have problem X" whereas I don't understand X. so i then ask questions to gain an understanding of X. So now after spending all that time (money) understanding and another boatload of time (money) coding up something which is starting to look like it will do the job the business owner changes thier mind. By this time a change of direction may cost me thousands of pounds and its thier right to change thier mind? Perhaps we would find business people less "annoying" if they were prepared to pay (with money) for thier own indecisiveness.
All of my coworkers are annoying, (Score:4, Funny)
Why is it my fucking job to train end users? (Score:3, Insightful)
Tech journalists can be annoying too (Score:3, Insightful)
Annoying lack of verbal skills... (Score:3, Interesting)
I personally think that the most annoying thing about some people in IT is their total absence of verbal skills.
For instance, in a previous company where I worked, some of the IT employees could only communicate to other people in the same office via HotMail Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger or some other instant messaging tool. *EVEN* when the person they are talking to is sitting less than a yard away.
And when you try to talk to such people using normal vocal means, they would give you a blank stare, a long pause where they attempt to remember how to talk and eventually they may find it within themselves to say "Umm... can you IM email instead?"
Very frustrating!
I'd last about 12 minutes in an office job (Score:3, Insightful)
Every client of mine, about 1/3 the men and 3/4 the women have this forced facade of a personality where every syllable is accentuated and they choose words like "Suuperr!! That's just superr!" and it makes me want to kill myself just to listen to. (If you've seen Lost in Translation, think of the blonde that's in Tokyo promoting her movie, and that's what I'm talking about.)
Isn't it funny that the best "actors/actresses", the ones we give Oscars to (usually) are the ones that can come across like they're not acting at all on screen. Genuine people who deliver what they say from who they really are without pre-processing it. But in real life you rarely find these people, everyone's trying to perfect this plastic personality willing to sacrific who they really are just to get a promotion. Even worse is they don't leave it at the job, it becomes permant like tatoo'd makeup. You see them in public or even talking with their "friends" and it's the same fake-speak, forced body language. I feel sorry for the lemmings. How did we get reversed to where Jack Nicholson in The Shining is a far more realistic person than Jenny Smith over in accounting?
Who's annoying who? (Score:3, Interesting)
What about peppering conversation with business or marketing jargon.
It would seem to me that the message of the article is it's ok for business, markerting and financial types to act according to type, but God forbid that a techy should act according to type.
Business discussions use business language.
Marketing discussions use marketing language.
Financial discussions use financial language.
Technical discussions must now use baby talk, lest we annoy... read, expose areas of ignorance... within the other disciplines.
Who's annoying?... Writers of pap populist biz articles.
Some annoying things in the other direction (Score:5, Insightful)
As an IT person, I find a few of the complainers annoying. Take, for example, Ellen Gottesdiener's statement that business people have a right to change their minds. Yes, they do, and I don't mind that. Change is a fact of life. What I find highly annoying, though, is that those same business people refuse to acknowledge that they changed their minds. They change their minds, don't bother to tell me they have or what the new decision is, then squawk when I'm still working based on the old decisions and then squawk more when I tell them the changes will take more time because I've got to go back and re-do work that's already done.
Another is Gerry McCartney. Certainly often there's no one right answer. The problem is, usually IT doesn't get the luxury of budget and schedule to cover every possible answer. At that point it's supposed to be the business people's responsibility to decide which answer they want to go with, so IT can get on with the job of implementing it. It's horribly annoying when they won't do that, or even indicate priorities so IT can work on the most important (to the business people) stuff first.
The final annoyance is when business people expect me to respect them but they refuse to respect me in return. I was hired to solve technical problems. The business people were hired to solve business problems. If you've got business constraints on the acceptable solutions, don't come to me asking only for the technical solution and then whine when my answer isn't the one you have to have. If there's constraints, tell me what they are so I can factor them in. And be prepared if I have to tell you that there aren't any solutions to your problem that'll actually work that also meet the constraints (real-world example: you want a vehicle with 3750 cubic feet (25x15x10) and 80,000 pounds of cargo capacity, under the constraint that it has to fit into a compact-car parking space). If there's non-technical factors that dictate the solution then don't bother asking me, and don't blame me if the dicatated solution doesn't work.
DRAMA-QUEENS. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's one thing too say that being uber-geek with non-geeks is annoying, or arrogance is annoying, or bad hygiene is annoying.
But some of the quotes are way over the top, talking about how we all must constantly monitor EVERY word and mannerism, in ANY company, or else risk contaminating the entire work environment.
These are the same ass-kissing back-stabbing political types who constantly use language like "proactive", "incentivize", "realign", "laser focus", "customer-centric", "team players", "challenge", etc.
Oh, and my favorite -- there are no "problems", only "issues" and "concerns".
I've heard it said (Score:5, Interesting)
Non-IT people tend to filter outbound - they don't say something for fear of offending someone. Not always the case, certainly, but by and large that's my experience.
IT people tend to filter inbound. In the days of yore, it wasn't uncommon to see discussions where "What are you, stupid?" was said, and generally it wasn't taken personally. It was just one of those things that was understood.
These days, there's more of a mix of people fitting the inbound vs. outbound filtering groups, and that leads to problems in business.
This article does a pretty decent job of highlighting one of the things I find to be the most ironic about IT personnel (and I have been one for almost 15 years now) - they tend to get into the business because they don't have to deal with people and don't want to. Yet IT work these days requires more interaction with people, not less.
Take Directory Services technology; according to Burton Group's studies, implementation of directory services technologies is 80% politics and 20% technology. The technology isn't really that difficult, but getting agreement between the various groups who own parts of the data about who owns particular pieces of data requires a fair amount of negotiation and people skills.
Re:Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, you are paid to deal with annoying users. IT salaries are high for a reason, and it has nothing to do with being the button-monkeys most of them are.
No, you don't have it straight. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is annoying:
"Well, my email is working, so it must be a problem on your end."
This is not:
"Hmm, let me check our mail server - well, everything seems OK there, let's see if the problem is on your computer."
Two ways of saying the same thing, one is antagonistic, the other is constructive.
That's what social skills are all about - learning to communicate effectively.
Those are VERY different responses. (Score:3, Informative)
But WHAT is going to be done? WHEN will it be fixed?
"Hmm, let me check our mail server - well, everything seems OK there, let's see if the problem is on your computer."
The investigation is CONTINUING.
Now, to make the FIRST response into a CONTINUING investigation....
"Well, my email is working, LET'S SEE IF THE PROBLEM IS on your end."
There, that doesn't sound so annoying now, does it?
Most times, it isn't the response, it is the whether t
Re:I'm getting really sick of... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I'm getting really sick of... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Most annoying of all (Score:3, Insightful)
The Mac zealot.
Oh yeah, 'cause its a JOY to deal with the people, whom when informed that you have a mac at home, inevitably ask "are you stupid" or some variant of it.
They usually then proceed with demonstrating their abysmal ignorance of all things mac, like stating "it must suck not to be able to open the case" or "man, why did you buy that? You can't even upgrade anything in it!".
Yeah, THOSE people aren't annoying.
health nut who tells you how crappy what