Computer Jargon Too Difficult for Office Workers 601
slashflood writes "Most office workers find computer terms such as javascript and jpeg just as difficult to understand as a foreign language, according to a new survey. A poll of 1,500 staff by recruitment firm Computer People showed that three out of four wasted more than an hour every week simply finding out what some technical term meant. 'A massive 61% don't understand the difference between gigabytes, kilobytes and megabytes and as a result have sent e-mails with huge attachments that have blocked clients' systems.'"
don't blame the office worker community (Score:5, Interesting)
My experience has been that office workers (non-IT) are not the only ones who are confused by IT jargon.
From the article:
Yeah, well a LOT of IT people don't really know what a firewall does either. I've cringed at some of the definitions of firewalls I've heard peer IT workers give for firewall. And, of those who have an inkling, I would not be surprised at all if 75% of IT workers don't really know how and why firewalls work.
I've seen IT people play fast and loose with these terms too. I've been on projects where estimations are off by 1 to 6 magnitudes because some erudite IT person didn't understand the differences. (I got an emergency call one time because an entire project was going to get canceled because a team member had confused baud (bits per second) with Bps (bytes per second, combined with parity bits, essentially a magnitude difference) and had said what we were attempting would kill our network. I walked them through a pencil estimate and put them back on track that night with an estimate of bandwidth within 2%.
Again, find me an IT team fo which the majority knows this, too. It's amazing how many times jpg's vs. gif's vs. pdf vs. pbm, etc. are selected mostly on the basis of only what the person involved knows.
yeah, good luck getting consistent answers on this one. Again, my experience, IT people can be amazingly clueless about the notion of "direction" and server-side vs. client-side technology.
Yeah, me too! The IT jargon is inconsistent, overloaded, pseudointellectual, and obfuscated. It's a constantly moving target making true currency in technology jargon a royal pain-in-the-ass.
This is NOT a surprise. As may be inferred from my previous points, IT "experts" probably reach this level of blundering also.
The fluid and obfuscated universe of IT jargon has long driven me crazy. And foisting it on the lay community is a crime -- it's fscked enough in the IT universe, who the heck would expect the user community to spend the time and energy to stay current. I would like to think in an industry as driven by rigorous technological underpinnings the language would distill to a more formal, stable, and consistent language. Unfortunately, that's not been my observation.
Theory(?) The language is less driven by the technology and more by the commercial/business bent, thus pushing all in IT to distinguish themselves with the best and most sophisticated sounding terminology. (Just my theory.)
The other side of the coin (Score:4, Interesting)
We would try to explain "what we do", in simple lay-man's terms, It was not as easy as we thought it would be. Expecially if you are working on stuff like lax parser, CORBA,.
There were times when we couldn't even begin to describe what we do, without using some kind of jargon or other. As we got better in the game, we narrowed down what terms we could use and , by the end of 3rd year, we weren't even using the term computer in our description.
It worked wonders for me, at my next job interview. My would be boss asked to describe my current job (which involved building and distributing a J2EE app using perl scripts ) , to sombody like a stock broker. When I did, he told me that's the best answer he has ever heard from a techie, and I got the Job :-)
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
In raw orders of magnitude, 1 million : 1 thousand : 1 is sufficiently close to correct.
Also: I'm a hard drive manufacturer. Bob Maxtor's the name.
Re:Its not just computers. (Score:5, Interesting)
Washing Machine: Hot cycle, Cold cycle, Permanent Press, Colors, Whites, Dry Clean Only, Gentle, Cotton, Polyester, etc, etc, etc.
I hate to say it, but those things are damned hard to operate properly.
? Most of us drive every day, yet many don't know the jargon for the parts of what a car does.
Car: Accelerator/Gas, Brake, Shift, Gear, Mile(KM), Miles(KM) per Hour, bucket seats, overdrive, fuel efficiency, gallons, gas tank, windshield, wipers, wiper fluid, oil/lubricant, glove compartment, tire rotation, coolant, etc, etc, etc.
And yes, you need to know these things to operate it.
We just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
If you think about that for a moment, you'll realize that you won't get very far. Plus you have to understand what a keyed ignition is first, not to mention the steering wheel, the gas, the brake, the shifter...
Re:News at 11... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard this over and over again, and I fail to see where this concept of education originated. Nobody has ever given up teaching in the name of boosting self-esteem. Although teachers don't smack kids around anymore, and they make an effort to not call a kid a know-nothing retard, doesn't mean that school is just one big shoulder massage.
If anything, teaching has been replaced by rote memorization in the name of standardized tests. This is why nobody has the skills to learn things on their own, most of schooling is the teacher handing you the answer, and asking you to memorize it so you can spit it out at a later date. Self-esteem has nothing to do with it.
And as for the comment about the Hurricane Katrina victims, somebody who would talk shit about people who have had their whole lives ripped out from under them, and showed incredible courage through a hell most of us will never know, should be really careful about how he uses the word 'ignorant.'
Re:Math? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Simple solution (Score:3, Interesting)
First, regarding Modern Portfolio Theory: Most people are very prone towards the "If I don't know how to do it, it can't be hard" mentality. I certainly am.
Second, I think IT's mission is far different from that of the janitorial staff, the mail room, etc., and that it's makes more sense to give them some measure of control than your mockery would indicate. But I think it would make more sense to just give IT some measure of control over the policies governing computer use within the company, and then treat violations of those policies as seriously as any other violations. This seldom happens, because the people in charge of setting policies don't understand the computer system well enough to understand the sort of hassle that some violations cause.
For example, the IT department might be allowed to say, "You should be storing your files on the network, not your local hard drive. We will not assist you in recovering data not stored on the network." Given that policy, if the CIO loses his spreadsheet because he insists on keeping things local "so he can access them faster", any complaints and threats of termination should fall on deaf ears.
Another example: If an otherwise competent person keeps hosing the network by running suspicious executables, that person's manager should be willing to recognize the inconvenience this causes. It shouldn't be up to the IT department to fire the guy; it should be up to the guy's boss to recognize the overall effect the behavior is having on the company, and do whatever it takes (disciplinary action, new IT procedures, etc.) to ensure that the IT people can keep the infrastructure reliable.
As it stands at many companies, IT people take the blame when the users trash the network, even though the management won't give the IT people the tools or authority needed to keep them from trashing the network. Sometimes, it really is a case of people needing to do X with their computer, even though forbidding X would make administration much easier. IT folks can be insensitive to business needs. But other times it's just a case of management not wanting to be told how they can and cannot use their computers, and figuring administration can't be hard because they don't know how to do it.
It's tricky to strike a balance between those competing needs.
Re:Its not just computers. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Its not just computers. (Score:3, Interesting)
Why yes, yes you do. [slashdot.org]
And it's not so much a matter of how it works as how to operate it. You can't effectively operate a computer without understanding things like storage measurements.
I don't have to understand how the electric motor in my blender works to make a smoothie.
No, but you do have to understand what blend, puree, high, low, and off mean. You also need to know how to measure the milk, ice, and flavoring. Which requires an understanding a units, doesn't it? Just like the units on a hard drive!
I don't have to understand plasma dynamics or scan lines or pixels to watch TV.
Nor do you need to understand head movement, staged pipelines, wait states, or memory refresh cycles to operate you computer. But you *do* need to understand the power button, channels, volume, video source, audio in/out, RCA cabling, and a variety of other details to operate your TV. You probably even need to understand measurements to make sure your TV will fit your home! (There's those pesky units again!)
If something like 61% of computer users are confused by even the most basic computer jargon, then the users aren't broken - the computers and software are broken.
No, the users are broken enough. The problem is that you have a generation that didn't grow up with computers. They're the ones having problems. (Remember, baby boomers outnumber the baby busters.)
It was the same problem with cars. Have you ever seen an old lady driving *really* slowly down the road? Ever wonder why they do that? It's because they didn't grow up with cars. Since they didn't experience the concept early on, they had difficulties with it later in life. For example, my mother had the hardest time teaching my grandmother to drive years ago. My grandmother kept wanting to look out the side window, because that was what she was used to doing!
People Send Large e-mail Attachments Because... (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a group of users who had a one page MS Word file that they were using as a template that got broken somehow and it became 12 Megabytes. When they got a complaint from a recipient who was on a modem they asked me to look into it.
I remade the file and it was 43 kilobytes. Then I showed them the way to figure out how to check the size and spent the next hour explaining about file sizes.
New cameras are also very much to blame but nothing is more to blame than XP's default way of dealing with big images and just shrinking the image view. They have no idea that the files are huge, and have no desire to learn about re-sizing, compression, file formats.... Mailserver be damned I am going to send this collection of worthless pictures anyway, I just got this cool camera and I am going to use it.