Nepster,
I’ve been an IT guy my entire career. The field is filled with people who have to worry about the tiniest little detail, or massive systems screw up.
We can’t even talk about our work to 99% percent of the population because their eyes glaze over and they go into a coma within seconds.
However, in my days, I’ve managed to straddle the divide between IT and management. It is a huge divide, and it involves dealing with issues very differently than in the IT sector.
As a programmer, it is important to be exact, to be correct, to be right. We learn to examine and nitpick the tiniest detail and consider our solution under every condition we can imagine, and indeed, if we do this well, we create robust adaptable systems that are very valueable to somebody.
However, people, real people that don’t work in IT, don’t work this way. Nobody, on the entire planet, gives a shit about details like we do. Nobody gives a rats ass about how the entire world will collapse if we don’t handle mixed case, whitespace and punctuation appropriately within key fields, if you catch my drift.
Some ideas, and I really have no idea if they apply to you, but I’ve seen them around.
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Our career teaches us the importance of being right and making sure the right action is taken. This is not how to act in real life.
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Everyone has an opinion. Everyone likes to be heard. Generally, it doesn’t matter what most people think. The world has muddled along for millions of years without our input, and it will continue to do so without it.
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STFU. Don’t tell people what they already know! Don’t tell people what you think (nobody cares). Don’t tell people what you prefer (nobody cares). If someone wants your opinion they will ask you for it.
Being a persistent poster and very obnoxious arguer online, I have to make clear that in real life I abhor discussing politics or religion. There is a time and place for it and it’s best if you keep it there.
Anyway, you need to think long and hard about the concept of talking. People use it a lot these days to whine about their work, to whine about their life, to make sure everyone knows their opinion on things. None of this bullshit is useful to anyone.
For example, how many losers will jump into a thread to say how they feel about something. Who gives a crap. If something makes you happy, sad, glad, angry, bonerific, why in the world would it be news enough to share to all of us in the forums? That is all some people do… relate how they feel. Whoa, stop the presses, home-boy doesn’t like something.
If you are going to open your mouth, have something to say. As someone posted about charm school, have something interesting or constructive to say. Or, if you don’t have anything useful to say, don’t say anything at all.
Silence is a fucking virtue. Shut your fucking mouth and try to figure out what is important and what isn’t. Until you figure out something is important and that people actually NEED to know what you are about to say, shut your piehole, there is too much opinion and commentary on the planet. We don’t need any more.
Anyway, I’m not attacking you, you know that. I’m trying to get you see the situation in a different light. After all, you asked for our advice…
So, an observation, the knowledge you have, and express online here, is also very esoteric and presumably unable to be expressed to the people you generally hang around with… just as the technical end of your job is useless in a conversation to most of the world.
Start working on figuring out what type of information your audience is looking for, and give that to them. If you can do that, then people will start to think your communication matters and they will choose to seek your input because it gives them what they need to know to make decisions.
Computer jockeys are fucking attrocious at all this stuff… I know it is a stereotype, but it’s also true that computer people are good with computers and not people about 95% of the time.
Figure out how and why, and change that.
