[Photo: @FelixFoggCircus, by @Karol_Jurga] I’ve been delivering the talk “Let’s stop making each other feel stupid” for a few years now. It’s a popular talk, and a topic that’s close to my heart. H…
The Stupidity Manifesto
LET’S STOP MAKING EACH OTHER FEEL STUPID. Instead, let’s…
ENCOURAGE EVERYONE TO ASK QUESTIONS
Lead by example: Be honest when we’re confused
Value curiosity over knowledge
Prioritise clarity over jargon
Remember we all forget stuff
Get excited about teaching and learning
Acknowledge the broad range of knowledge in our industry, and avoid judging someone if their knowledge doesn’t match ours
I appreciate this sentiment a great deal in general, but sometimes it is difficult to uphold when I have to regularly deal with “time vampires” who not only require that I explain the same thing to them over and over again beyond reason but who also show no willingness or ability to actually learn the thing that I am explaining to them; at some point I just run out of patience and start ignoring them to the extent that I am able.
The way I see it, explaining others also helps me understand it better. If its so basic (or too advanced) that I get nothing out of explaining, then I leave it to better suited people to help them instead. Being on these kindsa forums, its supposed to be enjoyable for both the teacher and the student. I don’t see any shame in dropping it as soon as it turns frustrating.
This may not apply to your situation, but I found that most of my problems like this were related to “general vs specific”.
Many people have difficulty generalizing from specific instructions so they need help every time something looks different to them. In an extreme case, found a person unable to choose a font in the header of a word processing document because the only thing they’d ever been shown was how to choose a font in the body of the document. It’s not even that they were particularly dense, it’s that they’d seen so much unexpected and unexplained variation in other areas that they started assuming that everything is an isolated task with a potentially distinct set of procedures. Now that I’ve switched from Windows to Linux, I’m getting a better understanding of how that happens, with many applications using different hotkeys, not implementing what I think are sensible “tab ordering”, etc.
Many people have difficulty going from the general to the specific without also seeing several specific examples in a variety of scenarios. That kind of thing normally requires more formalized training. If their only exposure to your knowledge is through ad-hoc help desk kinds of interactions, there will be no opportunity to put everything together.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !programming@programming.dev
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person’s post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you’re posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don’t want to watch videos
I appreciate this sentiment a great deal in general, but sometimes it is difficult to uphold when I have to regularly deal with “time vampires” who not only require that I explain the same thing to them over and over again beyond reason but who also show no willingness or ability to actually learn the thing that I am explaining to them; at some point I just run out of patience and start ignoring them to the extent that I am able.
The way I see it, explaining others also helps me understand it better. If its so basic (or too advanced) that I get nothing out of explaining, then I leave it to better suited people to help them instead. Being on these kindsa forums, its supposed to be enjoyable for both the teacher and the student. I don’t see any shame in dropping it as soon as it turns frustrating.
There’s a saying - if you want to learn something then teach it (even to a rubber duck ;-) ).
This may not apply to your situation, but I found that most of my problems like this were related to “general vs specific”.
Many people have difficulty generalizing from specific instructions so they need help every time something looks different to them. In an extreme case, found a person unable to choose a font in the header of a word processing document because the only thing they’d ever been shown was how to choose a font in the body of the document. It’s not even that they were particularly dense, it’s that they’d seen so much unexpected and unexplained variation in other areas that they started assuming that everything is an isolated task with a potentially distinct set of procedures. Now that I’ve switched from Windows to Linux, I’m getting a better understanding of how that happens, with many applications using different hotkeys, not implementing what I think are sensible “tab ordering”, etc.
Many people have difficulty going from the general to the specific without also seeing several specific examples in a variety of scenarios. That kind of thing normally requires more formalized training. If their only exposure to your knowledge is through ad-hoc help desk kinds of interactions, there will be no opportunity to put everything together.