💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2024 › 07 › 01 › ignorance.gmi captured on 2024-07-09 at 01:45:58. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Complaints were made about technical project managers exhibiting ignorance of computers. While someone with 'technical' in their title probably should know at least something of computers, humans can be very specialized these days, so in general everyone knows little to nothing about most things. I once knew someone who had trouble telling disk space apart from memory—lol, what, really??—says us technical types who spend, uh, far too long on computers. Computers are probably important enough at the moment that knowing at least a little about them may be good, but that would take time away from someone dedicated to some other pursuit, such as advanced chip design, as was the case for that someone. Given specialization, an expert in one area might not be so good at even a seemingly closely related field. Chip design, by the way, can use crazy amounts of CPU, memory, and disk space, so they were often running out of one or more of those.
The "Peter principle" is also a thing, where folks are promoted to their level of incompetence, so there can be an expectation that someone might not be good at their position: not incompetent enough to be fired, but enough to cause some amount of friction.
Or maybe they had a bad Monday? Or not enough coffee? These things happen.