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Comment by CareyB | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been in IT since the early nineties, and I see this as symptomatic of a more basic issue; putting non-IT managers in charge of IT. This used to be chronic. I’d be in board meetings trying to explain to the entire company brain trust the difference between a hit, and a page view. When they realized - after about nine months - that there were over 30 hits per page view, their entire business model went out the window. There are other fun, and unaware stories out of that job, but I’ll leave it there.

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On the flip side, the problem might not be with the non-IT manager.

I know nothing about your specific cases, but many managers are smart enough to understand the statement that there are 30+ hits per page view, especially when it is demonstrated with a simple webpage example with two counters (or even a clean chart). Why did it take 9 months to explain?

A requirement for almost any management role is to be able to explain things clearly to non-specialists. I have seen many engineers writing good code but hitting a wall trying to explain a simple concept to someone who does not share their exact terminology. It is a painful, toe curling sight. Let's keep those engineers writing code, they should not be managing other humans. My 2c.

You are making some good points but from my experience there is also a reluctance for non tech people to learn anything tech related. It gets brushed off the same way learning a language or math gets brushed off by people. They claim from the start that it’s too hard and not even worth trying. And that behavior is socially acceptable. You can come up with a lot of easy to understand analogies but often you will regret that because often then the analogies get stretched to a point where they don’t make sense.

That is a good point. In a perfect world, managers managing technology would make an effort learning it. But it is always better to assume that they did not (assume they focus on potentially harder skills needed to manage humans and teams). Instead of lamenting this imperfection, it is better for an engineer to learn how to talk effectively to non-specialists who are friendly, smart, but clueless in the topic you want to explain. This effort will pay off in spades.

I know it pays off but you can’t put all responsibility on engineers. Management should also accept that they have a responsibility to learn what they are dealing with. Even worse, it’s perfectly acceptable to brush off technical information as “nerdy”.

In my company a lot of big projects are set up for failure from the start because the big guys often listen to slick salesmen (preferably from the outside because they don’t trust their own people) and not to the people who raise concerns that are valid but hard to understand. Some things can’t be dumbed down but they are just complex.

In my view a lot of dysfunction in tech projects comes from the fact the higher ups don’t want to understand what’s going on and also don’t want to listen.

Some non-tech people are reluctant to learn anything tech-related. They wear it as a badge: "I'm non-technical." That's only socially acceptable in some circles. In others, maybe you're expected to lack the education or skill to implement or debug, but at least learn the lingo well enough to faithfully communicate between one technical person and the next.

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