On 06/12/2012 02:57 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:

>> The thing is, *nobody* thinks they can just walk in and pretend to know
>> how to be a brick layer. Because it's ****ing obvious that it'll take
>> the people interviewing you about 11 seconds to figure out that you know
>> nothing about anything.
>>
>> So *why* the hell does this constantly happen in computing?!? >_<
>
> Because a lot of people don't even know what they don't know.

Sure. But why is that peculiar to IT?

Nobody out there thinks they could totally draw up the blueprints for a 
suspension bridge and have it actually work. Yet people think they can 
write commands to make a computer perform a complex task and it'll be 
fine. WTF is up with that?

> Me: "Do you know the difference between the IP address classes?"
> Him: [quizzical dog look]
> Me: (Ok networking is not for him) "Have you ever played with Linux?"
> Him: [quizzical dog look]
> Me: (Ok, hmm... ) "Do you have a home network?"
> Him: Huh... No. But I customized the hell out of my MySpace page.
> Me: "I'll get back to you."

Yeah, this is pretty standard. Everybody understands that designing 
(say) an aeroplane is really hard. And yet people think that designing 
computer software is somehow trivially easy...

This probably isn't helped by the following fact: If you pay somebody to 
build a skyscraper, and they actually build a small wooden hut, you know 
that you did not get what you paid for. If you pay somebody to build an 
enterprise-class data management engine and they actually give you an 
Excel spreadsheet and an instruction manual, you might not necessarily 
realise that something is wrong - and neither might they...

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