i’ve talked a bit about dork community lately, and emphasized that I love it. What makes it great? when you’ve got people with similar interests who just want to figure things out and share good times. I think this is pervasive across any time of community, but I was thinking about something in the car that reminded me of the hobglobin opposite that’s a pet peeve of mine.
Years past I dealt with a lot of crap because of my age, the implication that I didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. I’ve thought about it a bunch recently because I meet a lot of younger kids with big attitudes that I want to say “you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about” to. Having discussed it with friends I’m pretty sure I’m being reasonable in these situations as generally this feeling is a product of feeling like someone doesn’t quite grasp how much of a pain in the ass and work their idea is, be it technical or political.
Take for example, if you’re a techie, this situation. I’ll complain about Windows Server because it’s doing some funky ass shit and I can’t find the right technical document to explain why (because it probably doesn’t exist). Most recently I was messing with batch scripts, and perhaps I’m spoiled from more advanced scripting languages but I could get a FOR loop to work. Any references don’t make it totally clear that you %%Variable means %% then a single character, not a word like you’d use elsewhere. Eventually I figured this out, but generally if I complained about something like this on IRC someone might say “that’s why you should be using linux” and be serious about it.
The work involved in replacing a domain with linux/samba and getting interoperability for things like outlook that people know and use is huge. Those who haven’t tried or don’t realize the political and user support hassles that are involved in this are just nuts.
Anyways, in the past I’ve worked with people like this, not necessarily who do such things out of inexperience though. I’m not sure why they do it, wanting to be cool/ego? I don’t know, nor do I really care because I don’t think caring will make it stop.
Like going into a meeting where your group has decided to use software package xyz, and someone from another group proclaims that you can’t use xyz because it’s insecure. If you know better than to accept such statement as fact and the end of the conversation and ask, they can’t provide further information, or a url, or even be able to find such information again on their own and provide a url.
Which in the end makes you’re job twice as hard, because you can’t trust their judgment anymore. Which totally makes a crappy coworker.