[dartos]

Being a programmer necessarily changes how you approach and interact with computers.

After a while (and not a long one) you develop a serious usability bias since you can intuit what a program is doing and how best to interact with it.

The longer you work in software, the harder it is to accurately imagine how a non programmer uses a computer.

That’s why the classic “only users could cause this error” jokes exist.

[sfn42]

The way i see it, that's just a huge advantage.

My partner works as a medical research assistant. They had filled data into a huge spreadsheet in a software I think was called IBM SSES or something along those lines. Basically an excel spreadsheet, with hundreds of columns and tens of thousands of rows.

One of the analyses they wanted to run wasn't working correctly so she was tasked with filling in 0s in place of empty cells. She was expecting to spend 2-3 weeks doing this. She mentioned it to me, I've never seen this software before in my life but it took me 15 minutes to figure out how to do three weeks of manual work instantly. Just googled it and followed some instructions.

Being able to understand software is a useful skill. We should find ways to bring the average person up to speed, help them understand what computers can do so they too can see a task like that and be like "there's no way the software doesn't have an easier way to do that" instead of wasting time doing pointless busywork.

[dartos]

It’s a useful skill when using a machine, but not when anticipating how people out in non-tech land will use that same machine.

[sfn42]

You say that as if there is another solution.

This is one way that you can design your software - follow existing conventions so that people's existing knowledge is useful for understanding your software.

The alternative can be summarized as "not doing that" and personally I don't see that solving any problems. It just means people have to learn it from scratch instead. And it's not like anyone actually reads manuals and such.

[dartos]

Nintendo, for example, regularly hires game designers with no game design experience.

Famously, there was a shoe designer who was hired on the BOTW team. The fresh perspective keeps Nintendo games from falling into idiosyncrasies, which is part of the reason children and adults can just walk up and play most Nintendo games and have immediate without needing prior gaming experience.

I think it’s valuable to have non technical designers and QAs for that reason.

Sure the fresh perspective fades after a while, but it’s still valuable AND gives us in tech a reason to hire those not in tech.