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by halfninety
4976 days ago
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Looks like I'm one of the people you are referring to. Like anyone with a healthy dose of curiosity, I'm interested in anything that is, well, interesting. I'm excited to meet people with expertise in various areas and ask them questions. I don't expect to understand their answers in full but in most cases I can still grab part of them. Based on my partial understanding in the first answer I can ask a better question the next time, and after several cycles I can probably learn something valuable (at least in the sense of satisfying my own curiosity). The point is, if you don't ask questions in areas you are not familiar with, you will never become familiar to these areas. Well, unless you learn everything from books and Wikipedia. I'm not sure how many people see me as an annoyance, but at least I'm consistent, in that if other people ask me questions in my expertise, I'm happy to try my best and explain. Oh, and if it's just impossible to reasonably answer my question in a way that makes any sense to me, I expect you to just say it, and I'm happy with this. |
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I do what you described too, in parties or whenever I have an opportunity for a discussion with someone and I enjoy it and they ask me questions too and we try our best to teach each other something which is perfectly ok and fun.
What I was referring to was mostly employee/boss situations where the boss asks the employee about the details or internals of system X and then gets pissed when the engineer can't explain it to him and blames it on them because they were incapable of explaining complex things to non-technical people.
I mean they have to appreciate that there's a limit to how much you can explain to non-technical people in simple terms. At some point it just doesn't work, and either you have to use the big words, and concepts and assume knowledge, or drop back to dead simple insulting analogies. You see that server boss? That's like a train! choo-choo!