Tech

06. why your IT department hates you volume I: social swiss army knife theory

Comments (6)
  1. Tim says:

    tech nerds and lawyers have plenty in common: both are service industries, and both involve special knowledge that is fetishized or blackboxed by those who simultaneously don't possess it but expect it to work in their favor magically.

    you go, nerd.

  2. Jessica says:

    this should be a quarterly GMP training article. you'd see some pretty swift attitude adjustment.

    also, i heard your girlfriend is awesome.

  3. tushar says:

    you're absolutely right tim – law and i would even guess medicine are falling victim to the same problem – it seems to me we're getting to a dangerous intersection between the following two things:
    1. the perception of specialized skills as commodities
    2. the unwillingness of the general public to try and understand the world around them.

    #2 scares the hell out of me, since the internet age was supposed to give people access to more information and more ideas and more culture. instead what they're finding are half-assed "i want it right and i want it now" replacements – a lawguru/webmd generation with the attention span of a mushroom.

  4. tushar says:

    and indeed jessica, my girlfriend is, where did you acquire this information?

  5. Jason says:

    This post reminded me of Big Bang Theory. Although I haven't yet seen it, I've talked to people who have. Currently it's one of the hottest sitcoms around, but it has a caveat.

    BBT is a show about nerds. The problem, according to my wife, is that the show is clearly not written by nerds, such that the characters are merely stereotypical examples of what "normal" people think nerds are… or should be.

    So while the hope might be that BBT would help make people think of nerds more as "people", the show instead revels in the belief that "nerds aren't like the rest of us".

    Come to think of it, one of the few shows that accurately portrayed nerds, Geeks and Freaks, didn't do well. Which I guess goes to show that most people don't WANT to think of nerds as "real people".

    It's easier to keep using (abusing) them if they're just tools.

  6. First time poster here at your blog — please keep it up! I'm enjoying the reads.

Leave a Reply to tushar Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *