#0 - Intro Episode

September 17, 2020

Engineers consistently exclude non-technical people from understanding enough about technology to better utilise it. This is wrong! Engineers should be equipping non-technical people with enough of an understanding to make the right business decisions, without trying to drag them all the way down into the detail.

Full Transcript

Hi, I'm Kevin, and you're listening to Tech Oversimplified, where we explain technology in simple terms so you can understand why it matters. I've been using technology to solve business problems for more than 15 years. Normally that's software, sometimes it's hardware, but essentially I've been building things with tech to solve business problems for most of my life.

I want to make this show because I have watched engineers be absolute dicks for years. Some engineers don't want to actually explain the concepts. They don't want to help people, they don't want to equip them with tools to understand the problem, they just want to work around it. They want to get through to the solution as quickly as possible.

And I understand that drive. I'm an engineer as well, but this is the wrong approach.

A number of years ago, I was sitting with another engineer and a colleague from the marketing department and she wanted to make changes to a website. She said, "Can I just change this blue to purple?" It doesn't sound like a large change, but of course this cascades all the way through, makes us retest and effectively couldn't have been done to still meet her deadline.

In my opinion, the correct response would be to say, "We could do that, but we need to do it after we go live." Unfortunately, the other engineer took a different approach and he said, "We can change it, but unfortunately we're out of purple pixels at the moment. We have another shipment coming from Italy, but that will take a long time to get here, and we need to wait for these purple pixels to arrive. Now we have some Chinese purple pencils, but they're lesser quality and they're going to fade quicker, so what we need to do is wait for the high quality purple pixels to get here in two weeks time, and then we can change it to purple."

I find this frustrating in so many ways, because simultaneously the engineer is being arrogant and is not actually equipping his colleague to do what she needs to do.

This feels like a massive missed opportunity to me. If we had taken the time to explain to her exactly what was going on and why these changes cascaded all the way through the site, then she would have been equipped to help us in the future and to better plan her own changes. When does she tell us what to change? This is actually a vitally important concept if you want to effectively work with a technical team and you haven't written code yourself before.

With this show, I'd like to take the opportunity to explain those concepts, to pull back the veil and to make technology simple. I think we can build things that are more effective and are better suited to our business environment if we work together. Fundamentally, this is why I'm an engineer. I want to build cool things!

So let's fight jargon and start actually communicating with each other. I know engineers are difficult to talk to, but I'm going to do my best! Bear with me.

Thank you for listening to Tech Oversimplified. Just in case you're running low, we have lots of Italian purple pixels in stock. Subject yourself to even more of the show at techoversimplified.com and on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your pods.