Engineers suck at communication.
Really, for all the smart people who can read a core dump and juggle twenty pieces of information in their head while debugging driver code, the ability to talk to the common user (bah, who needs users?) is surprisingly rare. Sure, engineers can, for the most part, communicate with each other with usual lingo and acronym symphony, but “dumbing it down” to the understanding of a normal person seems to almost be beneath some developers.
Yea, it’s not a criticism unique to the software world; every hobby or industry has its own terms and linguistic barriers of entry which, if put into song, resemble an international music festival.
There’s got to be a rule in the Corporate Handbook for Dummies (TM) which advises that a passerby with no stake in the company’s well-being is better suited to architect its systems than its own employees. Strange custom, woefully true.
Consulting is a pretty lucrative gig in the software industry. Ridiculous hourly rates, architectural design, and flexible work periods are nice perks, but consulting avoids in the hardest part of writing software: the continual maintenance and enhancement of existing code. And really, consulting is the pre-med of the job world; it sounds impressive until you realize the qualifications for entry are essentially zilch.
My latest obsession in efficiency are wikis.
You’ve probably heard of ‘em: besides running Wikipedia, you’ve probably contributed to or consulted a corporate wiki if you ever held a desk job. For those who haven’t, they’re a system of documents, easily editable with specialized markup for organizing data (usually via tables and lists), easily linkable between pages (e.g., Wikipedia articles), and easily editable by multiple writers (via keeping a history of changes). They’re a step up from random text files and lengthy email exchanges, at least in a collaborative environment.
In the cruel world of competitive typing, the difference between crossing the finish line first and repeatedly hitting the “reset” button is but a ‘teh’ and ‘playign’ away.
My fingers need to be in sync.
I forget where I found this site, but TypeRacer takes the dry task of keyboard pounding (of the computer variety, not the musical) and makes it multiplayer, which I guess takes it a step beyond schooling Mavis and, uh, zombies. Incidentally, I’ve found that I type a lot faster on my flat-keys, notebook-style diNovo keyboard than my ergonomic Microsoft Ergo 4000 keyboard at work. I even get to boast about it:
Of course, compared to the real typists of the Dvorak discipline this is laughably slow. And it took me around 8 tries to find an easy-to-type passage and not screw up on teh wrods. Stupid fingers.
