August 14, 2012 at 9:45 am
I agree about your point on communication and how important it is. As Bo Bennett once said "Communication is about being effective, not always about being proper.":-D
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
August 14, 2012 at 11:44 am
As data professionals, we don't necessarily need all that knowledge, but we do need to communicate with those individuals that may have the knowledge and work closely with them to ensure their ideas are accurately applied against data in the algorithms we write. In addition to writing code and understanding statistics, strong communication skills are important to moving your career forward.
Amen to that. Actually, I would make that any type of IT professional.
And in addition to being able to communicate with those who have more knowledge than we do, it is important to be able to communicate with those who have less technical knowledge than we do. Sometimes, that is more difficult.
August 14, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Both written and oral communication skills are important to have and you will make yourself more valuable to your company if you can communicate well.
Sometimes the oral communication is one-on-one, and sometimes it is to a group. One-to-Many, if you will. 🙂
For gaining experience and improving public speaking skills, I highly recommend Toastmasters.
August 14, 2012 at 1:03 pm
I'm a firm believer in 'if you can't explain it in plain English (or other), you don't understand it". While technical terminology may be necessary when addressing esoteric details, it should not be necessary for the majority of communication we have with others.
In fact, forcing ourselves to explain the problem in plain language will probably help us understand it better..
http://dogphysics.com/interview_me.html
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
August 14, 2012 at 1:47 pm
jay-h (8/14/2012)
In fact, forcing ourselves to explain the problem in plain language will probably help us understand it better..
http://dogphysics.com/interview_me.html%5B/quote%5D
Unless of course, you live in South Florida like I do where English is almost the second official language. 😀
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
August 14, 2012 at 1:53 pm
TravisDBA (8/14/2012)
jay-h (8/14/2012)
I'm a firm believer in 'if you can't explain it in plain English (or other), you don't understand it". While technical terminology may be necessary when addressing esoteric details, it should not be necessary for the majority of communication we have with others.In fact, forcing ourselves to explain the problem in plain language will probably help us understand it better..
http://dogphysics.com/interview_me.html%5B/quote%5D
Unless of course, you live in South Florida like I do where English is almost the second official language. 😀
Not the first time I heard that comment, in fact it was 20 years ago I heard someone else make the comment about living in Miami and not having to speak any English. :w00t:
August 14, 2012 at 3:11 pm
jay-h (8/14/2012)
I'm a firm believer in 'if you can't explain it in plain English (or other), you don't understand it". While technical terminology may be necessary when addressing esoteric details, it should not be necessary for the majority of communication we have with others.In fact, forcing ourselves to explain the problem in plain language will probably help us understand it better..
Absolutely agree.
August 16, 2012 at 5:23 am
jay-h (8/14/2012)
I'm a firm believer in 'if you can't explain it in plain English (or other), you don't understand it". While technical terminology may be necessary when addressing esoteric details, it should not be necessary for the majority of communication we have with others.In fact, forcing ourselves to explain the problem in plain language will probably help us understand it better..
I agree in principle although sometimes plain English still isn't simple enough. Here's an example of a recent conversation I had in resolving an issue with outlook.
Technical Explanation:
=================
Basically there are a few bugs in Outlook 2010 (which MS are in no rush to fix) where if you get it to open an eml file directly, the to and bcc fields won't always show when forwarding and printing.
We have a web mail vault system that allows people to open their journalled emails (eml files) and the software company that provides the system has provided their own converter tool that gets installed on a users pc that should be set to open the eml and it then converts it into a different format that is then passed into outlook.
The result is the user just opens the eml and it appears to open in outlook like a normal message with full functionality. The issue was that windows wasn't opening the eml with the converter program but rather had got changed to directly open in outlook again. So I fixed that and then had to advise the user what the issue was in what I thought was plain English.
Plain English Explanation:
===================
The conversation went:
Me: "Ok that's it fixed. You can open the emails normally again and everything will now work again."
User: "So what was the problem?"
Me: "The issue was because outlook has some bugs which means it doesn't work properly when it opens the journalled emails. We have another program though which is used to open the emails properly in outlook but this program wasn't working properly. I've fixed it now so that it works again."
User: "<nervous laugh> ha ha ... aww I've no idea what that means, I don't understand all that computer speak. Is it fixed?"
Me: "Yes"
These days I'm also a firm believer in that if you wish to use something, be it a computer, TV, phone, car, you should learn a thing or two about it and not just the minimum required to do what you need to do at a given time.
I've seen admin staff (with over 10 years experience) who delete shortcuts from their desktop and then call me saying I need to come right now because their program has been removed and they have urgent work to complete and how their (brand new) computer is useless because it allowed this to happen.
When I politely point them to the start menu all I get is a blank expression saying they don't need to use and have never been trained on that (they have actually) so how were they supposed to know to go there. I always ask them "well do you get your mechanic to fill up your car as well?" and when they say no and that they do it themselves I say "but how because that's not part of the driving or theory test. Any chance you had to go and learn it at some point, well then same thing here, now you know how to use the start menu."
And yet still because it's something to do with IT they refuse to use it and say I have to put the shortcut (which they didn't delete apparently) back because they don't have the time to click into the start menu. And I'll then get the exact same call a few months later.
There's communication and then there's understanding and unfortunately they are not always within the purview of the one doing the communicating. 😀
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