I Don't Get No Respect

WARNING: THE POST YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ IS QUITE BITTER

I have been struck recently by the general decline in status of the techno-guru and particular decline of my status as as techno-guru.

Once upon a time, email hit the general public; for me, that was in the early-to-mid 1990s. I had starting using email about a decade before, so email was a bit old hat to me by the time it reached my mother and other trailing edge technology users. I found myself frequently asked about this new email thing by people who knew me as a technology expert. While answering naive questions is not my favourite pastime, I sighed deeply  and answered with all the patience I could muster.

(Had I known that the tsunami of users would destroy the quiet, thoughtful thing that I knew as email, I would not have been so helpful or reassuring. In those ancient times, I only received few emails and each one was welcome. I corresponded with just about anyone I cared to in the ANSI C/Unix world. I remember clearly when I started getting automated "I can't read all my email, I am only accepting email from colleagues" from the big names in the field. I shortly had to do something similar as even minor players such as myself were overwhelmed by the flood of spam.)

More recently, Facebook hit the scene. This time, the situation was exactly reversed. I found that absolutely ignorant people were comfortable lecturing me about Facebook's pitfalls (always some vague concern about privacy or wasted time) or exhorting me to enjoy Facebook's benefits (usually something about the trivia of the lives of mutual acquaintances).

Whether one is pro-Facebook or anti-Facebook is beside my point, which is this: when did technical expertise become utterly irrelevant to technical discussions? Whenever I pushed back on the lectures, I found that the lecturers were happy to dismiss my requests for more detail, for evidence, for explanation. They waved their hands elegantly: they were not computer people, after all, and we were talking about the technical attributes of a piece of software, a distributed information system.

(For a humorous take on the Facebook privacy issue, watch the satirical Onion look at Facebook: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqggW08BWO0&feature=youtube_gdata_player)

Would I have been interested in their personal experience as a user or non-user of social media? Yes, I would have been. That would have been valid and interesting. But no one wanted to talk to me about their personal experience; instead, they all wanted to talk to me about either the pitfalls of the software's design and policies, or the benefits of using this technology without regard to the risks.

Sadly for me, this phenomenon is not confined to parties or family gatherings; I encounter it in the professional arena as well. I find myself being lectured on software choice and deployment by MBAs who are proud of their technical ignorance and their non-technical backgrounds. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that those of us who get our hands dirty in IT are less capable decision makers. We lack the business perspective. We are like children in a toy store, grabbing the shiny technology without regard to how much it costs or how long we will want to play with it.
I suppose that there are IT experts who can't grasp the concept of a budget. There may be IT experts who want to play with shiny new technologies just because the new technologies are new, without regard to the problems to be solved. But I am not such an IT expert and I don't think that I have ever met one.

But until I figure out how to overcome the disadvantage of years of experience and a track record of successful deployment, it won't matter: I won't be part of the conversation. Maybe I need to get an on-line MBA and lie about the last thirty years of my career.

(Why lecture an expert with only ignorance as raw material? When did this become a good idea? Do people now lecture their doctors, their dentists, their accountants, their garage mechanics? From my very limited survey, the general public does lecture experts with confidence. So perhaps this is not limited to me or to my profession. Sigh.)