Hi! I'm a drawing of Catherine. She does most of the writing here, including this blurb. (Does this count as writing in the third person?) Catherine believes that websites don't really run on technology, they run on emotions. If you agree, then she wants to help you rock it out and be awesome online.
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Here’s the second half of some tips on personality traits to keep a look out for with techies that you’re considering either hiring or working with over time. You can find the first half here.
It is bad to carry even a good thing too far.
Even concerning things such as Buddhism, Buddhist sermons,
and moral lessons, talking too much will bring harm.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Technical Evangelism: Fixation On One Technology
Technical evangelism is where your techie believes adamantly that the one particular technology they use is the One True Path, and that everything else is utter crap.
For smaller jobs, or a situation where what you need is their pet technology, you might never have a problem with technical evangelism. But if you need to change technologies because you’re changing hosting providers for example (I had the ideal host a few years ago, that would often answer emails at 3 in the morning. They were perfect right up until the point where they disappeared) then your techie might just be the kind of person to turn their nose up at the whole situation, and leave you high and dry. The company I work for has had this happen with our website, even though we’re an IT company. So it can happen to tech-savvy people too.
The other problem, and here’s where I possibly descend into nitpicking, is that it indicates a set of blinkers on how they view the world. There’s this great scene in Ronin where Sean Bean’s character, inexperienced and uncomfortable, tries to show his skill by asking Robert De Niro what kind of gun he prefers, and dissecting the plusses and minuses of different models. And Robert De Niro’s character says (paraphrasing slightly):
“It’s a tool. I take it out of the toolbox. I use it. I put it back”
Checkmate.
There are admittedly some really switched on techies out there who suffer from Technical Evangelism. But unless you’re solving really complex problems, it’s really a matter of choices between solutions that will do the job for you. And almost always, technical evanglists, capable or not, lose sight of the fact that they’re doing work to solve someone’s problem.
What To Do: if your techie has a preference for a particular technology, ask them why. What you’re looking for here is a reasoned explanation or even just a noncommittal shrug of “It’s what I’m used to using”. What you don’t want to here is a diatribe starting with “Because everything else is garbage” or “ARE YOU KIDDING?!?!”
For a samurai, a simple word is important no matter where he may be. By just one
single word martial valor can be made apparent. In peaceful times words show
one’s bravery. In troubled times, too, one knows that by a single word his strength
or cowardice can be seen. This single word is the flower of one’s heart.
It is not something said simply with one’s mouth.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
Communication Skills
As a consultant I’m slightly biased here, but communication skills are key. They have nothing to do with technical ability, and in larger organisations there are people with great technical skills who can flourish because they’re kept far, far away from customers. Labouring in dank and secret catacombs, they can produce works of staggering intricacy that us mere mortals cannot fully comprehend.
But that’s no use to you. You need someone who can function in their world of secret handshakes and arcane acronyms, and act as an interpreter to you as well.
It would be unrealistic and unfair to expect your techie to have to explain every decision and relay every choice through you – after all, their primary function is to get a job done. But either you take everything your techie tells you on faith, or there are going to be times where you’re going to need to communicate.
What To Do: If you’re interviewing, pick a relevant skill or technology that’s not terribly clear to you from your techie’s resume, and ask them to explain it. If the initial explanation doesn’t make much sense, ask them to explain it.
Alternatively, if you’re already working with a techie you’ve selected, pick a technical decision at a point where time is not critical, and ask them to explain the reason behind it.
Unlike when we talked about arrogance, what’s important here is not so much the attitude towards explaining (although that’s still important in general) but the ability of your techie to shift down in gears mentally to a slower pace of thought, and explain things in smaller, clearer chunks of information.
There it is, in four key points all up – the key traits I’ve observed over the years that can make it difficult to deal with techies. Thanks for reading!
Have you run into any traits dealing with people outside your profession that have made them problematic to work with? Share your tales of woe (particularly how you’ve worked through those situations) in the comments!