I’m really good at searching the web.
Seriously. Sooner or later, IT people who work around me start bringing me questions they’ve been unable to answer on the internet, and I can usually get the solution within one or two searches. I’ll write an article about my techniques one of these days, because everybody in IT searches the web for their living now. If we get an error message we haven’t seen, we search the web for it before we call support. If we get handed a product we’ve never seen before, we search the web to find out how it works.
But searching the web doesn’t give the right answer for everything. Many problems are too large, too complex to sum up in a Wikipedia article or a forum posting. Take world peace - there is actually a Wikipedia article on world peace. The article’s only a few pages long, and it lists many different schools of opinion on how to actually achieve world peace. Once you subscribe to one of those approaches, then you have to execute it, and that’s also beyond the scope of the article.
IT people have a hard time accepting that there are problems we can’t understand simply by searching the web, and we mistakenly extend that technique to major world issues like the financial bailout. We think we can get up to speed by scanning a magazine article, listening to a report on NPR or watching a YouTube video.
The best IT workers know when to shut up and get out of the way to let the real experts solve the problem. It doesn’t waste their own time, and doesn’t waste the time of the people who really understand the problem. When somebody asks me a question that is outside of my expertise and that I can’t lend value to, my answer is short and sweet:
I say, “I don’t know,” and I STFU.
Just yesterday, I gave that answer to questions about the financial bailout, how to price enterprise software, why Benjamin Linus can’t kill Charles Widmore and what ingredients go into hoisin sauce. Some of those answers could be easily retrieved with a web search, but the art of being a good IT worker is knowing which ones are a bigger challenge than a Wikipedia article can address.
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, so before you go spouting bailout advice, make sure you:
- Don’t use credit cards
- Live well below your means
- Have a fully funded retirement plan
- Donate regularly to charity
- Didn’t get a mortgage on a house you couldn’t afford
If you’ve mastered those techniques, then, and only then, are you qualified to even begin researching the financial problems today, let alone give answers. You giving financial advice about the bailout is like Hank Paulson telling you when to choose SQL Server Enterprise Edition over Standard Edition: you know it’s going to be crappy advice, and you’d be a complete idiot to take his advice.
Until then, say “I don’t know,” and STFU.
