Technobabble

Nerd Industry Culture

I've been doing technical writing for a long time now but have, as a friend once pointed out, "the soul of an engineer."  I'm not an engineer because a) I lack the patience to concentrate on designing one thing for months at a time, and b) I am a lousy coder.  But I like to understand how stuff works, take it apart, have linear processes, clearly stated goals, straight-forward technical discussions . . . if you read Cryptonomicon, Randy and his friends are, basically, my friends.

 The nerd business universe contains a culture clash.  At the base are the engineers--software and hardware--who are, well, nerds.  Yes indeed, there are some who have pants that are too short, or who forget to wash their hair regularly, or who can quote Star Trek dialog, but after a few years in The Biz, everyone gets socialized to a greater or lesser degree.  The ability to talk to people, go out on dates, and all the rest tends to make nerds less nerdly over time.  They get married; they have kids; they stop going to SCA meetings.

But at heart, they're still nerds.

Then there are the sales and marketing folk.  They wear suits.  They talk to people on the phone all the time.  They can order drinks more complicated than beer.  They schmooze.  Being around people energizes them.  They are the anti-nerds.

Neither culture is better than the other; they're just different.  And they have to co-exist to make the industry work.  Because without the suits, the nerds can't live; and without the nerds, the suits have nothing to sell and market. 

(That's one reason, in my view, the "banking industry" self-immolated--they had nerds, but the nerds weren't creating anything; they were just playing around with abstractions.  Which I'm sure was a blast for them, especially since it paid so well, but you can't sell abstractions forever.  In The Biz we call that "vaporware."  But I digress.)

Pubs people (technical writers), support folks, and testing folks live in between.  All three know what happens when produucts fail, when customers get mad, when people call the company in anger.  The focus is slightly different for each:  pubs people try to anticipate problems and write them down in advance; testing folks try to find problems before products go out (which either get fixed, or sent to the pubs people to write down); support people find out about the problems from customers.

But in short, all three groups are looking at the place where--as everyone in The Biz says--"the rubber meets the road."

Pubs people are the verbal interface.  They translate stuff into English.  Not from Hindi, or Japanese, or Mandarin (although that is sometimes the case), but from geekspeak.  Engineers tend to talk in acronyms, complicated abstractions, verbal shorthand, project names, and with an ocean of hidden givens.  And it doesn't help that a lot of engineers speak English as a second language.

Pubs folks are usually well-spoken, verging on pedantic; they tend to have degrees in liberal arts, like psychology or sociology or literature; they didn't hang out a lot with nerds when they were younger.  They rarely know what GURPS is, or play Worlds of Warcraft in their time off, or make it a point on a business trip to London to drop by Forbidden Planet.  (I made the mistake of going during Christmastime, but then, how often do I get to London?)

The problems here are obvious.

For me, an email I received recently epitomized the differences between these two cultures.  A pubs person was making a recommendation to change how bugs are signed-off on.  His or her email was three paragraphs, grammatically perfect, clearly written, and in HTML with a very nice background and a border that had some very nicely rendered fallen leaves.

The answer from the engineer was 3 sentences in plain ASCII text (courier, constant-width), without capitals, with typos and jargon.

So the next time you read a manual for some piece of equipment or software, even if it wasn't translated from a foreign language, just bear in mind what is going on under the surface.  I'm not asking you to excuse my industry--just keep it in mind is all I ask.