computers should be less friendly

Maybe a lot of people have this rule, but a quick google didn’t find anyone else talking about it. So here is my Rule of Mom.

“If you can’t explain what you are working on to your mom, then you don’t understand it.”

I’ve found this simple rule to be true over many years and many different subject areas. I can still remember my Mom asking me how college was going and what I was working on in a particular class and only being able to explain in the same lifeless math jargon it had been explained to me in. Needless to say after that conversation my Mom didn’t understand that class any better then I did and my grade certainly proved that out.

Maybe this person isn’t your Mom but, you should have them around somewhere — it’s a great check on your understanding level. You can identify this person by when they ask what appears to be an innocuous question, “How does email work?” you end up flailing around for a decent explanation that doesn’t include phrases like, SMTP, POP, sendmail, IMAP, etc. “A football team is a team of football players,” explaining something technical with more techno-babel just means you don’t know what you are talking about. Being able to explain chemistry to another chemistry person is certainly fine and well, and kudos to you as chemistry is a mystery to me, but real in depth understanding is when you can explain chemistry to someone who doesn’t know the meaning of the word titrate.

A somewhat similar idea is talked about in advertising as the “elevator pitch,” but with this it just means you are good at summarizing something down into talking points — which is a different skill distillation. This doesn’t actually mean you really understand what you’re talking about, you’re just very good at crafting a high level, 60 second sound bite, version of what the subject is.

To build a well designed well thought out system you need to have a low level knowledge of the tools and technology but, you also have to be able to stand back and decide if you’ve built a steaming pile of nothing or something truly noteworthy. They both might be technology marvels but, you have to be able to step back and have that “explain it to your Mom” view before you can tell the difference.
To explain email to someone how has no clue what SMTP or even telnet is, is truly a bottom up in-depth understanding of that subject.

I’m still working on explaining REST to my Mom.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 3:19 pm and is filed under IT, et alii. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.