MCSIE? (Re: hindsight/user experience)

[Karl Hegbloom]

On Fri, 2005-04-08 at 12:30 -0400, John Billings wrote:
> This person is a work at home consultant, and he seemed pretty tech
> savvy to me, so I didn't think anything about giving him the cd, until
> a week later he called me and asked, hey I tried the Linux out, now
> how do I get my windows files back?  He had wiped out his whole
> windows install using the orange disk.  Now I know, we all should have
> been smarter, he should have realized that reformatting the hard drive
> would erase his data, and I should have only given him the live cd,
> because I knew he had no intention of installing it, but hey, it 
> happened.  I rushed over to help him restore his Windows system, he 
> had a backup from February, and most important data was not on the 
> system, but it was still kinda traumatic.

So he's some sort of MCSIE? [1]  The whole pseudo-philosophy of assuming
that the user doesn't need to know anything about how the computer
actually works is so totally bogus.  It's ultimately responsible for
your friend's troubles.  Computers are so ubiquitous these days that
this sort of thing should be becoming common knowledge!  Anyone with a
PC ought to possess a certain amount of foundation knowledge.

As Open Source advocates, developers, and educators, we must assume that
people are intelligent enough to understand what we explain about the
computer's workings, and that they are curious enough to want to know.
We have to show them how to find the answers, and provide useful manuals
that actually contain real, in-depth, technical information.  There has
to be an easy road up the mountain.  We need to one-room-schoolhost the
underclasses into true knowledge of computer internals.

  http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/curriculum-Z-H-2.html


It continues to amaze me how many people out there tout themselves as
computer experts, and even have paying jobs (swinging their shoe in a
cubical) as systems administrators who don't seem to really know very
much about the inner workings of computer hardware and software.  I get
the impression that they get paid a lot of money and don't really have
the knowledge and skills the resume requirements would seem to indicate.
I had an experience with an Oracle employee who was supposed to install
it on a very standard (stock) Solaris machine.  He did not seem to know
basic shell and shellutils commands!

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[1] Microsoft Certified Solitaire Interface Expert