this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Microblog Memes

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[–] Gargantuanthud@lemmy.ca 125 points 9 months ago (7 children)

As an engineer, this is painfully true.

[–] blargerer@kbin.social 40 points 9 months ago (4 children)
[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 22 points 9 months ago

This physically hurt to watch. I had to stop half way through. Too accurate

[–] OpenStars@startrek.website 8 points 9 months ago

Oh no, PTSD, I just spent the last two days doing this!? Except the last line - I did not want to state that.:-(

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

That so perfectly encapsulates life as an engineer at a marketing company.

[–] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 16 points 9 months ago

Engineer with ADHD. Especially true.

[–] Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago

When you forget a word thats relatively common to the field, it's the worst.

[–] RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 11 points 9 months ago

Did you try making the thing go like *gestures* "uh" then *gestures* "uh"? That way it'll be *gestures*, you know?

[–] DrDominate@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

Also engineers youtube

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[–] tdawg@lemmy.world 85 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Ever heard of ADHD? Ya, the thought is perfectly intelligible. But as it travels to the mouth it gets mangled by six other thoughts along the way

[–] Snowpix@lemmy.ca 31 points 9 months ago

EXACTLY. Add social anxiety to the mix, and something as simple as asking a question becomes a Herculean task because your mouth won't cooperate.

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 28 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

This is why I prefer typing over speaking. I can go back and proofread what I said before I say it. When I speak, all that comes out half of the time is word salad.

[–] NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

I feel the same, and yet here I am shitposting word salad 🤷‍♀️

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[–] Zozano@lemy.lol 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

"Ah shit, I have something else to add to what I'm talking about, I better speak faster so I don't waste everyone's time"

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[–] Persen@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Or autism, where you are to scared to even start talking and when you do, you mumble, give up mid sentance or say somerhing wrong for no reason.

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[–] Wirlocke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 72 points 9 months ago (5 children)

People don't understand that I choose every word carefully in a sentence to convey the most meaning and answer follow-up questions up front. Then they think I said something that literally contradicts what I said or that I already accounted for in my first sentence.

Yes I'm a programmer with Autism and ADHD, why do you ask?

[–] miss_brainfarts@lemmy.blahaj.zone 25 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Sometimes it feels like the classic you said you like croissants, that must mean you hate bagels

You put in so much effort to make your point crystal clear, choosing your words extra carefully to form a sentence that means exactly what you need it to mean, and then some people just interpret the wildest things.

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[–] Ilflish@lemm.ee 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I do this enough that I'm convinced my friends gaslight me. It would be easier to just say that I'll watch something later. Instead I'll tell someone I know of it and why I haven't watched it yet. Easy for them to interpret I'm not interested and then later they'll tell me I'm not interested in it and I'll be very confused and then multiple people will agree.

The problem is that they probably never gaslight me, and that fear stems from a situation where I so vividly internalise a situation that leads to the conclusion they don't gaslight me that I forget the end result. The example being I have no idea which pronunciation of yoghurt is American and Which is British, because I used to be made fun of for saying it wrong. I only remember I was made fun of, I don't remember what I used to say or what the right way is.

Edit: The fact I bring up yoghurt tells you everything

[–] the_artic_one@programming.dev 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

If this is about your fellow programmers, they probably also have ADHD and missed your first sentence entirely.

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[–] NegativeLookBehind@kbin.social 67 points 9 months ago

The code when I think about it: A well structured systematic machine

The code when I try to talk about it: haha function go buuurrrrr

[–] Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world 43 points 9 months ago (1 children)
  • Okay. (2)

  • What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customers and you bring them down to the software engineers.

  • Yes. Yes. That's That's right.

  • Well, then I just have to ask why couldn't the customers just take them directly to the software people, huh?

  • Well, I'll tell you why. Because engineers are not good at dealing with customers.

  • Uh-huh. So, you physically take the specs from the customer?

  • Well... No. My secretary does that, or they're faxed.

  • So then you must physically bring them to the software people.

  • Well... no. I mean, sometimes.

  • What would you say you do here?

  • Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to.

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[–] vexikron@lemmy.zip 32 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

This is also generally true for software engineers.

In my own experience, the difficulty is that you basically have to teach someone software engineering before they even kind of understand what youre saying before they believe you.

Which is basically 99% of people, especially in a work setting.

The very rare 1% of people will usually give up and go, well, youre the expert, probably you know what youre talking about.

The rest will be angered by their own dunning-krueger effect and/or ego and be abusive.

EDIT: This is 100% true when talking to a video game player, unless they are somehow also a programmer.

There are 0 exceptions to the category of someone who has only played video games. None of them anything about programming, and they will be more angry and rude than the general public.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 23 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The art in this is to know/guess where you have to dumb down things how far to get your point across.

For example, I'm often explaining Kubernetes to business people as "a layer on top of our servers, so we can define which apps we want to run and how, k8s then sorts itself out, how exactly to deploy everything". That's wildly simplified, but usually gives them a rough idea of what they're dealing with.

I've had to endure a coworker explaining k8s by starting with manifests, then switching over to volume claims, finally something about ingresses... He was talking to a guy from a government office, whose job it was to do administrative tasks. That guy had no idea what my coworker was talking about and left the meeting more confused than before.

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[–] SolarMech@slrpnk.net 26 points 9 months ago (2 children)

People who appear intelligent to the average person, are either slightly more intelligent than their audience, or charismatic.

Really smart people can be hard to follow unless they put efforts in communication skills or are charismatic (but that might be the same thing?)

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 22 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Not trying to boast, but I appear to be one of the "smartest" people in my field. My evidence for this is that regardless of what company I work for, and I've worked for several at this point in my career, I become the "go to" person for solving complex issues that stump my co-workers. I often can solve whatever problem brought them to me in a reasonable time frame, or at least propose a solution that will lead to the desired outcome.

Personally, I would mainly attribute this to my propensity for learning everything I can about everything I touch. I'm not just looking for the "how do I make this work" of it, I'm always looking for "why is it broken and what do I need to do to make it not broken". It's a small difference, but the former is very results focused, fix it, regardless of whether the solution makes sense, and the latter is understanding the issue and finding a way to make it work from there. I don't think I have any special ability or intelligence that others don't have, nor that I'm smarter or better than anyone.

I spent years studying human behaviour. I'm certain I've lost friends due to my efforts. I spent a lot of time carefully paying attention to everything from body language, tone, phrasing, vocabulary, speech pacing.... Just everything I possibly could. I examined the presentation of statements and the responses based on all those factors to try to find trends for how to approach making statements that people reacted positively to.

I'm neurodivergent, I have ADHD. I may have a touch of autism in there but that's never been checked nor verified, so I hesitate to say that I'm on that spectrum. I feel as though people are far too frequently saying that "I think I'm autistic" or something of the sort, without any proof thereof, and IMO, that cheapens the diagnosis. We've seen such callous disregard of serious disorders before, particularly with OCD and statements like "I'm a little OCD". Unless you've been diagnosed with the condition, you're not. You probably don't understand OCD well enough to say whether any activity is classifiably OCD or not, and the misuse of the term has led to it becoming a meme at this point. I don't want to contribute to that happening to another condition.

Regardless: after years of effort and observation, I have been described as helpful and approachable, which has always been my aim.

I know of people whom I would consider to be easily more intelligent than I am, who get regarded as combative and difficult; mainly because they haven't spent as much time as I have examining the nuances of communication and putting in active efforts to adjust how their statements are made so that they are recieved in a more positive light. They have, instead, spent most of their time enhancing their knowledge, and have understanding in many complex topics that I simply have not spent the time learning in order to understand.

I explain all of this to contribute to your point. Social capability does not and should not imply someone's intelligence or knowledge. There's a lot of factors that go into someone's perception of another person that aren't things that you can really quantify well. From emotional intelligence, tone, the phrasing of the words used, even the selection of words, among many other factors, can be very deceptive in demonstrating someone's intelligence.

There's also the factor of having a deep knowledge in something you're interested in, and a very limited knowledge of everything else. You can be extremely well spoken in your area of expertise and make completely irrational and insane statements regarding things you know little about. There's also the matter of vocabulary. Even very well larned topics can be portrayed as something you know little about, simply because you either lack the vocabulary to speak about it, or that your vocabulary on the topic is so advanced that it comes across like you don't know what you're talking about, since nobody knows what you're saying, and it sounds like you're making things up to sound like you know more than you do.

There's a lot of factors here and there all important to the perception of whether a person is intelligent or not.

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[–] penquin@lemm.ee 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Have you fucking met me? And English not being my native language makes it 10 times worse. There is always this "translation layer" that I have to process everything I hear/say through.

[–] GladiusB@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What do you mean?

Jk jk jk

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[–] udon@lemmy.world 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

To be fair though, most engineers I know overestimate their intelligence and just ignore entire fields of knowledge. And are even weirdly proud of that. Cringe

[–] Thrashy@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I used to work in an engineering firm and the way I'd explain some of my coworkers' inanity to my wife at dinner is that the engineering mindset is to search for simple, elegant solutions to complex problems, and in cases where there is no such simple solution (let's take social or political issues as a common thread, here) that tends to lead to the engineer preferring a spherical-chickens-in-a-vacuum oversimplification over the complex and nuanced reality -- usually accompanied by protestations that "If only people would act rationally!" their ideas would work and make things better.

There's some overlap as well between engineers and the sort of mentality that one is a disembodied intelligence piloting a meat puppet, which feeds into those sorts of thought patterns. Like, dude, you may think of yourself as a purely logical being, but the fact of the matter is that like all of us you're a bodge-job mess of higher-order thinking strapped to a tribal ape with duct tape and baling wire. You can't ignore the rough edges that come with that if you want to find social or political ideas that actually work.

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[–] tired_lemming@sh.itjust.works 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Just take anyone who speaks a second language and ask them to explain their expertise in the second language. Almost everyone will start sounding stupid trying to do the translation in their head to the second language.

Edit: Just to be clear, I don't think said person is stupid at all. There's just difficulty speaking about a concept you would innately know and have learned in one language and translate it to a second one. Except for all those genius polyglots out there of course.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That only applies to people who don't speak that language well enough to go straight from concept to words in that language in their minds, without passing via an intermediary language.

People who need to translate between languages in their heads as they speak in a second language are at the same level in speaking foreign languages as those who need to count with their fingers are in Maths.

On the upside, once you start going directly from concept to words in a language you're reasonable good at, it becomes possible to do it in languages you're not at all good at.

[–] Aicse@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I have a bit of a different experience. As an engineer, I mostly use English at work, so I usually have issues explaining my area of expertise in my mother tongue and other languages I know. There are lots of terms I know only the English words , so I end up using the term in English or try to translate it and it sounds stupid.

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[–] afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 18 points 9 months ago

Which is why I gave up talking to clients unless I have to. That and they don't listen anyway.

"Spec calls for this part"

"They stopped making that part in 2003"

"YOU WILL FOLLOW THE SPEC AND DO WHAT I SAY OR I WILL SUE YOU AND BACK CHARGE YOU AND YELL AT YOUR MANAGER DEMANDING THAT HE FIRE YOU AND YOU ARE BEING RUDE AND I HAVE YOU KNOW I HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR 80 YEARS..."

Then I buy it used off eBay.

[–] Poggervania@kbin.social 17 points 9 months ago

Not an engineer, but I feel this as an autistic person

[–] exocortex@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 9 months ago (3 children)

In my experience there are quite a few tenured professors that are brilliant in their respective fields (so i heard), but we're absolutely terrible in teaching their it. In my case this was physics (and also mathematics where i met some of these specimens). I suspect if you understand a certain field so naturally and really excel at that it becomes a second nature it it is more and more difficult to put yourself in an outsider's perspective. It is so foreign and unimaginable for you that someone might not understand this and that aspect naturally that you cease to be a good teacher in this.

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[–] Toneswirly@lemmy.world 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I work under engineers. They spend enormous effort articulating complex solutions to simple problem. If anything theyre the opposite of what this meme implies: they are very dense but use flowery language to disguise it.

[–] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 45 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm an engineers who works with engineers. There are no rules. You have the dumb smoothtalkers and the smart... dumbtalkers.

It's pretty entertaining seeing management eat the bullshit some engineers give them. It's a crime for a manager not to be technical or at least have understanding of what is going on. If you want to see an engineer fucking a manager, put a manager who doesn't know shit about engineering.

[–] Toneswirly@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I see this every fuckin day man. Do you work where im at lol?

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've also seen this. At multiple companies I've worked for.

It's like this everywhere.

It's good to develop skills in making flow charts. If you can draw what the bullshit guy is recommending and then draw what you know is a better solution, the manager might understand a little better how stupid what the bullshitter is saying. Or the bullshitter might start claiming your idea is his idea. Whatever, either way you won't have to work on something that you know will work like shit.

If you do things right, you can have the bullshitter basically working for you. They'll find out from you what should be done, go to the meetings make themselves sound smart by telling people how things should work... but when that matches how you said it should work, everything works out.

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[–] sagrotan@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Define "intelligent". I know a lot of engineers through my job, they may be professionally competent, but ... Let me give you a short example: The engineer that actually was the team leader building a huge crane on tracks parks his car behind that thing in the blind spot for the operator. Shortly before a test. There went his beloved Jaguar. Old, but true story.

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[–] SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works 10 points 9 months ago

This is "Neurodivergence: the thread"

[–] Etterra@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago
[–] Crack0n7uesday@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

Well that's just ruuuude. I speak very goood.

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