this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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I was going to say it's not just technology executives. I'm glad the author addressed this too. It's the whole industry.
People do this to ourselves too. How often do people see a tech nerd and think they're some sort of all knowing demigod.
"You're a tech guy. Here fix my thing."
"Tell me about such and such complex topic complete outside of your niche professional expertise but you're of the All Knowing so opine me your All Knowing wisdom."
Everybody just fucking stop already.
You trigger their autistic word vomit. They use an excessive amount of tech jargon you don't understand. So people assume it must be profound insight. In fact 99% of what they're saying is complete non-sense.
Why are you describing me so well?
The number of times I've seen eyes glaze over after someone asked a question they shouldn't have and didn't want the answer to, is too damned high.
Also, sometimes, I'll go into a ridiculous level of detail just to intellectually beat someone over the head with how much I know so they'll stop asking questions. They seem to think they're being clever and trying to "prove" that tech guys don't know much more than the rest of the "tech literate".
I'll tell you, the amount of information in my brain from working IT support for a decade would make most people's head spin for hours. And that's not including the countless years of time in college, and doing personal/independent research, simply because a fancy new technology captured my ADHD hyperfocus.
I've gone from being a novice with a technology, discussing it with someone who seems to know a lot about the topic, to researching everything about it, and the next time I meet them, they don't have half of the knowledge of the subject that I do by that point. It happens... A lot.
If you don't want a lecture, and just want things to work stop asking questions, just tell me what you expect as the outcome and I'll figure out everything in-between.
But this kind of sounds exactly like the rationale these tech bros use to claim they know more than everyone and “these plebs just don’t understand”
Tech Bros drive me up the wall.
Generally they're users with just enough information to be dangerous.
They know some things, but don't have a knowledge deep enough to know that there are serious downsides to (insert whatever they care about this week here).
I'm pretty sure I'd be more neckbeard nerd than techbro.
"Hey Windows won't let me..."
No, it's actually me who doesn't let anyone on the network do that. For a reason.
Yup. Most of the time, policies are in place because someone tried what you're trying and it let them do that thing... And because Windows let that thing happen, something bad happened for everyone.
So now nobody can do that thing.
The prosumer tech bro that's never touched enterprise equipment or dealt with operational requirements are the worst.
I couldn't tell you how many times I've heard that something works fine at their home but doesn't work while they're at work. Sometimes that's intentional, sometimes that's because the network in the office is about 80,000x more complex than the Linksys you plugged in at home, set a password on once that you immediately forgot, and has been doing little more than source Nat and L2 bridging every since, with no regard to what the traffic is, just sending it out regardless, and creating a goddamned mess in the process, but because it's only you and your spouse and maybe a kid or two, that doesn't really matter.
Suddenly when you're dealing with hundreds of endpoints on a LAN, you don't want every broadcast packet being sent out over the dozens of access points you have dotted around, so no, your multicast discovery won't work Brenda. So you can't use Chromecast in the office, okay? I don't care how important you think it is, it would take hours to get this to work properly and I have more pressing concerns at the moment.
I used to work a little bit of IT-support for my city and this made me have flashbacks.
Another stereotype besides the techbro is the graphic designer gal.
Regards we once drove through the city to plug her scanner in... after we prodigiously made her make sure all the wires are connected.
Not exactly the same level of issue but it's just something I'll never forget. And nowadays it would be a completely understandable mistake to make, as USB's can actually power things. But not in 2006, lol.
Oh heck. I can't recall the number of times someone, even myself, has driven significant distances just to plug things in because users are to much of window lickers to understand what a USB cable looks like half the time.
One of the funniest that I still regularly encounter is people who power cycle their monitor to reboot their computer. Not realizing that the monitor isn't the computer itself....
I mean, the list goes on and on and on for this kind of stupid shit. The kicker is that if you even fucking try to make them slightly less goddamned stupid about this shit, they don't want to hear it.
You'll be taking at them and you might as well be taking to the fucking wall for all the good it will do.
And you also have to manage politely telling them how silly they've been.
Once got a ticket for "a broken DVD-drive". Went on over. 'Twas a CD-drive.
"Well what was the issue, why didn't my DVD-drive work?"
"Well if you look real close, this is actually a CD drive and thus incapable of reading DVDs"
She took it well enough with humour. Some don't..
I had to explain to someone today that, though you can print through someone's PC to their USB printer, you cannot run the scanner software and connect the same way. So scanning no worky from another computer.
We have print servers, but we don't have scan servers. Why is that?
Anyway, I don't think they believed me.
The fun part is that the printer has Ethernet, and if they plugged that in, both systems would be able to print and scan.... What a crazy idea!
But the bossman didn't think it was going to be possible to plug in the printer to the network without wifi.... Idk, I'm not there, I don't know what color the walls in your office are, nevermind being able to coach you on how to plug in a device I've never seen to a network I equally haven't seen.
Maybe people should ask their IT people if it's a good idea to buy a printer when they have these kinds of operational requirements....
Haha nice.
Sometimes there's just simple questions which are just like... leave you stumped as how to explain to them properly.
I think the scanner/printer divide is more because often there's a centralised printer in an office or something, but rarely is there a shared scanner. You'd have to walk over to it, place a document in, then walk back to your desk, run the scan, then walk to get the document again.
Yeah. Closest we come to something like that is either scan to email (directly from the printer) or scan to (network) folder. I've used both in the past, but both require a network connection.
If they had a network connection to the printer then the user would have direct access to it, and they wouldn't need a computer to act as a print server.
Hilariously, in that case, the printer has Ethernet, so it's entirely possible to do what they want. They just need to find a way to plug the printer into Ethernet. I explained this to them, they basically said that there was no way they could do that. Sure. Ok.
Hahah, they're actually equipped with RJ45 ports.
I don't think they understand that printer can connect itself directly to a network by the sounds of what you've been writing. And I don't believe they're incapable of understanding it. But it sure fucking felt that way a lot of the time with IT-support, and it wasn't about me being an autist, as none of those issues affected me in customer service jobs.
You should just set that up for them, then show how it works and then they'll go "aaaaaaaaa that's what you meant with all the annoying rambling phone call and emails I got from you after our last ticket"
I would, but I don't give any shits about them.
I would suggest it to my sales team to pursue it, but I couldn't be arsed to bother.
They want to be dumb, cool.
I was never senior enough to really ignore anything to be honest, didn't spend all that long in the field
I don't think they do... they just are?
Which is kinda sad. They can't help it. Well they could, if it weren't for their personalities, I guess.
Willful ignorance.
They put in effort to understand as little as they can.
Maybe that's a personality quirk, maybe their brain don't work right, who the hell knows. But they try to know only as much as they have to in order to do the job.
Yeah
“The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelli gence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure"
https://web.archive.org/web/20250314112627/https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/