If you find yourself standing mouth open, shocked, at the time/cost estimate given to you by your local nerd for something that you thought was simple then you are not alone.  This, of course, leaves you feeling powerless and frustrated since you thought it would only be a day or so to export the wub into the thingy.  After all, exporting the megaWub took only a few hours and was much bigger.

What can be done about this?

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I was thinking about paradox: people value complex design, rather than simple designs (from I Think Not, Baby Puppy) where the point that people often value complexity greater than simplicity is made.  Then if On leverage (from Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog) is added to the mix we get a corollary to the paradox which, from my experience, rings true - people will value multiple incremental improvement efforts over a single swift and well focused improvement because the former looks more complex.

I don’t know about you but even as a self-professed nerd who has for more than ten years worked with, managed, led, fought, herded, etc other nerds on a daily basis I regularly get more frustrated dealing with them than almost any other “type” of person. Why is this? What is it about the way we interact with others that leads to frustration? Is there anything that can be done to reduce the frustration?

Before I blab out my views about and answers to the above questions please note that I am, of course, generalising dramatically. There are lots of nerds out there who people love to talk to and rarely cause frustration in others. There are plenty of people who don’t get frustrated by nerds who frustrate the hell out of others. I know this so please think of this post as being about a mythical Platonic form - the typical nerd.

Suppose you are a “normal” person and you have just decided you need to get some information from one of us nerds.  What do should you do to be effective?

1. Ask if this is a good time to talk about X.  Nerds are often up to their eyeballs in the minutiae of dozens of software/hardware layers and abstractions.  All of this information is hard to keep in place.  Some of us are good at filing it all away and being helpful.  Most of us can’t do that - so we try really hard to answer your question as quickly as possible - which makes us unpleasant.  If we are given the opportunity to re-schedule the Q&A or even if it looks like the person asking is respectful of the fact that we have too much in our heads then we will response better.
2. Be clear about why you want to know about X.  A character trait that is common amongst nerds is that we aren’t always good at putting ourselves in other people’s shoes.  We also tend to have very deep knowledge about things we care about and somewhat less about everything else.  This means that unless we know why you want to know something we will give a perfectly logical answer to you question that probably won’t help you.
3. Be brave about asking for more detail or a more detailed explanation if something doesn’t make sense.  We know that we talk another language and don’t mind if you ask for more information.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few good strategies out there.  I’ll add more as they come to mind or as I get comments.

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