(A HN commentator was incredulous, having grown up in the '80s and '90s, that I'd think users knew more than developers)
I was working from the late 1980s, and living with a professional developer by about 7Y later.
It surprised me a very great deal as well, but I 100% stand by this observation. Your follow-on statements are entirely on the same theme:
[They feel that being an expert user is "microscopic" compared to being a programmer]
To quote Pauli, "that is not only not right, it is not even wrong."
It's also highly patronising and frankly offensive.
As a professional tech-support person from the late 1980s for about 25 years, I and my peers and fellow pros in this field knew many many times more about the general spread of desktop and server OSes, their compatibilities and more to the point their differences and incompatibilities, than 95% (not a random guess, a genuine estimate) of the developers I ever met.
And the majority of those developers though the reverse too. Many developers just assume that they are the gods of IT, shaping the raw clay into systems.
They are mostly completely wrong, but it is the pervasive belief.
[This is tantamount to saying a master car engineer never learned to park]
That is in fact almost correct, yes.
One, yes, it is the case, yes, if overstated. It is more equivalent to saying "most car designers are not also racing drivers" while sneaking in a dig that says that racing isn't a job and racing driver isn't a real job, but just a stupid hobby for idiots.
Hi. In this metaphor, I'm a racing driver. Nice to meet you. I know how to get your car to do things you never dreamt of, I know how to customise it, and I also have spent longer than your lifetime fixing up other people's cars, teaching them to drive, and winning races.
No, in fact, I do not think it is reasonable for you, as a car designer, to mock my work. I think it is rude and ignorant.
Yes, I know many car designers. Yes, I know more about how their cars perform than the designers. Yes, I know how to drive those cars better than their designers. Yes, I can fix them too, but I would not presume to tell a professional mechanic that they are doing it wrong.
But if you wanted to know what was wrong with a car, then YES I would definitely rate the opinions of racing drivers and pro mechanics over the designers, yes. 100% of the time, by far.
In fact, if I wanted to know what was wrong with a car, I'd never ask the designer and wouldn't be terribly interested in their opinions.
Sadly, FOSS is the domain only of amateur designers-cum-builders-cum-racers-cum-repair-bodgers. There are almost no pros in this entire sector and they have zero respect for the real pros in the commercial market, who know 1000 times more than anyone in FOSS.
[Many users have bad skills but the knowledge domain is microscopic]
More patronising rubbish.
Newsflash: the paid professionals deploying any complex machines know more about that software, how it works, how it doesn't work, how it fails, and how it breaks than the people who designed it.
This is true of everything from bicycles to cars to operating systems to desktops.
[The commentator looked up why Macs can't cut and paste and was surprised to find people asking]
Good. Glad you took my suggestion.
[They discovered that there is a move operation, it's just different]
Deep sigh
The reason I suggested people reading my comment look this up is because I already knew this, and that's because I do in fact know my job and what I'm talking about.
I know you can move stuff. I know this because I've been deploying, training on, and fixing Apple Mac kit since 1988, and I was good at my job. I left it because 25 years of dealing with rather stupid customers is too much for anyone to have to bear.
I picked this example because it is a good example. Macs do have the functionality and have done since 1984.
However Windows only got a poor version of it in 1995, but that is all most users know, and when they find Macs don't do it that way, their response is not to find out the Mac way, it is to complain that Macs don't work.
no subject
Follow on comment:
I was working from the late 1980s, and living with a professional developer by about 7Y later.
It surprised me a very great deal as well, but I 100% stand by this observation. Your follow-on statements are entirely on the same theme:
To quote Pauli, "that is not only not right, it is not even wrong."
It's also highly patronising and frankly offensive.
As a professional tech-support person from the late 1980s for about 25 years, I and my peers and fellow pros in this field knew many many times more about the general spread of desktop and server OSes, their compatibilities and more to the point their differences and incompatibilities, than 95% (not a random guess, a genuine estimate) of the developers I ever met.
And the majority of those developers though the reverse too. Many developers just assume that they are the gods of IT, shaping the raw clay into systems.
They are mostly completely wrong, but it is the pervasive belief.
That is in fact almost correct, yes.
One, yes, it is the case, yes, if overstated. It is more equivalent to saying "most car designers are not also racing drivers" while sneaking in a dig that says that racing isn't a job and racing driver isn't a real job, but just a stupid hobby for idiots.
Hi. In this metaphor, I'm a racing driver. Nice to meet you. I know how to get your car to do things you never dreamt of, I know how to customise it, and I also have spent longer than your lifetime fixing up other people's cars, teaching them to drive, and winning races.
No, in fact, I do not think it is reasonable for you, as a car designer, to mock my work. I think it is rude and ignorant.
Yes, I know many car designers. Yes, I know more about how their cars perform than the designers. Yes, I know how to drive those cars better than their designers. Yes, I can fix them too, but I would not presume to tell a professional mechanic that they are doing it wrong.
But if you wanted to know what was wrong with a car, then YES I would definitely rate the opinions of racing drivers and pro mechanics over the designers, yes. 100% of the time, by far.
In fact, if I wanted to know what was wrong with a car, I'd never ask the designer and wouldn't be terribly interested in their opinions.
Sadly, FOSS is the domain only of amateur designers-cum-builders-cum-racers-cum-repair-bodgers. There are almost no pros in this entire sector and they have zero respect for the real pros in the commercial market, who know 1000 times more than anyone in FOSS.
More patronising rubbish.
Newsflash: the paid professionals deploying any complex machines know more about that software, how it works, how it doesn't work, how it fails, and how it breaks than the people who designed it.
This is true of everything from bicycles to cars to operating systems to desktops.
Good. Glad you took my suggestion.
Deep sigh
The reason I suggested people reading my comment look this up is because I already knew this, and that's because I do in fact know my job and what I'm talking about.
I know you can move stuff. I know this because I've been deploying, training on, and fixing Apple Mac kit since 1988, and I was good at my job. I left it because 25 years of dealing with rather stupid customers is too much for anyone to have to bear.
I picked this example because it is a good example. Macs do have the functionality and have done since 1984.
However Windows only got a poor version of it in 1995, but that is all most users know, and when they find Macs don't do it that way, their response is not to find out the Mac way, it is to complain that Macs don't work.
Examples:
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/12391/why-is-it-no...
https://www.quora.com/Why-there-is-only-copy-option-in-Mac-a...
https://www.howtogeek.com/735756/how-to-cut-and-paste-files-...
First 3 hits on Google, out of:
... About 489,000,000 results (0.88 seconds)