For the longest time I’ve been searching for a better way to help clients understand the level of effort involved in each of the technologies they choose to use. I’ve come to realize that this is impossible for me to do. I know enough to help them choose, get them setup, and provide a basic understanding of what they need to do but after that, they need to take the ball and run with it.
The issue isn’t in the complexity of the tools – I’ve made a career out of figuring things out. What daunts me is the sheer volume of information. I have limited time and brain power that I can devote to memorizing and tracking the little details of my job let alone remember the level of expertise for each client, what tool they’re using, how well they know the tool they’re using, etc.
I sat down this morning and tried to count all of the different programs I know, have worked with, have been forced to use to help someone else out. I think it’s around 130 – hard to tell for sure because I keep remembering older ones that I’ve forgotten about. Then add on top of this programming languages (5 or 6) and then HTML and XHTML doctypes of course.
Consider that just one program (take WordPress for example) probably has at least 50 different commands, each producing an end result. In order to memorize the program, I memorize the command sets and the end results so when I need a solution like “how do I add a link”, I can look it up in my memory.
And then some of the commands have qualifiers. In HTML we could format a table cell so the text is centered within it like so <td align=”center”>. Or we could use an inline style <td style=”text-align:center”>. Or we could apply an external style sheet and leave the cell alone, <td>. The point is that there is usually more than one way to accomplish the same end result.
So now I have 130 programs, each having 50+ different commands, plus 1-3 different ways of accomplishing the same thing, and then in some cases the commands must be executed in a certain order. In the end, I’ve memorized thousands upon thousands of different bits of information.
When, in the morning, my daughter wakes up and says “good morning daddy” I sometimes reflect on all of that knowledge and ask myself, does it really matter?
Comments on this entry are closed.