It’s not everyone’s job to know the complexities of the world’s creations. In fact I would say that someone trained in a specific field finds that field more complex than someone untrained. That is the point of abstraction though isn’t it?

The average person probably doesn’t care what goes on under the hood of their car, or should they have to. They simply turn the key and the engine starts. Abstraction. The same can be said about computers.

Not everyone majors in CS or CE, and probably for good reasons, but their perspective of computers is so different from mine it sometimes amazes me. For example, I remember in college I would be asked to fix computers, printers, and any other device that has a power cord. I would take a look at it, but wouldn’t guarantee anything. I tried to explain my domain knowledge and that I was a software guy, but for some reason they bucketed software and hardware together. This was interesting because it got me thinking of how many similarities I must make everyday with things I don’t have a deep understanding about.

Another example is a computer screen message. I find it interesting that computer users believe the computer screen as if it was as credible as The New York Times. If the computer program says that it’s saving your document, it has to be saving your document. I would say that the majority of the time this statement is true. But, what about malicious software? I could easily write a problem that tells its users that it is saving a document when in fact it is deleting all the files off your computer.

Ethan Vizitei wrote a great post the other day on a similar subject. He talks about how he was approached by some friends with an idea for a startup. They had this great idea and all they needed was a programmer to throw it together. His friends seemed to think they had figured everything out, and just needed Ethan to bang on his computer to generate a product. And they wanted him to do it for free!

I don’t think his friends are solely to blame, after all how do you know what you don’t know? I think that concept itself is something to be learned though. And it always seems to remind me of a great quote that one of my math professors said (which happens to be Sergey Brin’s Father, Sergey Brin being one of the Google founders) — “The more you know, the less you know.”