What’s a secret of your trade?

Whats a prominent misconception or trick to your job that almost no one on the outside knows?

I’m an engineer who confidently tells clients on a regular basis I know exactly how to make what they want. I have no idea. We’re not good at knowing how to do stuff, we’re good at knowing how to find out how to do stuff, filtering out the garbage, then learning it quickly. It’s the ultimate career of fake it until you make it.

 

I don't know how big a secret this is, but if an IT or computer repair person uses the term "picnic error" in front of you, they might be calling you an idiot. P.I.C.N.I.C. stands for "problem in chair, not in computer."

 

Mine is not much different.

People assume that being an interpreter or translator (two different tasks) is akin to saying one is a walking Language 1 to Language 2 dictionary. This is, of course, foolish. No living person knows every word or use of a word in his or her native language, let alone more than one language. What a professional interpreter has is a very good grounding in both languages, enough to smoothly and effortlessly cover the majority of conversational speech, bolstered by training in how to make use of the best reference materials to fill in the missing knowledge. We're also trained to understand register and how to pick the best of an assortment of words that all kinda' mean the same thing, but not really.

But here's the real secret: We know how to correctly filter what you meant, rather than what you said. That secret strikes many people as the opposite of what an interpreter should be doing, and for the most part, that's correct. But humans - in general - are lousy, inexact, insecure, dodgy communicators who often speak as though words are playing cards and they are playing poker, rather than directly transmitting information.

Professional interpreters know how to handle the poker players separately from the communicators.

 

Being an IT hardware tech is as much or more about psychology. You have to talk people down before you can pry their precious, smoking computer from their adrenaline death grip. I was fireman first, and had to talk people off the ledge to the ladder. Then you had to play em the 'sometimes the patient can't be saved', first, if you knew it was bad. Most techs just want to grab the unit and get the hell out. I was the 'favorite uncle', which was not always good for me.

 

I was an engineer for three decades, and I never did that. Neither did most of my peers.
So I don't think it's a "secret of the trade."

 

"British English"

Or "American English," depending on where you're from. It's not a good thing to use too often. Well, it's not a good thing to use ever, really, but every so often a student will come up with a question on some odd construction of our language that we just don't know the answer to. And that's when the American teacher will say "Hmm, I'm not sure, I think that's British English" while his counterpart, who hails from the UK, is busy with "I think that's American English."

It happens.

 

This question reminds me of that old joke:

"What's the secret of success?"
"There are actually two parts to it:
1. Never tell everything you know.
2.

But Wreybries's comment:

That's really key. Every time you write something down, it's perfectly clear to you what you meant. But not so for the reader, for whom it may look like gibberish. That's why editors, beta readers, and such are so important.

Another thing: Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Try to be perfect (or at least adequate) on the first go, but don't get hung up on it to the point that it keeps you from writing more. The important thing is to keep writing and leave the editing and polishing for later.

 

I used to sell tarot readings for 20 bucks, and it seemed to work. I wasn’t bullshitting.

 

If you´re a seller maybe you just claim that you have the best product on earth. Of course, you sound more convincing if you really believe it. And still more if you can prove it.

 

In my former career as a coffee roaster, we had several customers who paid extra for dark-roasted versions of their favorite coffee. Thing is, once you get to a certain level of darkness (30 or so on the Agtron scale - Starbucks territory) all the flavor that distinguishes the coffee has been burned out, and your special (and expensive) Guatemalan may as well be the cheapest Mexican crap. We also offered four different grinds to online customers, even though our grinders were only capable of one. Neither 'secret' was unique to our company, though.

 

I'd tell you, but only for 20 easy payments of $99.99. In fact, when I write a book, you can buy that as well in order to learn the deeper secrets. Hardcover only. PM me for very vague, superfluous details.

 

Sounds like a certain celebrity I heard who likes their dry-aged steaks extra-well done, to where they clink when they hit the plate. With ketchup. De gustibus non est disputandum and all, but if the kitchen is actually turning good meat into a flight jacket, it seems like a bit of a waste.

 

This is true, I'm not joking.

You know how when you go to a hotel the beds are all made and nice and fluffy? Chances are the bed spread and blankets haven't been washed in over a week no matter how many other customers have used the room.

I know this because I'm an investor in a famous hotel franchise.

Think about it: you know how busy the hotel laundry room would be if they had to wash all the blankets and bed spreads from the night before, as well as the used sheets? You would never be able to check in by 3 p.m. and they would be doing laundry 24/7. There's just no time to do it.

So the family and I felt guilty so we stopped putting the bedspreads on the floor so the dog can sleep on them when we use hotels.

 

The product is the least important part of the sales pitch.

 

Maybe you can address this:

 

What type of engineer?

Looks like @newjerseyrunner is in software from his profile, so I would agree with him to the extent that pretty much all knowledge about software engineering lives on the website stack overflow. Though a lot of engineers will be glad to admit that.

I'll take it one step farther and add that the true zen of software engineering is understanding that complicated systems are comprised of many interlocking parts. The section of the glacier that people do not usually see is the mass of open source software that makes up every piece of software at some level. The compilers, web servers, operating systems, libraries, all that stuff. The code that we write for an individual product is much smaller, and connects these lego pieces together. An engineer should understand when to use an existing library that has been made available by someone else, and when to create a new one. But they should always think in terms of interlocking pieces that allow their system to scale with complexity. Having worked with many engineers in other disciplines, I think they also value a similar understanding that complicated systems are built by people of many different specialties.

 

Over the course of a few decades, software, hardware, and system architecture.

It ain't got nothing on high-performance microprocessor design in that respect.

 

Nice. One interesting thing about software is that it reaches into every industry. There are engineers who live in completely different worlds from each other not just in what they do day to day, but in the very nature of the business that they're working in. I've been hanging around aerospace for the last several years and have seen a little bit of a few different worlds, as aerospace melds many different disciplines together. The space is just too big for us to speak for all corners of the business. My mindset is from the distributed web application world. Though I've at least brushed on all of the technologies you mentioned.