Explaining Technical Information to Non-Technical People

awesome video,
this is great advice experienced engineers

I've watched until the very end but you skipped the so called "technically a third group of people" - people who are technical but not in the same category as you, that should be interesting

I was Just talking about a Pallet nothing technical guess i was talking to a non technical person i had to explain there was one pallet instead of 2 but they had put the goods on top without a pallet has given me so much confidence that i will apply for a city job a lot of confidence tricksters out there to put you down

She was very Technical

I think you should preface this by admitting that this material is actually better suited for marketing types that can't understand the guy making the websight.

From a strong technical communicators perspective, this advice is a wrecklessly oversimplify mockup of the truth. (Imaging the crayon drawings people made of the cybertruck)

Only when you can reasonably estimate the target audiences objective desires can you extract the "truth" from technical lingo. If you cant do that, it might be better to saying nothing at all.

As a technical guy, I appreciate when I don't get bombarded with terminology as well, if possible...

My problem is that I get excited when explaining it and don’t realize I am speaking complete Latin to them until I see their blank stares.

I am capable of using common knowledge terminology and never intend to communicate pretentiously. I just sometimes get caught up in my fascination for the subject, and forget that my enthusiasm can get in the way of communicating effectively.

Just want to say thanks

I love this.
I started explaining IT topics using hotels (lobby=DMZ, front desk=API gateway, kitchen=async/batch processing, storage rooms=database instances, security=monitoring, doors=ports, suites=subnets, floors=domains, ....) years ago and find that analogy extremely useful.

In short, know what problem they are expecting you to solve and familiarize yourself with the moving parts they are aware of and talk in those terms. If they need or want more explanation, they'll ask for it. Sometimes, I won't always be able to get through something without inevitably getting through a technical explanation. In those cases, I try to make sure I've got a demonstration as an explanatory aide while my mouth goes talking about whatever. If I can't not be technical, at least I can give them a visual frame of reference. Incidentally, this also helps fine tune your ability to explain things, because it tends to center your focus to the task at hand rather than the minutia of details that often derail the conversation.

great content! thx

Had an interesting example of this a couple of years ago with a client of my saas. 8.02am Sunday morning phone call saying the online video feature wouldn't work and after some investigation, I realised the ISP in their city was having a massive issue. I simply couldn't explain this to him in a way he understood and trusted until I sent him a news article detailing the outage.

Can I not just slap down a pile of computer science books and say "Ill explain it next week"

Also i have to Read directions 4 to 6 times i still have no idea and it's Roon ,, Tidal & Music servers simple things

Need more videos in python bro 🤩

Yo i made software that does exactly that.
Its in beta now.
Should be ready to ship soon.

Yeah, probably the best audience for this video are the members on elitist discord group.

You should automate Bloons Tower Defense. Maybe use Machine learning so the bot can learn where to place monkeys 🐵

what atom theme do you use?

Thank you so much. Very good information. Do you have github projects? If so whats your github. Thanks.

You deserves 10M subscribers atleast. Sometimes i think why the people like you are not famous much:(

Good one this. The last point about ppl feeling talked down to is most pertinent. Esp if said people are PhDs in less technical fields.

I once explained the concept of VLANs and trunking to a plumber. Something like this:

Imagine, if there was a single pipe, and you could pump in multiple different kinds of fluid in said pipes, and then have a way to separate them out on the other end.

Then he actually replied something like: "would that decrease the amount of volume available per fluid than just running each separate pipe?"

I actually just said to him that it's one of the dilemmas between setting up VLAN's or running different network equipment for each network.

So, just by relating it to a client, I actually had an interesting conversation about technology to someone who isn't literate in computers but instead a different type of technology, plumbing and HVAC.

I had to talk to the customer many times to explain what was going on in the development process. I can assure to you that if you can do this part of our job correctly, the customer will be much more satisfied and you can receive more accurate feedbacks. I have received an incredible feedback from the CEO itself and a raise.

An interview question I have used is "explain DNS as if you're explaining it to your mother". They get a bonus point if the term "directory enquiries" is used in their description 😁

" There are only 10 types of people in the world – those who understand binary, and those who don’t. "

Manager: Why is our system breaking down.
Engineer: The guy you hired to build it was incompetent and did a bad job.
Manager: You're fired.

hand puppets.

I was new as a sysadmin at a startup. Two weeks in, we had a problem with the Synology fileservers, which I knew nothing about. Ultimately we rebooted the faulty one and stuff was working again.

"What was the problem?" asked the team lead engineer.

"There was schpilkis in the genekicazoink." I said, not know how much to tell him.

"Ooo-kay" he replied. I don't think he'd heard Yiddish before, even fake Yiddish.

Oh..a video

In my experience it's not the person with the best explanation that wins the day, it's the person with the best line of bull excrement. Jim gave me an excellent explanation on how through exercise and diet I can lose weight, but John made this wonderful speech about how his software would make me thin with no effort at all!

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This skill is invaluable in all walks of life. During my practice on the floor it is absolutely necessary. Especially with the current global pandemic we're under/I'm dealing with at work. Patients are much more likely to carry out the recommended actions if you talk to them in normal language and explain why you want them to do this or that. Just telling them to do it rarely works but explaining it and the reasoning behind it has yet to not work for me.

AKA "How to speak to the humans"

Thanks for the video, it was a good refresher for me, as I'm about to get involved with an organization that has a bunch of non-technical people working with web developers

yup done this many times: explained to product owner what info i need to complete a ticket in way yoo technical way. they just say i dont know anything about databases

Engineer Man uploaded: video

Nice

I'm insanely bad at this.

This is absolutely right. But there are a lot of issues at work here.
Here's a few of them.
1. Geeks like to be geeks. They perceive it as giving them some sort of status. Which it certainly does, amongst their peers. But not with others. And it can very easily exclude people; that's a big problem for some.
2. Quite a lot of technical people only understand what they're dealing with at a certain level. Quite a few are actually incapable of thinking about a problem at a level that other people can understand.
3. For some, it's a mask. Their technical knowledge is actually fairly limited, but they know that if they use the right language nobody will question them about it.

With all that said, for those capable of hearing and acting upon this message, do it.

U are a rare wise person

Like if you saw before name chamge

video comment

You can use examples how a motor works and comparing that to the problem and then end up explaining how the motor works LOL

this is SO true!

Hey Engineer Man, i asked this questions on an old video of yours but our probably don’t read that old comments so I’ll reask it here:
What do you use your home server(the one you showed in that old video about your setup) for? Do you host some websites or repositories yourself?

Best click bait title for a video that I've ever seen! :)

video

thanks

I always say that I have no idea what is going on but that I am looking around for another job.