In college, I worked as a kind of helpdesk tutor to help programming students who were having trouble with their assignments, especially the freshman introduction courses. It was an enlightening experience. Most of the people who came to see me either claimed to be stuck without having even started or had written the entire project without testing anything and had no idea beyond "it doesn't work." In one of my freshman classes, the teacher asked us to come up with a simple way of generating a random playing card. He expected us to pick a random suit and a random number between 1 and 13. The point was to explain object-oriented programming by showing how it would be useful to have the variables be connected in some way. I missed the entire point and just picked one random number between 1 and 52 and used integer division and the modulus operator to show decide which card it was.
The ability to build logical models of things you haven't encountered before is a surprisingly rare skill. I also see people turn off their brain when they encounter an unknown situation. I was helping a relative get signed up for their COVID vaccine and it's like he stopped being able to understand English once the website came up. I was on the phone was having conversations like: Me: "look for a button that says 'next' or 'continue' and click it" Him: "nothing says that" Me: "what does it say?" Him: "<5 straight minutes of reading the screen> ...and then a button that says 'proceed'" This is a person I would consider smart, but because it's a website and he's not a computer person, his brain turns off.
I think this is a genuine problem with the fractured culture: 'common' elements of design, especially industrial design are increasingly hard to establish. I have the same issue with my folks: they have no idea how most websites function. Over the years, I find myself using that "inspect element" option less and less, and I'm genuinely concerned about the degradation of my technical skills by simply not exercising them.
Even this morning I had to explain to my mom that Amazon's "shopping cart" was an abstract concept, and yes, it could be viewed from multiple places in multiple forms. Whenever she wanted to change something in it, she always went back to the "checkout" version of the shopping cart, even if she wanted to continue shopping for other stuff. Never dawned on her that she could access the same thing from the sidebar, or the shopping cart icon, etc.
I think you're onto something @downndirty . My first thought about what @Binary wrote was that rather than it primarily being a 'brain turning off thing,' it's an anxiety thing that leads to a mental shut down. He's nervous and overwhelmed and can't see the simply thing right in front of him. That seems to be a common reaction to something you're really unfamiliar with and feel like a lot is on the line if you mess up. I think how unknown situations are approached can vary a lot by culture and upbringing.
I definitely would have overengineered that so that you could continue picking cards, without repeating one, until you'd picked all 52 cards.
Way back in the day I used to train pulp mill operators how to run mills with computers instead of using the knobs and levers in the field. Imagine trying to get your technophobe grandfather to use a computer. I ran a simulator for this training in an Atco trailer, where we had real control systems tied into computer simulations. Think of it like a flight simulator, but for pulp and paper mills. This was EXACTLY the problem. The out-of-the-box revulsion, fear, ignorance, insecurity, etc, caused a lot of problems. But once you got them past that, and things clicked in their head, they were SUPER into it and wanted to learn more. They became a sponge, especially when it got to emergency training for recovery boilers. It was a chance for them to try things that you never want to do in the real world... and see how effective the disaster mitigation was. After a few intro sessions, they fought for simulator time. The REALLY cool part of this was in exchange these old guys would walk me around pulp and paper plants and teach me how they worked. I ended up getting my 3rd degree power engineering certificate because what we were doing was so legit that it counted as "real" firing time on the boilers.
How do you translate this to a resume? I ask because I'm like this with pulling large data sets and making sense of them and then explaining it so "normal" people can understand what they are looking at, but I've never figured out a way to explain it to someone before other than saying some people are able to capture data and interpret it really well and some people are able to explain the results of data collection really well, but there aren't many people who are good at doing both.
In this person’s defense, I can see myself doing this because most web forms are complete fucking garbage- if you enter one piece of information wrong, or god forbid, in the wrong format, many tell you that you fucked up, and helpfully erase fucking everything, making you start from scratch rather than just fixing what you screwed up. Add to that the tendency of these websites to either time you out or freeze your access, forcing you to clear your cookies or web cache to even be able to try again. It’s infuriating, and why I hate filling out any form on line, even though I do it every day. And yes I proved my ineptitude by trying to trim binary’s quote and fucking up the quote feature. No I’m not going to fix it.
@bewildered It's absolutely anxiety, but that's a really big part of being able to break new concepts down into a logical model. You have to suppress the anxiety that says "you don't know everything" and look for the patterns and components that you can understand. I'm not really criticizing him for failing to understand what he was looking at - and yes, the site had garbage UI @Misanthropic but not recognizing a synonym printed on a button seems like UI isn't the problem there - just pointing out that this is a common theme in jobs or daily life. Sometimes "smart" is really just pattern recognition being able to progress through a series of logical steps. And maybe that really is smart, but I know a lot of people who are really intelligent in specific ways but shouldn't be trusted with a power tool, while my father-in-law is not what I'd consider to be a "high IQ" guy, yet is very adept at looking at stopping his brain from turning into goo when he sees something new, and working out the best path forward.
When I’m at a new job, or learning a new part of my job, I have little problems learning how to do something, but I ask a lot of questions that will help me know WHY I’m doing something. Once I can figure out the reason why this process fits into the overall goal of the department/company/whatever, then I’m solid on it and the step-by-step stuff falls into place.
In the vein of, "there's always an XKCD for that," I have referenced this many times: https://xkcd.com/627/ But the crucial part that's not documented is, "Step 1: don't let your brain melt just because you haven't seen this before. Take a deep breath and look carefully." Taken generally, I feel like that flowchart can be used for anything from car repair to gardening.
Tiger Woods in a bad way, car crashed and they had to use the jaws of life to get him out. No other information than that at this point