In historic blogs now lost in the mists of the Internet, I’ve written about this before. There is something odd about cyber people who have to show the extent of their knowledge to other cyber people. At. Every. Possible. Moment.

I experience this so frequently that it’s rarely worth writing about here. But it happened again a few days prior to writing this, which, got me thinking about this a little more. I wondered if there was a comparison with my favourite analogy subject: cars. 

I wondered if, when a vehicle technician is telling another technician about a car he happened upon which hadn’t had an oil change for 50,000 miles, does the second technician tell the first all the reasons why that’s bad. Of course not. The first technician knows all that, because if he didn’t – he wouldn’t have commented on it, he also knows the second technician knows all that, which is why its noteworthy. The second technician might suck his teeth/whistle a bit/shake his head, possibly enquire about other things on the car – but that’s it.

This makes me ponder why cyber people seem to wish to air their knowledge at every opportunity, here are a few possibilities:

• It’s fairly common (for cyber people) to work with non-cyber people who are doing ‘insecure things’ and there is desire to help them realise this by telling them – in detail – why they’re wrong (this is why cyber people are thought of as clipboard wielders, it can also come across as trying to change someone’s religion – likely to be unsuccessful)/
• The cyber domain is huge, its basically a slice of every other domain. That knowledge took a lot of time and effort to acquire! Let me show you how much I know share that knowledge…
• The techniques needed for cyber people to be effective are rooted in logic, lets show how smart we are (I might be a little guilty of this one..) and as such end up treating someone as though they are a child and need to have the issue s-p-e-l-l-e-d out….

Cyber people, please stop, before I leave this area of technology and do something totally different instead.