To know x to practice
Conversation between Queen Guinevere and Pyrlig, the Bard, about other bards. Extracted from Bernard Cornwell’s Excalibur:
‘I once heard Amairgin sing’, Guinevere said.
‘You did, Lady?’ Pyrlig asked, again impressed.
‘I was only a child’, she said, ‘but I remember he could make a hollow roaring sound. It was very frightening. His eyes would go very wide, he swallowed air, then he bellowed like a bull’.
‘Ah, the old style’, Pyrlig said dismissively. ‘These days, Lady, we seek harmony of words rather than mere volume of sound’.
‘You should seek both’, Guinevere said sharply. ‘I’ve no doubt this Taliesin is a master of the old style as well as being skilled at metre, but how can you hold an audience enthralled if all you offer them is clever rhythm? You must make their blood run cold, you must make them cry, you must make them laugh!’
‘Any man can make a noise, Lady’, Pyrlig devended his craft, ‘but it takes a skilled craftsman to imbue words with harmony’.
‘And soon the only people who can understand the intricacies of the harmony’, Guinevere argued, ‘are other skilled craftsmen, and so you become even more clever in an effort to impress you fellow poets, but you forget that no one outside the craft has the first notion of what you’re doing. Bard chants to bard while the rest of us wonder what all the noise is about. Your task, Pyrlig, is to keep the people’s stories alive, and to do that you cannot be rarefied’.
‘You would not have us be vulgar, Lady!’, Pyrlig said and, in protest, struck the horsehair strings of his harp.
‘I would have you be vulgar with the vulgar, and clever with the clever’, Guinevere said, ‘and both, mark you, at the same time, but if you can only be clever then you deny the people their stories, and if you can only be vulgar then no lord or lady will toss you gold’
Today I’ll talk about a matter that bothers me the most: the Letter Soup.
How many times we found ourselves in meetings with clients who do not have a clue regarding technical aspects, and we try and impress them with our wonderful gibberish, our hieroglyphical acronyms, our mysterious language that, at their ears, sound like a cult language? And worse than that, how many times we kept quiet when our colleagues try to convince a client that we are the best by using the same terminology to disguise a flaw out to justify a project delay? OR that obnoxious colleague that joins the company and tries to conquer the less-technical manager by using the infamous Letter Soup?
To those questions, I say: nothing better than the good old direct speech.
There is nothing wrong in gather knowledge through courses and self-development, I believe that this is also what makes the difference between many IT professionals worldwide. But to hide behind certificates and technical gibberish when the building is on fire is something else.
I’ve been seeing a lot of people who goes at a “by-the-book” attitude, and whenever they face an unpredicted problem at their methodology’s manuals they take the easiest course of action: do nothing and make up beautiful excuses. Those professionals get so invested in their trainings, their certificates, that at the end they get stuck at their own self-proclaimed glory, uncapable to think outside the box. As the excerpt says, they are poets trying to impress other poets, and don’t get gold tossed at them in the long run.
And what to do? I once worked with a wise man (an IT director that started as an intern) that told me ‘we use the KISS framework here’. Obviously, I asked ‘KISS?’. ‘Yes, Keep It Simple, Stupid’. He didn’t want to be convinced, he wanted reliable and quick results, and guess what — the same happens to most of the clients. At first, your management or client can get impressed at your tech babble, but in the end the results are what matter the most. If the product releases in time, with a minimal amount of bugs — and plans to handle with those bugs — I’m sure your client will be satisfied and will come back to you when he needs anything else. In short, he will toss gold at you in a continuous flow when you prove you are aggregating value and solidifying their business.
My advice for you: keep your certificates and learn to think outside the box. The certificate itself does not contain a tangible value, usually it only proves that you can pass a test. But the acquired knowledge that comes with the certificate should help you at solving problems. If something is outside the established pattern, you won’t get stoned if you don’t do what is predicted at the manual. Learn to combine your strengths, using your technical speech to the other technicians, and practical knowledge to your clients. Then, all you have to do is to tune your harp and gather the gold tossed at you.
