Re: Stupendously learned user

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au>]

In my experience this is a fairly common mistake. Often a programmer 
will have a narrow view of the range of users and in fact will latch on 
to a single user type.

For example, in many cases users of UNIX system administration software 
will be experienced UNIX users and experienced system administrators, 
but you can't assume that's always true.
- They may have run the basic admin procedures on a single UNIX box but 
not be as familiar with the detailed operations of a data centre.
- They may have 25 years experience as a sysadmin on mainframe systems, 
and now they've been told to manage some UNIX systems their company has 
acquired in a merger.
- They may be competent operators who are taking on extra 
responsibilities while the sysadmin is away.
- They may be specialists such as DBAs, security admins and auditors who 
need to implement their own procedures within a general sysadmin framework.

As the TW you can't be expected to teach the full UNIX for Dummies and 
System Admin for Dummies, but you do need to handle these different user 
types appropriately.

Final point: although engineers can be wrong that the readers "are very 
knowledgeable and know all this", *sometimes they're absolutely right*. 
You have to be able to detect these cases and back off gracefully, 
otherwise you'll use up whatever credit you have with that engineer.

Stuart


Nancy Allison said:
> "Web services engineers are very knowledgeable, they're not beginners.
 > The reader of this document won't have any trouble with this!"
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