

Buckets of Water - eloycoto
http://ivan.pedrazas.me/?p=397

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htor
"What's happened with the customers data? It shows up as incomprehensible
garbage on the screen!"

"Well, you see - imagine a collection of buckets with water standing on top of
each other."

"Uh, yes?"

"The water is flowing into the topmost bucket, slowly filling it up, so when
it is full the water fills up the next bucket. This how we designed our state-
of-the-art RAID, sir. Now just image someone kicking the bucket in middle out
of its position, taking it and pouring its water in to each of the other
buckets randomly and then plugging in a second water supply on the top,
overflowing the whole bucket stack."

"Oh my god. Please tell me we have a backup of this."

"Okay, so image a bucket pipe going to each.."

"Just call the plumber and stop wasting my time!"

"At once, sir!"

~~~
ipedrazas
We're all plumbers!!!

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agonzalezro
I also know an example to explain the arithmetic mean. I have read it
somewhere but I don't remember the exact book.

"If I have 2 chickens and you don't have any chicken, in average we both have
a chicken, but you are going to be hungrier than me."

~~~
ipedrazas
Finding these examples is always hard. We should have a collection somewhere.

Like a Tech2Biz dictionary or something like that.

~~~
agonzalezro
That would be a cool project. Sometimes you need to explain a concept that is
difficult for non techies and you don't know how.

Actually, it should be useful as well the other way around. When they talk to
me about finance concepts and stuff I get properly lost :D

~~~
devonkim
Even among tech people you can have trouble explaining things, why would it
get that much easier to talk to people across an entirely separate world and
dimension of concerns? No tech "dictionary" or translator can ever make up for
sheer lack of inability to grasp a concept in the first place. Good luck
trying to explain transcendental numbers or the number of servers Google has
to the Piraha tribe, right (heck, they're actually not even interested)? This
is modified partly by how deep the person is in their domain as well as how
smart they can be (horizontal thinking mostly). For example, in the cloud
infrastructure business, a LOT of people that are in charge of companies'
infrastructures are in their late 40s, 50s, and 60s, and it's been a struggle
oftentimes to explain basic concepts like image-based deployments, cross-
region failover, etc. The dad from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs lives in
a world of fishing in his head obviously - maybe you'll have to learn a little
bit about fishing to communicate with him right. However, a talking point that
works really well for these people seems to be "imagine your mainframe was
built out geographically across the world" and then you get all sorts of
different conversations.

It's extremely rare in larger businesses to find people in charge that care
enough about WHY something is not working when it comes to their operations or
even legal as much as just having it resolved and when it'll be fixed. These
guys are having to put up tons of defense against an army of angry customers
and managers above themselves that want something done NOW. So, it's best to
respect these folks' time by giving the most execution-focused response
possible and if they want to know more, then you tell them and ONLY then. If
you don't know, don't be afraid to tell them you don't know - then they know
they need to come up with a really, really good smoke screen and it won't be
solved soon (within minutes or less than an hour or somewhere in the timeframe
of 1-2 phone calls).

Never, ever, ever try to "talk down" to anyone unless it's been proven beyond
a doubt that they truly are actually dumb (and at that point, you should make
efforts to leave because the truly dumb tend to run their companies into the
ground). I've inadvertently done this before and nobody has a good impression
of an asshole even if they're actually not like that. Perception is reality
when it comes to people, it's part of why politics is so image-focused by
necessity.

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dredmorbius
See also "Lie-to-children" and Wittgenstein's Ladder.

From Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-
children](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children)

 _A lie-to-children is a simplified explanation of technical or complex
subjects as a teaching method for children and laypeople, first described by
science writers Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. The word "children" should not be
taken literally, but as encompassing anyone in the process of learning about a
given topic regardless of age. It is itself a simplification of certain
concepts in the philosophy of science._

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lukasm
Why not closet and documents?

~~~
ipedrazas
As well, the thing is that if water overflows it goes to waste (like losing
data), but documents can be picked up and moved to another closet, drawer,
table...

