Stop Letting Technical People Get Away With Social Ineptitude
As a technical person who has worked many customer-facing support roles, I’m offended by the often-cited notion that technical people have poor people skills or are poor at filling customer support roles. Earlier this week, a web host incited a Public Relations nightmare when their “Technical Director” responded childishly to some customers, disabled their accounts, and deleted their backups. The company’s response was to create a new customer support position so they could keep their Technical Director yet isolate him from their customers. In this new customer support personnel’s recap of the situation, he wrote:Jules [is] the Technical Director. Jules does a fantastic job looking after things and keeping the infrastructure running well. Unfortunately though, as is often the case with very technically minded people, customer service is not always his strong point.
As I stated above, I find this absolutely offensive. Unfortunately, it’s often believed to be true because there are so many engineers and technical personnel with poor people skills. I never have seen statistics to support the notion that the ratio is higher in these professions than in others, yet employers often find that people filling these roles with poor people skills are still employable. This needs to stop.
I’m of the opinion that every position is customer-facing. Sure, some positions might not interface with the company’s customers, but the position is likely to have customers of its own – whether internal or external. All it takes for someone to be good at customer service is:
- The understanding that they represent their employer and that people are relying on them,
- A compassionate, helpful, and courteous attitude,
- The knowledge of whatever they’re supporting.
Frankly, if you don’t have those qualities, how can you work with anyone at all?
38 Comments
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amen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Autism-stacking-cans_2nd_edit.jpg
In your world, this small child would never find employment.
Sure, this particular guy should have been fired. But social skills are difficult, if not impossible for some people to learn. They’re already disadvantaged in life; like you point out, most jobs involve some amount of human interaction, as do the interpersonal relationships that make one fulfilled. And you want to make it harder on them?
Wait. Since when does Autism render someone incapable of learning that some behavior isn’t acceptable?
This question has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Charles used what happened at This* as an example of social ineptitude. On top of that, there is no proof that the person from This* has autism. It manifests itself in much more subtle ways in everyday situation and one of the criterion for being good at customer service is compassion, which is typically lacking in individuals with Autism.
I agree with you Renee. Social interaction with people about things that I don’t enjoy talking about is painful for me. It is very hard and I get in trouble a lot with the misses because my facial cues portray emotions that I’m feeling and I’m not able to hide it (I’m not even aware this happens). So what, am I not supposed to work because my social skills are terrible?
If somebody is going to be dealing with external customers, that’s one thing, as they represent the company. But to hold that standard for everybody in the company is going to leave people unemployed. And in a sector that seems more understanding/sympathetic of those with poor social skills, where would those people find work?
Totally true. But This* is hardly alone in having offensive, obnoxious and dictatorial customer service people. In my experience, the vast majority of web hosts have shitty or no service. They just don’t make enough money to give a flying fuck about a shared hosting customer’s experience. Even a customer with a lot of dedicated servers is likely to wait days or weeks for an explanation of why there was downtime, or who just rooted our server and why the hell did someone just root our server.
The people who work support positions or even technical positions in hosting companies, let’s face it, they’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer. if they were coders or decent engineers they’d be working for a real company instead of a ponzi scheme out of somebody’s basement. So call a spade a spade. If you want decent service that waits on you hand and foot, pay the premium and go to rackspace or some other ridiculously overpriced company. This is airline economics. Everyone gets a seat, and the seats get smaller, and the shit they call meat in the lasagna gets weirder every year.
I can’t agree. Not all jobs are customer-facing, and some people, like it or not, are not “people persons”. And that’s OK.
As a manager, I’d rather have a great engineer with below-average people skills than a mediocre engineer with a winning personality. Because I (as a manager) can handle the people skills, both between my team and the outside, and between the engineer and myself, but I can’t make a substandard engineer into a brilliant one.
You don’t have to be a “people person” to not be an obnoxious jerk. A people person turns someone who’s antagonistic into an advocate. A non-people person ought to at least be able to stay “I’m sorry you had a bad experience. Can I let you talk to my manager?”
That’s some dead-simple shit that can be learned by rote. There’s no excuse for letting employees treat customers badly.
This “Jules” character should have been fired. His employer is wasting time and money doing damage control when firing Jules should have BEEN their damage control. It doesn’t even come down to being a “people person,” although your point is still valid. He simply failed to do his job properly.
I think Jules is the promoter of the company. I do not defend his behavior but sometimes people act nuts. Probably he was going through a tough time. But that does not necessarily mean that he is a bad person. I am a techie and am generally considered to have good people skills but I fuck up a lot of times. I do not understand many of the social protocols between my friends and relatives. To many of my friends and relatives I am just a nice wierd guy who really does not care about social conventions.
100% agreed. That behaviour was totally unacceptable from anyone, and if he was my business partner I’d be having serious words with him.
So, it is offensive that he says it’s often the case that technicians have poor people skills, because, in your words, “there *are* so many engineers and technical personnel with poor people skills.”
You may want to clarify or rewrite your position — I can’t seem to look past this while reading your article.
After answering the same redundant questions over and over and over instead of working on new product innovation its easy to get cranky
The fiasco with Thiswebhost’s terrible tech Jules, includes him refusing to provide backups to customers, but being able to delete them instantly, and him being willing to do so to a customer out of spite.
The customer’s account was disabled when he argued, and when the customer lost his temper, Jules intentionally deleted his data including the backups.
That’s not social ineptitude, it’s unforgivable malice.
PS Here’s the link where Jules mentions the backups policy and is another example of the temperament of this individual:
http://www.webhostingreviews.com/thiswebhost-reviews.htm#r4136
Oh wow, I hadn’t realized that was what happened. Yeah, that’s not social ineptitude or even malice at all. It’s criminal destruction of property. Not only should he have been fired immediately, but he should have been arrested and the company cooperate fully in his prosecution. That they did not and instead are not doing the right thing makes them even more culpable. Bring on the lawsuits. As far as ineptitude goes, everyone else at the company is clearly inept that someone like this is still on the payroll instead of in jail.
I will do this when we stop letting social people get away with technical ineptitude. If I have to hear one more “Hah, unfortunately I’m just not a ‘computer person’ one more time, I might just bust a vein. It’s 2011 people, it’s no longer cute that you have no idea how to print a Word document or have little understanding that “this nice .exe email attachment will surely be a fun flash game” might be leading you (and the technical folks who support you) into a Donnie-approved World-Of-Pain(tm).
non technical people don’t care and would likely say the same about you “I will do this when we stop letting technical people get away with hair-cutting ineptitude”. It’s no longer cute that you have no idea how to cut a fade or do a perm.
As a developer with what most would call “poor people skills”, I’ve got to disagree. It’s not that I can’t deal with people, it’s that I have a low tolerance for bullshit. I can’t stand having to sit and lie straight to someones face, and I hate “bending” the truth, or omitting important details just because it might upset someone for some reason. It’s hardly my fault if they have unrealistic concepts of reality, or can’t accept reality for what it is, and I’m not about to make promises I can’t live up to just to make marketing’s lives easier. These same traits also make me a very good engineer, as a firm grasp on reality, as well as an acceptance for the state of things as they are rather than as we might wish them to be is the first step in coming up with an effective means to get from where we are, to where we want to be.
Now, on the topic of This*, there’s a difference between “poor people skills” (I.E. lack of ability in telling people only what they want to hear, and lying through your teeth otherwise), and being a childish asshat. In this case, Jules definitely behaved like the later.
>> As a developer with what most would call “poor people skills”, I’ve got to disagree. It’s not that I can’t deal with people, it’s that I have a low tolerance for bullshit.
Yeah, I used to say that too. Then I grew up.
Seriously, this excuse is infantile. Put as much effort into social behaviors as you do your out-of-work hobbies and you’ll quickly see it’s not “bullshit”, it’s not “lying to someone’s face”. It’s the basic courtesies and interactions between human beings.
>>Seriously, this excuse is infantile. Put as much effort into social behaviors as you do your out-of-work hobbies and you’ll quickly see it’s not “bullshit”, it’s not “lying to someone’s face”. It’s the basic courtesies and interactions between human beings.
There’s a difference between basic courtesies (saying hello to someone, not talking over people, not calling people idiots even if they are), and PR. If someone asks me a question, I’m going to respond truthfully and as accurately as I can. That right there, is murder to PR. If someone asks me if our product is going to solve all their problems that the marketing department has been promising them it will for the last 6 months, I’ll tell them “probably not, unless you’re problem is specifically this…”. If they ask me for feature xyz, I’ll tell them honestly how likely it is to happen. Surprisingly most customers don’t want to hear “anything is possible given infinite time and money, but what you want isn’t possible within either your time-frame or your budget”, even if that happens to be true. Marketing, and to a certain extent the related field of Public Relations, has been described rather accurately as creative lying, and I don’t lie.
This isn’t to say I don’t ever interact with customers, and I have from time to time, usually without incident, it’s just not something I should be asked to do on a regular basis, mostly because it would complicate things for Marketing when I tell customers that no, our product will not buy you a pony. As I said, there’s a difference between being a juvenile asshat, and being bad at PR. One is petty, vindictive, short tempered, and rude. The other tends to speak uncomfortable truths, and answers questions truthfully.
Yes! I completely 1000% agree with this.
I find myself in nearly the same boat as you, but you’ve explained it perfectly.
As for the original author, maybe he’s spending too much of his own time/emotions being “offended”
People find every possible way they can to become indignant or ‘offended’ by something. The best is when they become offended with the truth LOL.
It is definitely true that, in general, techie folks do not have customer service as their strong suit. This is not new information. And to spend time ‘being offended’ is a huge waste of time.
> It is definitely true that, in general, techie folks do not have customer service as their strong suit. This is not new information. And to spend time ‘being offended’ is a huge waste of time.
Is it really true though? As I pointed out in my article, I have yet to see any statistical evidence that supports this. I don’t think it should be obvious that if you’re good at “tech stuff” then you’re automatically bad at “social stuff.”
I think many of the people who are clinging onto that idea are lazy, impersonable, and are backing themselves into a corner when it comes to their career. People skills are absolutely learnable especially if you, as Ed pointed out, “put as much effort into social behaviors as you do your out-of-work hobbies.”
What’s ultimately happening is that many non-technical people believe this stereotype, so if you’re a “technical person” you’re automatically placed in the set of people who have poor people skills
I was told a few years ago that many people’s career “peak” at where I was at. I won’t get into details, but I was not happy with the idea of having reached the pinnacle of my career there.
I feel that many of you like the idea of spending the rest of your career writing code or doing system administration. That’s fine and I’m glad you found your passion – but I don’t. Instead, I would one day appreciate the opportunity to join the ranks of management and, thanks to this stereotype, I’m going to have alot to prove.
Why would you continue to employ a mediocre engineer if they aren’t meeting your needs?
Totally disagree with you. Some people are great with people, some people are great with machines, some (less common) people are great with both. To claim that all engineers are customer facing is just (a) wrong as a matter of fact and (b) wrong as an element of good strategy. An annoying, prickly engineer who can invent fantastic things in a cupboard in the corner can be a bloody useful thing despite the fact that they couldn’t market it.
People haven’t different skills – how hard is that to understand? Good managers should maximise the useful skills that their staff have and manage their foibles, not try to force everyone to be the same. We are not all the same and if you can’t grasp that fact, stay away from commenting about how to manage people.
James, this is the work of an indispensable person. Part owner, majority owner, or perhaps “the only person who knows how things work”. This is the work of a person who believes he is beyond reproach, perhaps because without this person, the business would likely cease functioning.
I see this as a management failure that, knowing how he is, they didn’t previously isolate him from customers.
Not everyone likes to interact with customers. It is a distraction from flow, especially when interruptions are frequent. I deal with customers and do a good job. Not everyone is good at both things.
Saying all engineers must all be diplomatic and not hurt people’s feelings is like saying all diplomats should know how to program in C.
Anyone treating a customer improperly is bad, unless you really want to get rid of a bad customer.
It is easy to single out a specific group, like engineers, but you can also single out asshole managers and moron marketing / sales.
It seems fine to me to wish everyone you hire is strong at every aspect of work. I think it is a bit unrealistic but maybe my standards are too low (this is the opposite of what most people find who know me though). It seems to me people that are very skilled (have skills that are not easily found) have leeway to do poorly in other areas and still be a net gain to the employer. This is true for divas, athletes and technical people. There are lots of technical people that are great working with people. My experience though, is you often have trouble finding only them for every single technical job (though I am sure the more demand there is for working at your organization the more possible it becomes).
My belief is most technical people could be better in this way if they wanted to. They just can get away without and so do. yeah it isn’t great, but the real world often has things that are not as the “should be.” If you want to work at Trader Joe’s and want to be anti-social they can just move on to the next person and find plenty of people that are great with people and have all the skills they need.
One thing that comes into play also is the desire of technical people (and academics) to challenge ideas and pick at weaknesses. This is a very beneficial trait. Some people can’t distinguish criticism of ideas and being mean to people. It is not wise to set a standard where people taking offense to ideas being criticized is protected over sensible critical discussion of ideas.
I do agree with your mindset, I just think a bit more flexibility may be warranted. I would agree the corporate culture should be one that expects and coaches everyone to customer friendly and that works well with others.
Wow… you talk about people needing compassion to be effective at dealing with people, but you illustrate absolutely none of your own when it comes to people who might, for reasons you clearly cannot comprehend, be psychologically incapable of picking up on those people skills that you believe everybody who has learned how to walk ought to have… these same people can be positively brilliant, sometimes even savant-like, in their field, and yet your position would condemn such people to perpetual unemployment, leading to poor self-esteem, severe depression, and assuming they don’t commit suicide to end it all sooner, a life-long drain on the welfare structure that would otherwise have to support them.
Wow.
Just…. wow.
I am not referring to people who are “psychologically incapable” of learning people skills. I am referring to people like a certain web host’s “technical director” who maliciously terminated customers’ paid accounts, deleted their backups, and taunted them about because they were “abusive” on twitter. That event is what inspired this post. Clearly, many people are hung up on the fact that I used the term “socially inept,” but what else would you call it?
If I stopped to acknowledge every condition that causes people to be psychologically or emotionally incapable of learning people skills, my two paragraph blog post would be a two page blog post and way off topic. Acknowledgement should go without saying, but apparently that isn’t the case. The combination of hypersensitivity and political correctness causes more problems than it solves.
What can be a psychological inability for a person to effectively learn people skills can *easily* be perceived as rudeness or maliciousness by other people, when the intent of the person is often nothing more than a rigorous adherence to a particular procedure. People who suffer from such a condition generally depend almost vitally on such rigorous adherence to procedure in order to function, and it is only with almost herculean effort that such people are capable of recognizing situations where exceptions should (quite reasonably) be made. it is only a sad misfortune that this behavior tends to alienate other people, or be perceived as rude, when nothing could be further from the truth with regards to the intent of the individual… who can often be shocked and frequently deeply remorseful to discover that they have inadvertently offended somebody.
You ask me what I’d call it? How about Asperger’s Syndrome?
It may have the misfortune of being a bit of a pop-culture label these days, often referring to anybody who is nerdy or a social outcast, but that does not mean it is not real.
It just so happens that people who suffer from Asperger’s Syndrome also frequently tend to excel at pursuits that require extreme mental precision, such as engineering, scientific pursuits, or computer related professions (in no small part because of their tendency to so rigorously follow particular procedures). Such people are naturally drawn to these fields by virtue of their excellence in them, which is why there is often a disproportionately large number of them in those fields (probably not a majority, as you yourself question… but definitely a disproportionately larger number of them).
I can’t agree with you more. I even wrote a blog post of my own about this topic:
http://technomosh.blogspot.com/2011/08/people-skills.html
Thank you
The opposite should be true also. Socially skilled people should stop getting away with technical ineptitude.
Doesn’t apply so much these days, but not too long ago in internet terms we used assume for any techie/developer guy that the level of their social skills would be in inverse proportion to the length of their pony tail…. surprisingly reliable!
Not sure what it might be these days, possibly some correlation between increasing age and continuing need to wear shorts?