How do we get people to care about computing?

‘I’m not technical.’

If you work in enterprise technology, I bet your heart sinks when you hear those words. Whether you hear them from a programme sponsor, the leader of a business unit, a product manager or a project manager, you most likely perceive it as shorthand for, ‘I know that the success of this project depends on technology, and I know that the technology is going to be really complex and difficult, but that’s your problem, not my problem: I’m not going to engage with things that I don’t understand.’

There are a couple of reasons that this sentiment irritates technologists.

The first is practical: it means that, when they hit problems, they are unlikely to get active, engaged, curious, empathetic support - they are more likely to get asked to just fix the problem, to make it cheaper, faster and easier to deliver.

The second is more emotional: many of us work with technology because we find it fascinating and exciting, and we want to bring its potential to the world. We want others to be as fascinated and excited as we are, and the phrase ‘I’m not technical’ typically signals a lack of interest: the door is closed to fascination and excitement.

I’ve heard the phrase, ‘I’m not technical,’ throughout my career and have found it more puzzling over time. When I first started my career, computing was a niche hobby and a specialist profession, and computers were scattered thinly across the world. Now, the person saying ‘I’m not technical,’ may do so while participating in a video conference, scrolling through messages on a smartphone and receiving notifications on a watch. They are visibly, inescapably surrounded by computing, yet seem to have little interest or understanding in how it works.

On reflection, though, this should not be a puzzle, and we should not blame people for this sentiment. Computer technology is complex and daunting to newcomers, and grows more complex and daunting every day. Those of us who work with technology deliberately build experiences which are easy to engage with and understand, but which mask the underlying complexity which makes them possible. A well crafted digital experience gives few or no signals about the technology that lies underneath.

Should we just accept, then, that some people are just ‘not technical’, and that we have built a world which is simultaneously dependent on technology, yet impossible for most people to understand or care about? Unsurprisingly, I don’t think that we should. Rather, I think that we should work harder to find ways to engage people in the topic.

One way is to explain how things work in straightforward terms, even when they are difficult to understand. I’ve attempted to do a bit of that in the past (in this series of articles , for example). However, this doesn’t appeal to everybody, so we need to find another way. I believe that one way to engage people is to tell the human story of computing.

For many people, when they hear words like ‘computer’ and ‘technology’, they think of machines and cables, of incomprehensible lines of code: the images are cold and calculating - literally. Yet, like all technology, the story of computing is a story of human endeavour, of striving and failing, of facing problems and solving them.

It is the story of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, trying to build mechanical computers way beyond the capability of the technology available to them. It is the story of Alan Turing, and the creation of fundamental concepts that have created the world we live in. It is the story of Dorothy Vaughan, overcoming prejudice and leading her team of human computers to become computer programmers. It is the story of Margaret Hamilton, and the development of a software engineering discipline that made the Apollo Moon landing possible - and saved them at the last possible second. It is the story of all of the pioneers who have built a globe spanning network and put power in the palm of our hand.

As enterprise technologists, we don’t always engage with our own history: I think that, if we spend more time with the stories of challenges faced and overcome, then we would find ways of connecting with more people. (Recently, I ran a webinar in which I attempted to condense a three hour exploration of the history of computing into twenty minutes. If readers of this article are sufficiently interested, I will record that as a video and post it publicly.)

I think that there is something more to this story, though. I count myself fortunate to have been born into an age and place where computing was always, to some degree, accessible. Home microcomputers were appearing just as I became old enough to learn to program them. Programming skills were in demand when I was looking for my first job. And, just as computing has grown more complex and daunting, it has also grown more accessible and more in demand. Most of those people who say, ‘I’m not technical’ have computers on their desks or in their homes which, if they just knew how, could give them access to everything they need to build working code. And building and running code is not just an interesting thing to do: it makes you part of the human story of computing.

I believe that technologists should not treat the phrase, ‘I’m not technical’ as an irritant or a barrier. Rather, we should treat it as an invitation to explain and educate, to share the great human story of computing, and to show how everyone can be a part of it.

(Views in this article are my own.)