Avoiding the Blank Stare

Igor,

I often find conversations go awry. When I am at a party or a business function and I start to chat with someone and before you know it, I see a blank stare. They are looking at their watch or around the room as if I've said something wrong. This happens all the time and I'm not sure why. The only time I seem to be free of this is when I am with my development team back at the office or with other CITOs? What is going on?

- A Curious and Confused CITO

Dear Curious and Confused,

Take comfort that there is nothing wrong with you or your way of thinking or acting. You are a nerd pure and simple and have the Raw Technology Persona deeply embedded in your brain.

The problem you are encountering comes from the vast mismatch between the level of detail that interests you and the level of detail that interests the rest of the people in the world. You have been drawn to the work of a CITO because complexity fascinates you. Almost any modern technology is built in layers, each one fascinating it is own right (to us anyway), each one dependent on the layer below. When you add to that the challenge of having to make technology work in a business or large organization, you end up with problems of enduring interest.

The problem you are facing is that you mistake people's literal statements for their actual intent. When some asks: "What do you do?" they are looking for a one liner. "I lead development of Web applications for BizzaroCorp" is a good enough answer. If they ask, "Is that like Amazon or something?", you should say, "yes", and not explain the difference between a cloud and on-premise architecture.

But that is not our instinct, most of the time if someone asks what we do, we go into a long explanation of how we are trying to move our web apps from PHP to Ruby, to implement an agile development process, or to attempt to figure out where to use web services and where to use the simpler REST-based protocols.

As nerds we suffer from the love of complexity and abstraction, which I call, "the love that dares not speak too long." Let your nerd out when you are at OSCON or Web 2.0 or InterOp. In between, come up a non-tech interest in The Jets or Lady Gaga. But be careful. You may be tempted to get down and dirty into the details of why Darrelle Revis is so damn good or why Lady Gaga is a marketing genius. The world is not ready for the nerdy level of detail in non-tech subjects.

The surefire way to be seen as the best conversationalist in the room is to just keep asking your conversational partners about themselves, a topic of enduring interest for the non-nerdy world.

If you follow this strategy, you will find that every once in a while you hear someone start talking about how they have gone through seven different knife sharpeners before finding one that gets the edge just right, or extolling the glory of different kinds of coffee makers. Find a nice quiet spot and get a fresh drink. You are in good company.

-Igor