I’ve had this mulling in my head for years and it’s not about you, I promise, and I’m just as guilty of needing to shut up once in a while.
tl/dr: You wind up looking smarter when you listen and try to understand what you don’t instead of jumping ahead, interrupting the speaker and filling in the blanks for them.
I don’t know if it’s an IT-thing specifically but after 20 years or so working in technology, I’ve noticed sometimes we would rather look smart than listen and try to understand. We want to appear experienced and knowledgeable so when a co-worker or subordinate starts going into detail about an incident or issue they solved (because you asked them to), we cut in and pretend we understand and give them the ending. And we’re probably almost always wrong because we didn’t actually participate in the troubleshooting, research, analysis or resolution.
The irony is we actually just annoy the speaker (probably). Maybe it’s because we’re in IT, we put the onus on ourselves to understand everything (impossible) so we have to lie to ourselves that we do know all things IT by jumping to conclusions instead of listening to explanations or analysis.
So something blew up overnight and you fixed it or at least restored service, and are still working though the root cause. When you’re asked by a manager outside of IT whose department was affected, their eyes are locked on to yours and ingesting every word. You can see it in their eyes. They are absorbing every word from your mouth and waiting for you to finish before asking for clarification or more details. It’s almost like Lloyd Dobler is holding a boombox over his head while you explain what likely happened and what you did to restore service. The rapt attention is almost uncomfortable, you feel like you really need to explain it well because OMG, you have an audience here waiting for the ending.
Now, picture the same scenario but you’re talking to your CTO. Hey, 20 years ago they turned an IT wrench so they’re already jumping ahead guessing at what happened, what the cause was, what could be done next, etc. Ultimately they don’t get the explanation. There’s no Lloyd-Dobler-effect. There’s no rapt attention. They aren’t even looking into your eyes. They get the movie trailer they want to see but they never got to watch the movie. And not to pick on CTO’s, there’s plenty of good ones, I’ve worked for a few (and hopefully continue to after posting this).
