Once upon a time I had time to craft answers to problems, I would investigate them get into the roots of them, immerse myself in them and know that the answer was indeed the answer.
It is getting increasingly difficult to do.
I don’t think it’s only me.
The Internet has turned us into scavengers. Whatever the problem, whatever the situations, someone on the Internet has an opinion on it. Quite often those opinions are good opinions, but they stop us looking further, they stop us short of actual understanding. My field is hardware and software, but if this was reading it would be like moving from Shakespeare to Mills and Boon, the words are the same, the subjects are the same, but they just don’t go as deep.The Internet has allowed us to find an answer much quicker, but the vastness of the information available stops us doing the ward work of getting to an understanding.
I have been in numerous conversations with people when I have been given phrases like “Microsoft say that most of the problems they see are to do with name resolution, therefore, we need to check name resolution”. The statement is valid, but in the situation, the context, when it is used it is often completely invalid. The statement is used without understanding. A similar one is “This system is so flaky, we need to rebuild it and start from scratch”. Starting again may indeed be the correct answer, but when I challenge the flakiness and try to get to the bottom of it I find very little real evidence that a whole series of problem warrant a rebuild. What is really being said is different, what is really being said is that we don’t understand this thing, so if we create something new we might have a better chance of understanding it. The problem is that rebuilding something doesn’t normally help with understanding.
Understanding is hard work, there are no short-cuts to it.
The other day I mentioned that Microsoft have started making VHD of their products available for evaluation purposes. Some of them are limited to 30 days. 30 days is long enough to look at the gloss, but it’s certainly not long enough to gain an understanding.
How do I gain understanding:
- I start with the principles – why is something built like this. Quite often it’s been built like that because of history – so what’s the history?
- I try to understand all of the elements – there’s no point in understanding the software if you don’t understand the hardware. I normally do this by applying knowledge I already have, but I also read a lot.
- I focus on the dependencies – if things are dependent, why are they dependent? I try to do this with real test systems. If I take out a component what happens?
- I assume that nothing works exactly the way it is supposed to. Software is great at doing what it is supposed to do when it is in a nicely tuned test-bed; it rarely works the same in real life.
- I meddle outside of my remit. I have a remit, I am an architect so I’m not supposed to look at real software, or real hardware – rubbish. If I’m going to understand why something is as it is I need to meddle with the real thing.
- I read broadly, I don’t just read within my context, I try to gain an understanding of the broader principles at play. It’s all about understanding “why?”
How do you gain understanding?
tags: learning, understanding, architecture
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Graham Chastney 
Hi,
I like it how the piece starts “Once upon a time..”,I expected to hear of gold, poisoned apples or fairy folk!
Though seriously, I understand your sentiment. I feel that these days a question comes with the expectation of an immediate answer. Possibly an unfortunate consequence of the vast volume of information out there in the wild wild web. People expect you to almost already know, because somewhere, sometime, someone has already gone to the effort to understand and find out for themselves, and kindly posted a distilling of their knowledge on the www. Making us try and glean the good stuff and filter out the trash, but not take the time to develop a true depth of understanding for ourselves.
To answer your question I try to gain understanding through as many means as possible, reading, listening, watching, doing (what other learning gates are there?).
However, I do find reading and listening (to monologue/lectures) are hardest to turn into real repeatable benefit; especially if they are prone to interuption or conflicting with other concurrent activities. I sometimes struggle with conf calls covering multiple topics to concentrate on the parts I’m even interested in!
Watching and doing are always more satisfying and normally leave a longer lasting and more contextual memory to rely on in future occassions.
Doing really means trial and error or iterative steps to try and establish an understanding of the principles of the system or thing.
I think a lot of IT solutions to problems or questions come from being able to deconstruct the sequence of events or issues into atomic parts and reassemble them. Not necessarily physically but mentally so you can hold them together in some sort of model or framework… I have a feeling you’ve touched on this before.
The developer, engineer, architect should all engender this attribute… having a knowledge of basic to create the complex.
The gift of the troubleshooter is doing the reverse, taking the complex back to the basic.
These things take time… and some say time is money. But in my mind always well spent.
Charlie
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