It’s not relevant anymore, because instead of helping people unfamiliar with computers we now help people who think they are familiar with computers. They are going to argue with us, find hills to die on, all while not understanding a single thing of what they are talking about.

A computer is a means to an end. The person you’re helping probably cares mostly about the end. This is reasonable.

They think they know something, so they don’t do that anymore. They care about the way to reach that end they have imagined as the best.

Their knowledge of the computer is grounded in what they can do and see – “when I do this, it does that”. They need to develop a deeper understanding, but this can only happen slowly – and not through abstract theory but through the real, concrete situations they encounter in their work.

This is obsolete because of “user-friendliness” and other modern trends making causal relationships very fuzzy even for “computer people”.

You are the voice of authority. Your words can wound.

Good news is they can’t anymore. Bad news is - their voice of authority is, for example, their friend from college who can write helloworlds in Python, because that friend is social and successful and not too nerdy, so they must be smarter than me on any subject at all. Or, worse, an employee of Apple Genius Bar or someone like that.

Computers often present their users with textual messages, but the users often don’t read them.

Not anymore. No text message - no feeling that something is wrong. Customer satisfaction. Instead of “some error happens” users say “nothing happens” now.

They might be afraid that you’re going to blame them for the problem.

Not anymore, now they blame you if you’ve touched their machine even once before. Themselves - maybe sometimes, and there’s only one party they won’t blame - the vendor.

The best way to learn is through apprenticeship – that is, by doing some real task together with someone who has a different set of skills.

They don’t want that, because they consider you weird and your skills worthless, in principle, in ideology.

Your primary goal is not to solve their problem. Your primary goal is to help them become one notch more capable of solving their problem on their own. So it’s okay if they take notes.

God forbid they’ll guess that that’s your goal. They are normal people, see, and bad with computers, so you shouldn’t do that “helping to become more capable” thing to them. You should just help them each bloody time. That’s an /s.

Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes it’s usually the fault of the interface. You’ve forgotten how many ways you’ve learned to adapt to bad interfaces.

I don’t adapt anymore. They always expect me to teach them to adapt. I just say it’s crap and I use, say, a native IMAP client. Or that my Facebook usage is limited to FBM. They don’t get it and think I must teach them to adapt. Cause FB, MS, Apple etc are ultimate authorities and “computer-savvy” people are just those who know how to use their stuff. That’s an /s.

Knowledge lives in communities, not individuals. A computer user who’s part of a community of computer users will have an easier time than one who isn’t.

They are ideologically opposed to such a thing. Cause they are normal people and shouldn’t care about this stuff.

The advice is fine in general, optimal even. Just with what I said in this butthurt tone it can only get you so far.