“I’m trying to click the button, but it doesn’t work.”

“Refresh the page and try again.”

“I tried it already. Can you give it a look?”

I walk over to the user, refresh the page and alas, the button works.

“I swear I did the same thing!”

“I guess it’s the tech touch.”

No, I don’t know what I did. And yes, I do believe you restarted the page as I said. The thing is, I might have the tech touch.

Some people just have it

And some people don’t. It’s not something you can fake, but it’s not something you’re born with, either. It’s strictly something you practice.

You can learn it, but you gotta hone it. What you learn is not as important as how much time and effort you dedicate. Actually, don’t learn: practice, with real environments, and shoot yourself in the foot.

OK, but really, what should you learn if you wanna have the tech touch? Everything. At least enough to be able to ask the right questions. Best thing I can say is: be a Jack of all trades.

But don’t try to cover too much too soon, or you’ll muddy yourself up. Don’t do as you did in high school to memorize formulas, try to learn intuition, build a mental model and think as a computer: before knowing how to fix something you gotta know what is broken, and to know what is broken you need to discern if something is broken. Learn how to see broken things, be keen and pay attention.

Go deep

Paradoxically, if you want to learn a swath of things, just pick one project and dive deep. Grab a thing you always felt curious about, webRTC, compilers, blockchain, signals, concurrency, torrent protocol, shaders, assembly langs, anything. Do it and find roadblocks. After enough of those you’ll probably be more comfortable navigating around your computer.

The tech touch is something that arises once you have enough comfort and experience.

It’s just like magic

Some people say the tech touch is just like magic. It feels like magic to the uninitiated, but we know it’s not magic, just like a magician knows their tricks are not magic!

But I think the tech touch is kinda magical. When does the magic appear? Any good magician was once an apprentice, and to become a good magician, he must have practiced. Unbeknownst to him, that’s when the real magic started to happen. A good magician doesn’t invent (or bend) laws of physics, he just gets good at them. He becomes an expert.

Then can he make you believe in magic, only after he believes it himself. He then knows how to do the trick, he can do the trick, but most of all, he has practiced the trick.

The magician is not a machine, his trick is not a strict program: he’s actually so good at it that he feels comfortable exploring. Sometimes he moves his hand a bit further out, sometimes he uses his other pocket, sometimes he changes the order of things, enough so that if something goes wrong, the trick does not fail.

Computers are usually hard problems, even when they work correctly. Knowing your way around them is like inhabiting all the magic tricks, while some of them are failing.

Pay attention

“I cannot send the email to the client!”

Where can I start debuging this? From the button that the user clicks to the SMTP server, there’s more than a dozen things that can fail.

Sometimes we have no better option than to just follow the trail, try to find logs or replay the incident on our side. But if you know your way around, you’ll find the solution faster. Having the tech touch is all about being able to find the solution faster (or even, which is truly magical: being able to pinpoint exactly where the problem is without looking at the system).

Well, you need to know yourself around first. This means time spend nosing around, walk the walk. But then, experience is not all, you also have to be paying attention, because you’re looking for something.

Did this happen before? Who is reporting the issue? Did I see any error notification right before or after the issue was reported? What are my colleges working on? What piece of the workflow was changed recently?

Seeing how the user interacts with it can give you a million clues: what explorer are they using? Is there anything peculiar about their workflow? How many of these do they do a day? When’s the last time they logged in the app, or restarted the machine? Might they be running an old version? Ask precise questions.

And all the while, pay attention: many times I spotted the solution out of the corner of my eye.

Try stuff out

Back to the first example: I truly believe the user restarted the thing as I said, but I may mean many things by restart: closing the tab, closing the explorer, erasing cookies. Apps and computers are state machines, refreshing them once is not the same as refreshing them 20 times, which is definitively not the same as deleting cache, restarting your PC, reinstalling, or even taking the battery out of the motherboard.

How to copy and paste

A note to those of us who have the tech touch, be patient with the uninitiated. People do not live plugged-in as we might, and we take for granted things that are definitively not obvious. I’ll close this with a short story.

While I was working as customer support, I received the strangest call: “I cannot copy and past a text.” I went over to the user and told him to show me what he was doing. He began his demonstration:

“Well, I select the text and click control+c, just like you guys told me to. Then I unplug the mouse,” he effectively unplugged the mouse, “And very carefully take it to my other computer, I plug it in, and, see! I cannot paste it here!”

“Well,” I said to myself, “Maybe there’s a good idea for a startup right there.”