“You took an HTML course in college. You know more about tech than everyone else in your MBA program. You were president of the technology club. You are the one that explains what the cloud is to your friends. You follow TechCrunch on Twitter. You’re the mayor somewhere on Foursquare. You went to SouthBy last year (and refer to it only as SouthBy). You set-up your Roku all by yourself. You have a blog on Wordpress. You downloaded Zed Shaw’s book. You have a gorgeous About.me page. You follow Robert Scoble. Yeah, you’re technical… The only thing is, you see, you can’t code.”
–
Technical = Coder. Non-Technical = Non-Coder. - Find Office Space - 42Floors
//
This. I’ll admit to having said (often) that I’m half technical, but this lays it out clearly why I’d never, ever say I’m “technical”. I don’t code.
I’ve coded, though. I’ve spent hours looking for a mistyped space. I can look at code and infer a surface level understanding of the way it all fits together and (if I’m lucky) I can use that knowledge to make things that didn’t exist already. Sometimes they work! I’ve done hours of bug fixing and feature replication in Rails and Java now, but building ground up just isn’t gonna happen without more training.
So I’m not technical. And the idea that anyone anywhere near me on the technical skill set spectrum might suggest they were technical without hesitation is baffling to me.
