Talent

I put "Witch Doctor" on my business card because when I try to tell people about the kind of work I do their eyes glaze over. It may as well be Voodoo. Most people don't seem to have any understanding of it. I got to thinking about this a while back and it occured to me that anyone with any kind of technical job, meaning a job where you are working with things instead of people, is going to have all kinds of specialized knowledge about their work, most of which is not going to be of any interest to anyone outside the field. So maybe we are all Witch Doctors in our own professions.

Then I came across web page where another programmer was making the same sort of lament. So know I wonder, maybe it isn't just that it's technical, maybe it's a special kind of technical that most people just don't understand, or maybe you need a certain amount of training to understand it.

I "played" clarinet in school, and later graduated to saxophone, but I never really learned to play it. Oh, I knew all the fingerings for all the notes, and I could get it to make musical sounds, but I never really "got it". I never heard what I was playing as music, I never learned to play by ear, and when I got out of high school I dropped it and never looked back.

My son picked up a guitar a few years ago and kind of dinked around with, but about a year ago he started playing a lot more and now he can sit down with it and just play, without any written music, or tapping his foot for the beat or anything. I think that's called talent.

When my daughter was on the dance team in high school there was one girl who was much better than any of the others. I never noticed the difference, but that's what everyone told me. She has gone on to great dance things or some sort. Natural ability, also called talent.

When I hear I musicians talking, it holds no interest for me. They are talking about stuff that doesn't seem to be worth discussing. So maybe that's what it is like with programming. You take a natural talent and mix it with some training and experience and you get something that people without that talent cannot understand.