A tale of an advice gone wrong

This time, it is a story from my college days. By this time, I had owned a PC for about nine months. I had learned a few things from my experiences and failures. I was eager to offer these bits of advice to my classmates, of course, for free.

I had my Windows operating system crash every few months. After losing my work stored in the C drive once or twice, I learned my lesson. I then started saving my work on the D drive. This way, when I reinstall Windows, only the C drive would get reformatted.

One of my friends had just bought a new PC. I happily shared the above lessons with him. A few days later, I learned he had managed to crash his Windows installation. It didn't take much time for me to realise what could have caused this crash. Along with his documents/ work data, he had also moved some OS-related files to his D drive.

What did I learn?

• I should have been more careful while advising others. It doesn't make me feel great hearing my advice caused some failure.
• Communication is hard. I could have checked if he understood my advice correctly.
• Context is the king. I had first-hand experience with the problem the advice was trying to solve, while he did not. That would make a difference in the attention one pays to the level of detail. This can be commonly seen in the software development industry. A significant number of developers do not have clarity on the impact of the software they develop on their end user's lives. Also, many larger organisations make it hard for the developers to understand the business outcome by keeping the developers away from the users. Of course, there are other areas of software development where context is important too. More on that in another post!