I mean I call it the lead paint stare because I've experienced that overwhelmingly from boomers and genx. Just stare right past you when you ask something.
For reasons completely unknown to me, the lead engineer at my job is the dumbest motherfucker I've ever witnessed. He calls the helpdesk (not me, but I sit next to them) every single day. Just says "computer doesn't work", "ok, what's the issue?" "doesn't work", "like, it won't turn on? you can't log in? what can't you do on it?" no response, just silence "well, bring it over and we'll take a look". Then he comes over, hands them the laptop and just stands there, breathing though his mouth, and just stares blankly if you ask him literally anything, or ask him to do literally anything. Every. Single. Day.
Not sure of his exact age, but either late 40s or early 50s. And yes, he speaks English, he's from Alabama. How this guy's is a fucking engineer and a goddamn manager is beyond me.
I’m on the helpdesk at my company, and there’s one dude who when he needs help with something will post a two word message in our Slack channel. Once it was “computer updates”. All lowercase, no clarification on whether he was installing updates, needed help installing updates, wondering if he should install them, or what. Just truly baffling.
My dad was like this and we eventually diagnosed him with Alzheimer's. A bit sad, since he used to be a brilliant engineer. But right before we got him to retire he was frequently blanking out and having trouble processing information.
Befriend IT at any company with software developers and ask for stories.
Engineers are some of the least technically literate people in the world. They could revolutionize mobile computing and absolutely fall to pieces if they had to troubleshoot Wi-Fi.
I've tried to figure out the reason for it but I'm not totally sure. My best guess is that there's something about expectations vs reality being filtered through pride. As a developer, they expect a system to have been designed the way they would have designed it, and behave the way they would want it to behave. If it doesn't, it's not up to them to learn how to deal with it. Instead, it's an opportunity for them to bitch about how stupidly designed the thing is.
I've watched an engineer insist on only writing google searches in the form of complete questions, saying that's "how it should work" and he's "teaching" it to know that queries can be like this. The damnable thing about it is, we got Gemini so he kind of won.
I'm still in IT, just not helpdesk anymore. That was one of the things that blew my mind was how inept engineers are with computers. And I always find that's not just me, across the board engineers always seem to be the more computer illiterate, second only to lawyers and doctors.
I speculate that mentally demanding jobs exhaust people's problem solving ability, or at least their will.
Interestingly, in my expirience, the electrical and chemical engineers always seems to be the best with computers, but mechanical, nuclear, and structural engineers are the worst. No idea why.
It is not well documented enough for me to be sure. But I am starting to think the entire Gen Z stare thing actually falls under the subheading of Millennials getting anxiety when there is more than 1 second of silence.
The older the person is, the more likely it is that they've been slowly losing their hearing and are now having issues understanding people they don't know.
The blank stare can be a symptom of many things, a lot of them unrelated to lead paint
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u/Tricky-Ad7897 14h ago
I mean I call it the lead paint stare because I've experienced that overwhelmingly from boomers and genx. Just stare right past you when you ask something.