Computer People surveyed 1,000 office workers across various industries to examine perceptions of IT personnel and to explore how communication between IT professionals and their non-IT colleagues could be improved.
Over half (56%) of those surveyed said that IT professionals 'speak another language' with two fifths (40%) saying that they feel IT staff are unaware of the confusion that tech jargon causes.
The research identifies the most commonly used jargon terms as:
1. Bandwidth
2. HTML
3. Hostname
4. Alias
5. IP address
Yikes! Is that what you'd call jargon?
An article about the survey says that "nearly 75% of people said they spend more than an hour every week simply trying to find out what something means in order to finish a task." That sounds terrible, but if you didn't know what an IP address was, I can see that you'd be spending some time chasing down definitions.
The survey and article are written from the layman’s point of view (and I'm guessing that not all the respondents worked regularly on office PCs). The Slashdot thread argues the other side -- touching on the role of IT in the organization, transparency, customer service and whether users should have the same kind of basic knowledge to work at a PC as they do to drive a car or cook a meal.
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