One of the functions of an expert should be to filter all -- or mostly all -- of the details of an activity from the person for whom the activity is being done. They should be a black box, where all the recipient knows is that the function was done, and output was created.

I was just reading the documentation for a capacity planning tool. The tool was written by some people whom I'm gonna assume as smarter than me; certainly more experienced in what they do than me. The goal of the tool is to let someone of reasonable intelligence figure out some things about a mainframe computing environment -- things that would be really helpful to know, such as; if we continue to grow workload at the current rate, when will we run out of capacity? To a capacity planner, that's a 'it depends' question. (Actually, sometimes it seems like everything, including "What did you have for lunch today?", is a 'it depends' question to them). But in this case, it really is, because the question translates into this: If we continue to grow workload at the current rate, assuming that all of the components grow at the same rate, and assuming we know what we mean by 'grow', when will we get to a point where we either a)dislike the response time or turnaround, b) despise it, or c) have to stop running some things so that we have enough capacity to run others'. This is where the person asking the question starts making hand motions which are intended to convey disgust with this pettifoggery; just answer the damn question already! And so the expert does, using round numbers, shrugs, and the occasional muttered ' it depends'.

What brought all this on was that the documentation that I was reading seems to have been written for a bright five year old. It uses lots of complex concepts (the bright part) and says really obvious things (if you don't like the screen color, you can change it). Okay, perhaps that isn't so obvious, but there's something about the way they say it that makes me want to skip to another paragraph in search of immediately useful information. Just answer the damn question already! In this case, the expert (them) is not shielding the user (me) from the details. They might not be tellling me everything about what it takes to do the function, but they're telling me way more than I wanted to know. I just want to push the button, turn the crank, and get the answer.

Is that too much to ask? (I can hear the expert's resounding answer.)