I am surprised how often I run into or hear about execs of large and small technology and Internet companies that know absolutely nothing about their product nor can they understand when their CTO or other technology worker explains something that is relevant to their business. They probably hold the excuse that it doesn’t matter for what they do, but I don’t buy that. At FundingUniverse.com I am impressed with how our entire management team at least attempts to understand what each other is doing. I think it is extremely important that the entire management team knows how to converse with each other including knowing much of the jargon that is used with the other jobs. I honestly don’t find it too much to ask that each person on a team spends a couple hours a week learning about things that directly affects their business regardless of whether it is in their job description.
I think if programmers are now being expected to have a large amount of business knowledge, that those same people running the business learn about the technology that runs their business. I don’t expect everyone to suddenly be able to plop down on a computer and begin developing, but understanding that IMAP is a type of email server, or that Apache is the server that runs their website is not asking too much. There is a caviat, since they don’t need to know how these servers work, nor that to configure them you need to edit httpd.conf or whatever it is. So, for a headstart for anyone wanting to learn about all those “nerdy” things we CTOs talk about, I will write a small list of terms you should know. And if you don’t know some of them, Wikipedia is a great resource.
Terms: POP3, IMAP, RSS, streaming, script, Apache, databases (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL), cron job, WEP encryption, WPA encryption, Ethernet, wireless(802.11), USB, Firewire, languages (PHP, Java (J2EE), ASP, .NET, Ruby (on rails), SEO, search engine friendly URLs.
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