When someone says "programmer" there are plenty of pictures that might go through your head. Some think of the typical asocial geek type while other folks might imagine a big beard and laptop strapped to his chest doing the "soulja boy" dance. No matter what you associate with the word "programmer", there is an undeniable fact that understanding how programmers think of things can help us use software. Just as you might examine a book by making an effort to link characters to people in the author's life, when you use software, it can be helpful to consider the software author's intent.

Thinking like a programmer could have a wealth of meanings. Attention to detail, math and abstract thinking all come to mind as potential programmer qualities. But, as a programmer, the part that defines what I do is learning. Programmers are forced to learn new languages, systems and software all the time. The majority of a programmer's day is spent reading and understanding documentation. Bugs are often fixed with a few lines that take a few hours of reading to find. The reality is programmers must be good at learning more than anything else.

If you ever want to see this requirement, just take a look at open source project mailing lists. Of course, I don't really expect you to do this. If you did poke around on mailing lists for a while, you would see a consistent pattern. The folks in the know are asked questions by folks just getting started. The answers come as links to documentation and code. A new user is forced to go find their own answer in the resources given. In a way this is very frustrating, but once you become the person in the know and you've dedicated your time to learning something, it feels unfair that you are seen not as expert, but a simple dictionary.

I mention all this because as we consider how to help companies move towards being NGE, we need to consider the authors of the software. If you can imagine then how programmers are forced to spend hours figuring out the two lines to make some new whiz bang feature, you can also imagine that they expect effort from their users. In one sense programmers are very detailed oriented, so there is an excellent chance there are clues to how to do things in a piece of software. While at the same time, programmers have had to do quite a bit of work, so exposing the easiest way to do things for every user may not be at the top of his/her list of things to do. As a user then, if you want to get the most out of software, the best course of action is to take some time to go through things in detail. Make some notes and when confronted with a problem, try to find the answer yourself. The result is you will learn the software and you will become a better learner in the process. It may seem like you wasting your time and it will be frustrating, but being NGE relies on your ability to learn and understand new things quickly. Programmers excel at this and so should you. Learning new software is a great way to practice this and potentially find a great new tool in the process.