When one of your staff members asks "what's a file path?" It's times like these that I am ever so grateful that @dfox hooked me up with a squishy ball.

@Fixxel both. I was trying to explain why he couldn't run what I had sent to load a bunch of shape files into a postgis enabled PostgreSQL instance. So I told him he needed to either make sure his console was in the same directory as the files or use an absolute file path.

And this is why I'm struggling to figure out ways that I can pay people on a different salary schedule...can't get people with good coding chops when the compensation is crazy low.

Surprised they did not know that. 101 stuff

@Jumpshot44 it should be part of basic computer literacy but doesn't seem to be the case.

But not a dev at least I hope?

@Elkstorm not a dev, but a data analyst who should still have been taught those things a long time ago.

@wbuchanan Agreed. That's sad.

@Elkstorm also ironic that most people graduating from an education degree program have not been educated about basic computer literacy skills.

@wbuchanan I don't know if it's basic computer literacy. I think most programs (the part that the user sees at least) don't use relative file paths, and if they do they are commonly abstracted in some way.

@johnfoobar this was all stuff that was being run explicitly at the command line (shp2pgsql to be specific). And for doing data analysis you should be familiar with the concept since you'd need to be able to load data. But as you mentioned a lot of programs tend to abstract this from the user a bit, particularly GUI driven analytic applications.

@johnfoobar along those same lines, do you happen to know of any training tools that I could use to get this guy up to speed quickly? Even just like a cheat sheet with some basic computer terminology would be useful.

@wbuchanan honestly I don't know of any off the top of my head. I am surprised to find fellow students at my university that don't know basic things like file paths, but most things just come in time.

I learned these concepts slowly over time myself. It's easy to look at that stuff and say it's simple, but there's just so much to take in when your first beginning. When learning I think most people skip the details and go for getting something to work.

I think you would have a better shot at finding things to help fill him in on those details as you know the circumstances better.

I have a resource on the UNIX command line though if you would like it. I believe this is the one my professor suggested. http://ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/...

@johnfoobar that would be great, but aside from me all the people in my shop currently use Windows only. Depending on what type of budget I'm able to free up we may get ourselves a Linux box to use like a compute server, but that won't be happening for a while. I might be able to get them on machines running Windows 10 sooner (with the hopes that the Bash integration is at least decent).