[HN Gopher] Commonly used idioms in the tech industry
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Commonly used idioms in the tech industry
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 118 points
Date : 2021-08-13 19:52 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (levelup.gitconnected.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (levelup.gitconnected.com)
| elliekelly wrote:
| Only somewhat related, are there any interesting reads about
| _how_ idioms tend to come into being? This post includes the
| origin stories and some of them seem to start out as an inside
| joke of sorts. I guess I'm just curious whether anyone has spent
| any time looking into what it is that makes a joke or phrase "go
| viral" to the point that it becomes a widely used idiom. Or maybe
| the backstories are more apocryphal and part of the "story" to
| sell the idiom in the first place? Either way, I'd be interested
| to read more about the factors that allow a new idiom make its
| way into language.
| DonaldPShimoda wrote:
| Not these idioms in particular, but you might be interested in
| the book "Metaphors We Live By", which looks into the origins
| of a lot of common, everyday metaphors that you probably
| haven't ever consciously considered as even _being_ metaphors
| before.
| elliekelly wrote:
| HN comments like this are the best! This is exactly the kind
| of obscure book I'd never know about or even think to look
| for but I absolutely cannot wait to read it. Thanks for the
| tip!
| spacechild1 wrote:
| It's indeed a great book!
| frenchyatwork wrote:
| This would be the domain of linguistics, and my understanding
| is that there's really no clear consensus on anything. Folk
| etymologies are rarely any better than a "just-so" story, and
| often they're an entirely fabricated re-analysis.
|
| When we talk about the creation of neologisms like this, we
| often put them into various categories: sometimes they're
| simpler than the previous idiom, sometimes they're more
| complex/nuanced, often they can act as some sort of shibboleth,
| but it's all after-the-fact analysis, I don't think there's any
| real rules.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > Folk etymologies are rarely any better than a "just-so"
| story, and often they're an entirely fabricated re-analysis.
|
| Don't 86 my 420 history
| cyberge99 wrote:
| I beleive you're referring to the etymology of the terms and
| when they entered industry parlance.
|
| I think that may be tricky to determine as word tend to spread
| like viruses. One person hears something and wither knows or
| looks up the word in context, then starts using the word.
|
| Google fu may tell you when a phrase started being searched for
| frequently.
| whateveracct wrote:
| I started working with a new team recently and they use the term
| bikeshedding not as a negative but as a word for spending time
| discussing and coming to consensus on minutiae. "Let's spend some
| time bikeshedding what to name this class."
| ptudan wrote:
| That sounds... not ideal. I wonder how that came to be.
| walshemj wrote:
| That would be a "oh dear I have accepted the wrong job
| moment".
| whateveracct wrote:
| This is a job I've had for years - just tectonic shifts in
| the org chart exposing me to this
| drewcoo wrote:
| Does this mean people don't know about the jargon file?
|
| http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/go01.html
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| It could use a little pruning. MIT hacker phrases are not
| widely in use, unless they became popular independent of their
| origin.
| djur wrote:
| Also, it still has a bunch of terms that ESR added that were
| not from the hacker community but from his circle of early
| 2000s pro-war bloggers:
|
| http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/anti-idiotarianism.html
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| True. Jargon File should get an impartial steward who
| reverses ESR's vandalism.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Lots of useful stuff, but some are a bit out of date:
| http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bounce.html
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Much of that is something like a quarter century out of date.
| ilammy wrote:
| That's for boomers, eww~
| edoceo wrote:
| Also, don't utilize utilize, use use.
| onecommentman wrote:
| An earlier take on tech jargon was published in 1997 by Wired
| magazine in the form of a physical book entitled "jargon watch".
| It was touted as "a pocket dictionary for the jitterati".
| Published in San Francisco under the HardWired imprint, printed
| in Singapore. Collection of submitted terms to a Jargon Watch
| column to Wired magazine in the early 1990s.
|
| Examples include adminisphere, appeasement engineer, articulizer,
| balloon help (now mansplaining), bit flip (a personal
| favorite)...worth a gander. Honor your nerd heritage and revive
| some of the words the ancients used before the dot-com bubble.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| The only one here I don't hear frequently is "yak shaving." I use
| "giving a mouse a cookie" for that.
| jimbokun wrote:
| When I was a child, it was the Hole in the Bucket song:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_Hole_in_My_Bucket#...
|
| Looks like the idea for the song goes back to at least 1700:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_Hole_in_My_Bucket#...
| philipov wrote:
| My favorite oddly confusing idiom is POC. I say that sometimes
| and people go "Wait, what?"
|
| "Proof of Concept."
|
| "Ohhhh..."
| shapefrog wrote:
| I have a short enough attention span that after the P and O my
| brain has already assigned the dialogue 'Piece of Shit' to the
| conversation.
|
| Sometimes its awkward, sometimes it is fitting.
| ishjoh wrote:
| It can be a hard habit to break that association. I work with
| different ecommerce clients and many folks refer to their
| stores payment systems as POS - point of sale, took a while
| to unlearn what I had always known POS to mean.
| count wrote:
| Heh, it helps that most point of sale systems are also pieces
| of shit.
| romanhn wrote:
| Not that odd, since it's a common acronym for a variety of
| contexts. Point of Contact, Person of Color, etc.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| PoS is a good one also. In retail and restaurants it means
| 'point of sale', but also the systems and software behind the
| sale, which often translate a lot of business logic and and
| CRM-type stuff.
|
| Of course if you're developing one and you mention the PoS POC
| you could end up in hot water.
| leo_bloom wrote:
| My team has the same reaction when someone references our CoC.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Proof of Concept
|
| I had the misfortune earlier in my career of working for a
| total megalomaniac chair-flipper. One time he described some
| fairly vague product concept and I said, "ok, let me put
| together a proof of concept". He blew his stack and said, "no,
| I don't want a proof of concept I want a working product!"
| temp0826 wrote:
| One company I worked at started using "tranche" obsessively after
| an exec used it thrice while talking through a pie chart slide.
| My team all thought it was ridiculous how malleable people tend
| to be and used "in the tranches" or "tranche and wave". Felt
| bizarre never hearing the word once before that event and made me
| question why people are vulnerable to something as such.
|
| Some others mentioned amazonians and I can confirm this type of
| thing was incredibly common there (not just tranche, though I did
| hear that one more than once)
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| The definition of yak shaving seems totally wrong to me. I always
| understood it to following way (as an example):
|
| 1. You need component X to carry out the original task
|
| 2. To get component X, you need to do something else
|
| 3. Several steps of recursion later, you end up shaving a yak -
| an activity that's unrelated whatsoever to the original task, but
| is still a dependency.
| enchiridion wrote:
| Yep, that's the definition I'm familiar with.
| 21echoes wrote:
| This seems to be exactly the definition given in the article?
| bhauer wrote:
| My read of the article was quite different. Namely, "Imagine
| you had to shave a yak. There would be a lot of things
| involved in getting that done, many of which you don't know
| ahead of time."
|
| Ultimately the same underlying meaning, but quite a different
| illustrative scenario.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Yes, your goal isn't to shave a yak, it's to do something
| else, but you have endless side quests including being a
| yak barber.
| karomancer wrote:
| Yes I've heard this too, but I've also heard both.
|
| While writing this I found a lot of opposing definitions
| (as mentioned with bus factor). I've also heard "Don't
| shave the yak!" as part of the definition you gave for
| yak shaving.
|
| Thanks for the feedback! I'll incorporate this too to
| make it more complete.
| djmips wrote:
| Watching the video in the article is better than the article!
| ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fnfeuoh4s8
| pchristensen wrote:
| That's the video I was hoping for!
| kemayo wrote:
| Although, to the grandparent's point, that's very much a
| "getting distracted while performing the task" video -- the
| first several steps didn't show Hal _having_ to divert, after
| all. He could have replaced the lightbulb and then gone back
| to fix the shelf, and fixed the shelf and then gone back to
| oil the drawer.
|
| It's only oiling the drawer that demonstrates true yak-
| shaving, since he then _has_ to buy more oil and fix the car.
| infogulch wrote:
| Sometimes I suspect that my current yak-shaving chain might
| have one step somewhere that isn't _strictly_ necessary...
| but then I quickly dismiss that idea and start to write a
| report about why every step is needed, but then I notice
| how our wiki is disorganized should be split up into the
| four primary kinds of documentation as described by
| https://documentation.divio.com/, but then I noticed that
| our wiki service is running on an old server that hasn't
| been updated in 2 years and maybe it's time to switch to a
| saas provider, but wait does the provider I was looking at
| support the wiki syntax our current wiki uses? ...
| grillvogel wrote:
| Not an idiom, but the latest dehumanizing thing ive started
| noticing is referring to people by their slack tags, even in
| direct messages. Now when my manager has an "ask" for me, instead
| of a DM with "Hi Name", i get "Hi @jdklsajdls". You don't need to
| tag me, we're already in a DM. Then, when someone is DMing me and
| referring to someone else, they use the slack tag instead of
| their name. Its gotten to the point where people were referring
| to someone by name on a zoom call and I genuinely didnt remember
| who that person was. Finally im like ohhhh thats @jkldsajlds
| walshemj wrote:
| That's very old practice in online in online communities I know
| people who will know my handle but not my IRL name.
| grillvogel wrote:
| Sure I get it, but these are people i worked with in person
| until last year. It just feels like with the remote working
| thing we are transforming from people into interchangeable
| virtual entities.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| This one seems to go way back. I had an cousin who started a CS
| program back when it was a big deal if your dorms had ethernet.
| I remember when visiting him it was wierd to listen to people
| actually refering to each other by their university-assigned
| email address.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Slack tags are unambiguous, and some folks have different
| notification settings for mentions vs simple messages.
|
| Same thing with email rules prioritizing mail that has the
| recipient on the To: line.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| This is quite weird since slack generally encourages people to
| use their real names for exactly this reason. In slack, tagging
| someone has a few added benefits, even in a private convo.
|
| In a DM, if I tell you @fred can help you if you have any
| questions, you can now hover to see Fred's availability status,
| and click to message them.
|
| An added benefit is that these tags track the user's displayed
| name. If Fred changes their name to Francine, the places where
| you've tagged Francine in the past will update automatically.
| You can also search for places where users are mentioned this
| same way.
| er4hn wrote:
| I can try and explain this one - I do this a lot when writing
| down meeting notes / sending emails. The problem is that when a
| company has 3 Steves, 5 Freds, and you need to refer to
| someone, you need an unambiguous way to do so. So I try to
| write down people's email handles when taking notes or saying
| "you should talk to @sdlkfj" about this issue.
|
| On calls I will try to use their first name, unless there are
| multiple people with the same first name there as well. Then I
| just refer to people by the NATO phonetic alphabet of their
| last name. I do ask for their permission before I do so though,
| I'm not trying to be a jerk :)
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _or, if you're like most people, you've probably just smiled and
| nodded while thinking to yourself "What the hell does that
| mean?"_
|
| If you do that, you failed the test. People who use inside
| jargony things love to explain them, and love to be asked what
| they mean. Also, they can usually tell when you don't pick up on
| it.
|
| When I interview someone I'll throw in something company
| specific, that I know they won't understand, just to see if
| they'll ask me what I meant. I don't want to work with someone
| that is afraid to admit they don't know something.
| karomancer wrote:
| Totally agreed.
|
| That being said, I find a lot of junior devs scared to ask and
| I've run into some senior devs who are a bit high and mighty
| and judge you if you don't know. It's why I started writing
| these articles (junior devs I mentor will ask me what things
| mean after hearing them in meetings/seeing them in PRs)
|
| But...ideally one should just ask, like with anything else!
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I can relate to that and it's really important to ask
| questions. Also it can be quite irritating when people try to
| look smart instead of being actually interested in the point.
|
| On the other hand jargon is not an exact science. There are
| things like false friends, commonly incorrectly used terms and
| all that. That's why spoken language is usually spoken
| redundantly. Also sometimes the acoustic is bad and you don't
| want to ask 10 times a minute. Or the person says something
| incorrectly but you realize what the person actually means
| because of the surrounding context.
| elwell wrote:
| > just to see if they'll ask me what I meant
|
| I like that. Also, on the job, I try to be willing to ask for
| explanations even if I think I have a good guess. One thing you
| ending up finding is that other people often don't know either,
| but everyone was just going to be quiet about it.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| "Default" might be one of the most overlooked technical
| terminology to the point that people don't even realize its
| technical sense (no-choice choice) is not "default" in English.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| It's annoying that "bikeshedding" isn't properly attributed to C.
| Northcote Parkinson. And it's not really tech jargon, it's
| management jargon (same as "ask") - a type of jargon I find much
| more irritating.
| karomancer wrote:
| The article references and links to The Law of Triviality,
| which in the first sentence references C. Northcote Parkinson.
|
| What would you like to see instead so I can make it right?
| sorokod wrote:
| Some non idioms I find annoying:
|
| * "We" instead of "I". on StackOverflow "how do we reverse a
| string?"
|
| * "showstopper", no matter how trivial a thing is, it will be a
| showstopper for someone: "the lack of a dark theme is a
| showstopper"
|
| * "workflow", no matter how trivial an activity is, it will be
| someone's workflow
| nharada wrote:
| I often see "we" on internal documents written by one person --
| I think it comes from the convention in academic papers where
| you'd use "we" to refer to the researcher(s), even if it's just
| one author. I don't personally mind it in this context.
| cdcarter wrote:
| > "We" instead of "I". on StackOverflow "how do we reverse a
| string?"
|
| I usually notice this with english as a second language
| speakers, it's probably a more innocent mistake than people
| choosing a word like "workflow" or "bandwidth".
| duckmysick wrote:
| I catch myself overusing the word "workflow". Any good
| replacements? I tried "activity" and "task" but they don't feel
| natural to me.
| sorokod wrote:
| For me workflow implies something substantial and so
| appropriate occasionally. Activity, task or just a way to do
| things works too.
| sorokod wrote:
| Ah, forgot "community". No matter how loosely related a group
| of people is, someone will call it a community, e.g. "the HN
| community"
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > no matter how trivial a thing is, it will be a showstopper
| for someone
|
| I used to work for a big web site that produced standardized
| requirements documents ahead of every project. Part of the
| standard was the "flexibility matrix": the PM or "stakeholder"
| who was producing the requirements document was supposed to
| identify whether scope or timeline was most flexible. Of
| course, for about five years running after the standard
| document template came out, _every_ project was "least
| flexible" on timeline and "most flexible" on scope.
|
| We finally started calling them on their impossible timelines
| and tried flexing the scope by pushing some of the vague
| requirements off to later releases. The result? They added
| another column to the "flexibility matrix" called "resources",
| as in they were willing to hire more people to meet all the
| requirements in the mandated timeline.
|
| That was also not true.
| elwell wrote:
| > "We" instead of "I"
|
| What about "we" instead of "you"? E.g., "Can we change the
| color of this button to blue?"... "Yes, _I_ can do that. "
|
| It used to bother me, but when you're in the position of
| telling other people what to do, I suppose it sounds less
| demanding.
| sorokod wrote:
| I see it more in the spirit of "how are we feeling today".
| Some sort of false comradery.
| cvburgess wrote:
| Is there another way to read this?
|
| I guess i've hit my limit of free Meduim articles and i have to
| pay to see this now. I'm a little concerned, I wonder how many
| people don't realize all their content is now behind a paywall.
| adenadel wrote:
| Incognito works for me
| blululu wrote:
| The Wikipedia list on Anti-patterns is also a pretty good place
| to start learning about these concepts:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern
| romanhn wrote:
| TL;DR: Assuming you have the bandwidth, please double-click on
| these concepts, leverage the learnings therein, and then take it
| offline to iteratively ideate further.
| clpm4j wrote:
| Something that has really started to annoy me is how often 'order
| of magnitude' and '10x' is thrown around.
| xdennis wrote:
| My pet peeve is people saying "exponentially" when not
| referring to growth like: "a pickup truck can carry
| exponentially more than a sedan".
| shapefrog wrote:
| > is thrown around.
|
| 10x too much? Or a couple of orders of magnitude too many?
| ljm wrote:
| I'm now an Order of Magnitude Greater Engineer.
|
| OMG Engineering.
| theginger wrote:
| I feel like tech debt ought to be idiom #0 since it is referenced
| in #2 twice.
| stuartd wrote:
| Perhaps not common, but certainly still in use: The Queen's Duck
| - https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
| fsagx wrote:
| I think many people have independently discovered and use this
| technique. My wife once had a boss who would always find points
| to argue in any proposal she authored. She began adding at
| least one spelling or grammatical error to every document. He
| red-penned those, and his inner critic was satisfied. The
| points that really mattered went unopposed.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Definitely a thing that gets independently discovered over
| and over. I'd heard this described the "hairy arm
| technique[1]", with similar setup as the Queen's Duck
| anecdote, but a hairy arm instead of a duck. I remember
| reading about it and thinking "oh, so that's the name for
| that".
|
| The Queen's Duck is a catchier name though! [1]
| https://lifehacker.com/use-the-hairy-arm-technique-to-
| deal-w...
| bookofjoe wrote:
| You are spot-on! Back when I was an anesthesiology research
| fellow (U.C.L.A. Department of Anesthesiology, 1979) I was
| first author on a number of papers resulting from my
| experimental work. As was expected and routine, I passed my
| manuscripts on to my research director for editing.
| Invariably he'd make changes each time I submitted a freshly
| typed revised draft. One day I noticed he'd changed some
| things back from the way he'd revised them to my original
| wording. From then on, I submitted papers for publication
| when I felt they were ready. And they were accepted for
| publication.
| jiscariot wrote:
| I know an electrician who will reverse polarity on a couple
| of outlets when they do a large job. It gives the inspectors
| something to mark down and is an easy fix.
| sam_bristow wrote:
| The other side of this is 'brown M&M' issues. Sometimes
| small mistakes will cause a reviewer to go over things much
| more thoroughly than they otherwise would.
| tfigueroa wrote:
| I've heard something similar as a "Helicopter".
|
| Can't find a source, but it was relayed to me as a technique in
| negotiating a contract for videography. You would put together
| a contract that includes normal shots and one extraneous,
| really expensive aerial/helicopter shot. If the client doesn't
| notice - cool, you get to do a fun helicopter shot. If they do
| notice, it can give them something to negotiate away - making
| them feel accomplished, while you still land a contract with
| the important shots.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Which reminds me of another favourite, "Free As In
| Helicopter": the software is free, but figuring out how to
| use it is so insanely complex, and has so many dependencies,
| that a successful completed deployment costs you thousands in
| $$$/PSPSPS/EUREUREUR.
|
| https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/01/13/free-army-
| hel... is the ancestor of the phrase.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _can give them something to negotiate away_
|
| That's sometimes referred to as a distractor, or as "Combat
| Barbie."
|
| https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-
| Draftin...
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| That seems very, very similar, but slightly different in my
| mind (and is also a great one to add to my vocabulary)
|
| In the Queen's Duck, the extra work gets done in a way that's
| easy to undo, so management can add their value by telling
| you to remove it. The artist gets more control of the queen
| animation instead of tweaking the color, shape, etc. because
| management wants something to do.
|
| In Helicopter, the additional work is just a proof of
| concept, to ease negotiations. It's not about having control
| and making work easier down the line, it's about picking a
| moonshot, and maybe having fun with it, but at least getting
| the contract under the terms you want because they're
| probably going to cut the helicopter, which leaves you with
| the contract you would have agreed to in the first place.
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| This reminds me of some advice I received from a previous
| manager. He said that decisions are impossible to make in any
| meeting larger than 5 people, so I vowed to really pay
| attention to my invite list and pair it down where possible.
| His response was, "That's great, but more importantly, if you
| want to make sure no decision is reached, be sure to invite
| more than 5 people."
| me_me_me wrote:
| OMG, that is pure genius forward thinking.
|
| This is one of those things university ought to teach but they
| don't.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Well you could argue that if a PM focuses on the duck - or
| something that is fine if there wasn't a duck - said PM needs
| to reconsider what they do as well. Educate the PM, instead
| of the developer adding fluff to distract the PM.
|
| And "no" is a complete sentence. I know, chain of command and
| authority and the like is hard to rebel against, costs energy
| and brain space, but I think in the example given, the artist
| should be the authority on what is in an animation, not the
| PM. They are entitled to an opinion of course and to voice
| it, but they would be one voice among many.
| sorokod wrote:
| Oh nice, now I know the name and a story to go along with it.
| brianmcc wrote:
| There's an important additional aspect to bikeshedding: the
| conversation gets sidetracked onto the distraction-level details
| very much because the main conversations are _hard_ and everyone
| involved can understand and opine on the simpler topic.
|
| And that might not be true of the more important activity. It's a
| procrastination-like thing: let's convince ourselves we're being
| productive planning this trivial thing while the other big,
| scary, difficult thing lurks behind us ominously...
| hinkley wrote:
| The canonical case in software teams is arguing about code
| style guidelines.
|
| Almost never do the structural elements of good code
| organization get discussed. Instead we wrap around the axle
| arguing about things like bracket placement and whitespace.
| Usually in a manner which damages team cohesiveness rather than
| building it.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah, kind of the same thing as when you check your email and
| complete a bunch of other trivial tasks because you're
| struggling with what you actually need to get done.
| toxik wrote:
| This is neither the time nor the place to talk about my work
| ethic.
|
| Cleaning my desk or going through my inbox instead of doing
| whatever needs to be done is just my brain cargo-culting
| "working at a computer in an office", not unlike a toddler
| imitating grown-ups. At this point it's very useful to train
| yourself to talk to somebody about what you need to do, or
| write a list of the steps you need to take and keep breaking
| it into smaller parts, until you find it's easier to do what
| you were about to write than to write it.
|
| It's a classic trick, I call it "starting with a corner",
| from when you were a child and you had to color the entire
| background with blue -- it was so off-putting, even if you
| knew /how/ to do it, it was so much work. But if you start
| with a corner, at least you got somewhere.
| DavidAdams wrote:
| I was disappointed that this article didn't include "cargo
| cult," which is my personal favorite tech industry idiom.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| "Cargo Cult Science" -- Richard P. Feynman's 1974 Caltech
| commencement address:
|
| https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
| kemayo wrote:
| I used it in conversation with my spouse the other day
| and was legitimately surprised to realize that it wasn't
| in common usage. Or that I apparently had failed to use
| the term in their hearing in the past 20 years of us
| knowing each other.
| mr-wendel wrote:
| Here, here!
|
| Two tricks in my bag for this: 1. Exactly
| you already said: "write a list of the steps you need to
| take and keep breaking it into smaller parts" :) 2.
| Play competing heel-dragging tasks against each other, when
| possible.
|
| I find that doing this ensures that sustained effort is
| almost guaranteed to be more productive (and it doesn't
| take long) than trying to do a controlled, focused burst to
| get something out of the way.
| treyhuffine wrote:
| If anyone is getting hit with a paywall, you can use this link to
| view the article -
| https://levelup.gitconnected.com/demystifying-5-commonly-use...
| hangonhn wrote:
| There are a couple that I use pretty regularly even outside of
| tech that result in weird looks from people because I didn't
| realize it's not part of the common vernacular:
|
| 1. orthogonal - "Well, this issue is orthogonal to that issue"
|
| 2. impedance mismatch - "I think we have a bit of an impedance
| mismatch here. We want this but all we have is that."
| pattisapu wrote:
| At the Supreme Court a lawyer once said something was "entirely
| orthogonal" to the main issue.
|
| Chief Justice Roberts: "I'm sorry. Entirely what?"
|
| "Orthogonal," the lawyer replied. "Right angle. Unrelated.
| Irrelevant."
|
| Justice Scalia: "What was that adjective? I liked that."
|
| "I think we should use that in the opinion," Scalia later
| added.
|
| "Or the dissent," said Roberts.
|
| https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/supreme_court_word_o...
| elwell wrote:
| "orthogonal" to me is HN-speak. I always feel annoying when I
| use it.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It's interesting how I've heard "impedance mismatch" used much
| more often than "orthogonal" - even though the latter has much
| wider applicability in various disciplines. Impedance mismatch
| is a very specific term in high frequency circuits.
| Orthogonality is relevant anywhere you use vector spaces
| (including linear algebra, real analysis, PDEs, etc).
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I use orthogonal in a negative sense "what you do is orthogonal
| to the strategy".
|
| Looks like everyone has their own interpretation of these
| tells.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Orthogonal often seems to be used in place of "unrelated" but
| deployed by the person to make what they're saying sound
| cleverer than it really is since they've used maths
| terminology!
| BeetleB wrote:
| Not really. It's a culture thing. In certain tech fields, (in
| academia), the concept of orthogonality is important. Hang
| out with those crowds and they'll use "orthogonal" in their
| day to day usage all the time. To them it's not a fancier
| version of "unrelated". It's at the same level.
| Spivak wrote:
| I use orthogonal specifically to say that two or more things
| can be changed independently without affecting the others. I
| don't think unrelated carries that connotation with how
| people actually use it. I've never actually met someone who
| uses unrelated to mean "the absence of relations" literally.
| Maybe it should but I won't get too broken up about it as a
| language descriptivist.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Perhaps, that's just been my impression at least in some
| cases I've seen. It has its valid usages I'm sure.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| A related one I've heard lately (from VC "thought leader"
| types) is _modulo_ in non-numeric contexts.
| dctoedt wrote:
| "Modulo" is itself part of the techie idiom, no?
| raman162 wrote:
| I'm thankful for this article. I've never explicitly searched the
| term bike-shedding and yak-shaving prior. I just had a rough idea
| of what it was. I also enjoyed the backstory explanations.
| [deleted]
| mdip wrote:
| The author is a little more gracious than I would have been:
|
| Bikeshedding -- in a past large enterprise that I worked,
| _bikeshedding_ was most frequently employed in staff meetings
| that involved multiple levels of management. Middle-management
| and administrative staff would inject (often extremely project-
| disruptive) ideas into non-trivial things[0], but things "they
| understood enough to talk about" in an attempt to appear that
| they had a deeper understanding of the project. Thankfully, upper
| management was solid and saw through it, consistently.
|
| [0] Small bullet point to move a task co-ordination database from
| its MSSQL version to a supported version ends up in an
| explanation of why our "Data Warehousing Solution" can't solve
| this problem for us ... it's hard to reason with someone when
| you're coming from a place of knowledge, and _they 're in that
| same place_, just in some other universe where things don't mean
| what they mean here ... I remember "Data Lake" and making a quip
| about drowning, insulting the guy accidentally but not suffering
| any fallout.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| One of my favorites: "We'll burn that bridge when we get to it."
|
| Used when someone is trying to over-anticipate potential problems
| down the road.
| mabbo wrote:
| The one piece of jargon in tech that I _loathe_ is not listed
| here: "Ask". Not as a verb, but as a noun.
|
| "We have a few asks for your team". - ie: we need something from
| you.
|
| From what I have heard, this came out of Microsoft at some point.
| As engineers and managers drifted between companies, it became
| pretty common across Lake Washington over at Amazon. I can only
| hope appropriate quarantine procedures are followed to keep it
| contained in the Seattle region, but I suspect there are cases
| spreading globally at this point.
|
| I don't even know what it is that I hate about it. It's perfectly
| reasonable as a word, and usually I'm a linguistic descriptivist.
| But ugh, that word.
| mavelikara wrote:
| The usage as a noun is quite well established outside tech. For
| example, in finance, market prices are called Asks and Bids. In
| the game of cricket, the target score for the team batting
| second is also called Ask.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - I thought it came from the east coast? DC specifically
| is where I first heard it.
| JackFr wrote:
| Can't stand 'actionable'. Grew up with it meaning "grounds
| for a legal action or lawsuit" (I guess I knew to many
| lawyers) and its still jarring to end meetings with
| actionable next steps.
| mabbo wrote:
| That's a really fair point- it's usage in other industries
| and contexts may be where the term came from.
|
| Specifically, I'm talking about the "ask" noun meaning
| "request for work". "My team has 10 outstanding asks from the
| billing team, but we don't report to their VP so we can
| deprioritize 8 of them".
|
| I would hope that in that context, you don't presume that I
| mean one of the two definitions you've posted :)
| ericbarrett wrote:
| It's far too late for containment; "ask" as a noun was in use
| in the Bay Area in the early 2000s. At this point it's endemic
| :(
| hiddencache wrote:
| Hasn't yet made it over to the UK, thankfully. Let's hope the
| Atlantic is a sufficient barrier...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Does "that's a big ask" count?
| hiddencache wrote:
| Yes, it's a slippery slope
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Then I'm afraid to say, it reached the UK several years
| ago. (Perhaps decades.)
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ask#Noun definition #2.
| (Definition #1 is the directly problematic one.)
| whatshisface wrote:
| I think it originated in the older phrase, "that's a big ask."
| s_dev wrote:
| >"We have a few asks for your team".
|
| Almost as poor a choice as "What learnings did we get from this
| experience"? that has emerged as corporate speak.
|
| There is something unsettling about the word "lessons" missing
| from a persons vocabulary.
| grillvogel wrote:
| "that was a miss"
| duckmysick wrote:
| I'd use "What did we learn [...]"
| nend wrote:
| Oh thanks for this comment. A little over a year ago I started
| working for a Seattle based company (remotely), and this is
| done constantly. I had never heard it before and couldn't
| figure out if it was a really common thing that I missed
| somehow or what.
|
| The company does have a lot of ex-amazons as well.
|
| It's funny to see how these new phrases/keywords are born. I've
| been in the software industry for ~15 years now (longer than
| some, shorter than others), I always get amused when I see new
| phrases gaining traction and spreading. It's like a verbal
| pandemic, from a certain point of view.
| filoleg wrote:
| > a lot of ex-amazons
|
| Not gonna lie, seeing "ex-amazons" instead of "ex-amazonians"
| definitely gave me a light chuckle and a mental image of
| incredibly tall giant women who somehow decided to quit being
| amazons and ended up becoming of a rather average height.
| standardUser wrote:
| I think the vast majority of corporate/industry speak is self-
| important gate-keeping, but you kind of lost me on this one to
| be honest!
| jmfldn wrote:
| Sadly this sort of thing caught on in the UK too where the
| tidal wave of US corporate speak was impossible to hold back.
| It's rife in the tech sector and beyond.
|
| I find all of this sort of thing; "blue sky thinking", "touch
| base", "leverage", "reach out" "deliverables" and so on, to be
| substitutes for clarity and real meaning. Just speak clearly
| and like a normal person please! Quite apart from murdering the
| language you often find that, whilst this sort of speech sounds
| clever on the surface, it's often hiding vagueness and half-
| baked thoughts. It gives the illusion of substance.
|
| "Lets touch base offline on those key deliverables when we have
| enough bandwidth and ensure our thinking is joined up". Makes
| me think of David Brent from The Office!
| cedricd wrote:
| Yeah, this one bugs me too. I try to use 'requests' instead.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Well, it's a euphemism. It's being used a sugar-coated variety
| instead of the perfectly good words "request", "requirement",
| "demand" etc (whichever is appropriate).
|
| The one I dislike is "issue" as in "we have some issues". No,
| you mean "we have some problems". But "issue" just sounds nicer
| than "problem", I guess. That one is thoroughly lost.
| vikramkr wrote:
| Issue is a euphemism for problem? Those two words are
| completely equivalent to me, relaying identical information,
| neither sounding nicer than the other.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I heard it in Philadelphia a decade ago.
| klyrs wrote:
| If you want to live a long and happy life, embrace neologism.
| Language is fluid, and when you decide to stop learning, you
| become an irrelevant fossil. Corpspeak is easy to hate, but is
| it actually the neologism that you hate, or the suits that use
| them?
| kens wrote:
| Can anyone explain "loop" as in "interview loop"? It doesn't
| make sense to me but a lot of people use it as a normal phrase.
| Is it an Amazon thing?
| mabbo wrote:
| It's definitely big at Amazon. And I can tell you why.
|
| Typically, recruiters try to setup 4 interviewees with 4
| interviewers. You 'loop' through them, like speed dating.
| It's "an interview loop".
|
| At least, that's my interpretation.
| dsego wrote:
| What's the difference between an ask and a request?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > What's the difference between an ask and a request?
|
| An "ask" is part of a business negotiation, a "request" is
| usually interpersonal. An "ask" invites a conversation about
| what it will take to make it happen (money, etc.) while a
| "request" invites acceptance or rejection.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Pithy statement of the principle (more often ignored than
| followed) of:
|
| _Don 't invent a new word when there's a perfectly good one
| already available._
|
| "What's the difference between a learning and a lesson?"
| would be another good question.
| gkop wrote:
| No difference
| walshemj wrote:
| In the original sense "that's a big ask" has implications
| that the ask is not practical and is received with a raised
| eyebrow.
|
| A bit like the quote from yes minister
|
| "That's very brave of you, minister. An extremely courageous
| decision,"
|
| followed up by the explanation
|
| "Oh, yes! "Controversial" only means "this will lose you
| votes". "Courageous" means "this will lose you the
| election"!"
| antiterra wrote:
| Ask as a noun in that sense goes back to Old English. The OED
| has a 13th century cite with the alternate spelling axe:
|
| c1275 (>?a1200) Layamon Brut (Calig.) (1963) l. 529 Eouer axe
| ich eow leue.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Whenever I hear a idiom I cringe inside, but go along. I do judge
| people by their use of cliches, idioms, and bad similies.
| eplanit wrote:
| I agree. I've been in this game 35 years, and it has been true
| most all that time. The examples in TFA are really all rather
| recent -- and frankly quite stupid (IMHO). Yak shaving is a
| thin reference to Ren and Stimpy, but requires complete
| explanation for it to make any sense; and, when it does, it's
| just dumb. If an analogy or metaphor requires much explanation,
| then it really isn't very good. It should 'click'.
|
| But, I go along with it, too. At least the new cliches replace
| the tired old Star Trek/Wars allusions. Let the new generation
| have their day.
| daveslash wrote:
| I usually try to avoid using idioms in a group setting, or with
| people I don't know very well. I also usually cringe when
| people use them. That said, I do find them useful in private
| conversations. For example, in candid conversations with my
| manager I might say _" Hey Boss, I think we've got a lot of
| bike shedding going on; folks on the team are eager to help,
| but they're attacking problems that they know how to solve
| first, not the problems that represent the biggest timeline
| risk."_ or I might say _" Hey Boss, I know it looks like we're
| all off in the weeds on this project, but there's a lot of
| necessary Yak Shaving going on - I'd be happy to dig into some
| specifics/details if you like."_ ~ In private conversations
| with people you know/trust, some of these idioms are convenient
| shorthand.
| offmycloud wrote:
| The article's author is really crushing it.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Honestly every industry and even every company in every industry
| has unique lingo and idioms. It's a large part of your first year
| at a new company: mapping and digesting the differences in
| language.
|
| Most companies I've worked for had elaborate glossaries for their
| lingo. Usually dozens to hundreds of pages long.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "Architecting" ... you see, us software people don't design
| things. We're not working with construction, where architects
| design buildings. We're software people, we architect software.
| There's no design, just architecting. If you need to design an
| architecture, you architect, and while you're doing that, you're
| architecting, since you're an architect.
|
| I am frankly surprised that there are not more noun/verb
| overloading examples in our field. Once you've verb'ed architect
| while also using it as a noun, every similar process seems like
| small potatoes. Or maybe it's just "architecture" that's odd. For
| example, "implementor(s)", "implement", "implementation". No
| problems there. Somehow, the thing that architects do ("design"
| or "design architecture") got lost, and we verb'ed it.
| bitwize wrote:
| Ideally the architect would get together with the developers
| and they'd all start _solutioning_...
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