Especially when it comes to business. I just got off of a meeting with a company that focuses on “monetizing the user experience journey” and the amount of jargon that was used just left me yearning to go tend a field instead.
This is what Franz Kafka means in some of his stories. The tyranny of bureaucracy. A structure and organisation so complex, it’s oppressing the individual, both physically and mentally.
I forgot what the term is, but there is the idea that using jargon heavily is a way to exclude the masses from discussions and information.
But yeah, this elitism, even in the business world, is a flex saying “I know better and I am better than you. Therefore, I am superior. I can control you.” I would say that my industry is not nearly as abused with jargons, as in not mincing words to say nothing of value, but my current company and work is definitely Kafkaesque.
the amount of jargon that was used just left me yearning to go tend a field instead.
Haha then you should watch Office Space! Personally, I know of someone who is in IT and a son of a farmer. He said that he’d rather be a farmer like his dad, in his home country of India, if money is not an issue. Me, I’d rather be a polymath if money is not an issue.
Unnecessary complexity seems like the basis the U.S. legal system and of U.S. tax code.
Nobody can break the law if nobody can understand the law well enough to prosecute lawbreaking.
Uttering the phrase, “monetizing the user experience” should be punishable by death
“Our vision is to create Value for the shareholders.”
The phrase “create value” drives me up a wall.
Sometimes we don’t need more “value”, we just need something that gets the job done. See: forced appreciation and housing prices.
By providing solutions in an ever-changing dynamic landscape… by utilising cutting edge machine learning… bla bla blockchain… with cloud computing… and high definition whatever… something something profit margins…
Alright Randy, lay off the ket
Services too
This field?
Sometimes the complication is a smoke screen too.
Case in point… I picked up a contract to be the corporate Change Manager for a manufacturing company just before COVID. It’s the type of company that makes appliances and other things that are destined for the garbage pile. Not really anything of note.
The guy I was taking over for had put in his notice and was moving on and had 2 days to train me. Fortunately, the ITIL system they used was ServiceNow, which I already had a lot of experience with. He got to the monthly report and in his own words he called the method of generating it “byzantine” and it was a horrible process that took almost an entire day to finish. Fortunately, he gave me step by step instructions that were accurate.
Side note, the process for generating came from my boss. She was one of these people that had just enough intelligence to be dangerous. Yeah, this contract was a fun one.
So I used my decades of reporting experience and broke down how all the reports were generated. It turned out that the Director had never really learned how to use Pivot tables and that was why there were dozens of steps in generating about 7 different reports. I took about two days to write an Excel spreadsheet (because SNOW Reporting was not capable of generating some of these reports) and automated the entire thing. I ran the original process concurrently with my new spreadsheet for another month and they both generated the exact same numbers, I canned the old process.
But I did NOT tell a soul about it. Everyone, including my boss, thought I was still taking a full day to generate those stupid reports, when I was actually doing it in 5 minutes. 4 of which were waiting for ServiceNow to run its report and download it into a CSV file.
Oh I had tried to let my boss know that I had made myself a lot more efficient, she just got angry and actually yelled at me for a couple of minutes, then she promptly forgot about it. So I just kept it to myself after that. My plan was to just pass on the old process to the next poor schmuck to get this contract, but instead the reporting part of it was handed over to someone I actually liked. She told me flat out when she found out she was taking the Change Reporting piece that she was terrified of that process. So I had her sit with me at my desk and showed her the new spreadsheet. You would have thought I bought her a puppy.
So sometimes the complications in the business world are defense mechanisms for people’s time.
Totally agree, it’s a harder to debunk way of protecting your time. Grandpa story time!
I follow something I call the rule of thirds. Of any three unverifiable improvements in workflow, two remain secret and they and their saved effort are solely mine while the smallest goes to the company. If I bust out 12 in a row, the company gets the smallest four. Maybe three if I’m feeling catty. I occasionally dole out one of the retained 2/3 when I need to look good for a review or something.
I learned this from an employer a few years back. I maxed out the first year and made a ton of improvements, so my first review was stellar. My second year’s review, though, noted that I hadn’t kept up with the previous year, so it was just a “meets expectations”. I was outperforming most of my peers, but not previous year me, so they thought I was starting to slack off. That’s when I realized many managers are idiots so you have to game the system if you want to succeed.
I hope her reports continued to “take an entire day”.
The entire concept of capitalism rests on selling something for more than it’s worth. This includes your own time and physical labor.
The problem is that we all got indoctrinated to believe that capitalism is a meritocracy, instead of a snake oil selling competition.
We’re instead to believe a high paycheck means you are high in importance. But in reality, since this is capitalism, it just means your high paycheck is now a great reason to waste people’s time to feel important. Selling your time as valuable while actually wasting it as much as possible for profit.
Which is now the only thing that trickles down. Well paid, but ultimate skilless idiots all making decisions to massively waste their time and everyone else’s so they can feel their paycheck is earned.
People who want to get shit done, don’t get these kinds of jobs simple because they’re too good at finishing them. Making all the other idiots they work with look like idiots. So actual skills are seen as a detriment to holding these positions as they quickly reveal how much time is being wasted by every single Csuite whose paycheck is bigger than their abilities. (Which is from my experience damn near all of them).
Worked with Apple, Google, Sony, and more. All have the same problem at the top: idiots delegating impossible promises to people that have actual skills then making them take the fall when it inevitably goes wrong.
I’m a socialist so no big fan of capitalism. That said, I don’t think capitalism is just about selling things for more than they’re worth.
We add value through our labor. Think of a log, it has some value as raw material. A worker might cut it into planks, and another might make a table out of it. It’s now worth more than when it started. The value came from our labor, and we should be compensated for it.
The issue with capitalism is that the few benefit off the work of many. Based on the rest of your comment I think we’re pretty much in agreement, but just want to highlight that as a worker-owner (vs robber baron) there’s nothing wrong with charging for what you’re worth.
Yes. Trades are between people with different values of the subject; no problem there. Seller values it less than buyer, they trade, everyone benefits. Negotiation is about splitting the difference and trying to get a fair price.
That can all be free and fair if the traders do not have excessive market power.
Capitalism is about accumulating market power, or other power that can influence the terms of trade and extract more than a fair share. Or worse distort the information about the trade so the one party mis-perceives the subject or the terms.
The classic case is to monopolise the means of production, or exclude workers from borrowing on fair terms to buy their own tools. Or prevent new market entrants from scaling to the minimum efficient economy of scale. So that capitalist can offer unfair terms of trade to workers and extract more than their fair share of the surplus.
Try reading “Enterprise Level” code
It’s factories all the way down
I don’t know how professional developers do it. My head starts spinning as soon as my files or functions go more than 2 or 3 layers deep.
Proper abstractions should make code more legible, not less. Sadly, most of the code I read both professionally and for fun does not follow this practice.
Code is for other humans to read. The fact that it can compile into something runnable on a computer is secondary.
I like to tell my juniors “readable code is maintainable code”. 9 out of 10 times a comment could instead just be choosing better names.
Funny someone downvoted you - clearly they’ve never dealt with something un- or poorly documented.
Oh, that’s just some cunt [email protected] who stalks me and downvotes all of my comments.
Yes. They also use buzzwords to cover up the fact they don’t know what they are talking about. They tell you the wrong information and then say “I never said that” later. Their mistakes are miscommunications, yours are sabotage. They cover themselves and throw someone else under the bus because most people are cowards. They will change their mind constantly but expect you to be dependable.
And we are meant to smile and accept it all.
I see you have met my last boss!
Middle men all the way.
Bruh, I still don’t understand the economy…
Feels kinda like they are making up shit as they go…
If nobody understands what my job is, they have no idea whether I’m doing it.
No, this. or maybe “too.”
To be fair advertising, marketing, and sales has always been straight up evil which is required for this particular society to function, at least in the short term. Buuuuuut will likely continue for much longer.
Big/many word is good replacement for big idea!
I’m not a corporate penguin, but I’m in a position where I often find myself in meetings with them. While there’s a lot of corporate jargon, such as “Let’s circle back on that”, and other common phrases, I am so happy that my industry doesn’t have a “user experience” to “monetize”.
We are the survey equivalent of hotdog vendors: you pay us, we do geophysical surveys for you. Sure, there’s an armada of geophysicists that work oit the specifications regarding the type of condiments and hotdog buns, and the hotdog is produced on a ship, but at the end of the day, I like how little fluff there is.
