A Little Too On Point

I’m sure that there has been a time in my life, and will again be a time in my life, when the skewering of tech industry management jargon done at Rands In Repose was/will be hilarious.

But I’ve got to tell you, right at the moment, some of those things are just a little too on target for me to laugh, you know.

Examples:

• Alignment — “I’ve yet to convince people that I am correct.”
• Executive Summary — A brief assessment given to executives. If this summary were shown to those who actually do the work, they would giggle.
• Future Proofing — Architecting a product so that it accounts for things that don’t yet exist and can’t be predicted.
• Heads-up — “You’re screwed.”
• Milestones — Magically created dates that mean nothing, but give executives the impression that progress is being made.
• Socialization — The process by which an idea that no one wants to do is forced on others.
• Solution — “I don’t know what your product does.”

Read the rest at the original article.

I felt a little better about the Management Glossary at the same site when I started browsing it, seeing definitions that I quite liked such as;

Architect: An engineer who knows what he/she is doing. If an architect says something which appears insane, it’s worth firing off a couple follow-up questions as they are often smarter than you.

and:

NIH (“Not Invented Here”): Term to describe behavior where an engineering team will not consider working with anyone’s code except their own. It’s not that the external code is good or bad, it’s just foreign which means it must be reviewed, reformatted… oh, what the hell. LET’S REWRITE THE WHOLE DAMNED THING. Billions of dollars have been lost to NIH. I mean it. Billions.

But then my eye settled on the punch-line to the whole affair…

Computer Associates: A sixteen billion dollar company based in New York that you don’t know. Seriously, name a single product by these guys. I dare you.

Ouch.