Buzz Words That Suck: What is this blog about?
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
“Tech guys” are crazy. Software developers, IT admins, system admins, networking admins, quality engineers, CTOs, CIOs… You name it, they’re crazy.
Many industries have a unique language by which the people in that industry speak intelligently to each other in a shorthand that means something to everyone else.
Take the medical field for instance. There is a plethora of words in medicine, usually based in Latin, that give a medical professional a quick and precise definition of a symptom or illness. While a layman would say “heart attack”, a medical professional would say “acute myocardial infarction”, and that language much more accurately describes the symptoms present in the patient.
Technology has a special language too. In it, you’ll see words like “scalable”, “codify”, “big data”, “metadata”, “bleeding edge”, and many, many others. The difference between these words and those medical ones? The medical ones actually MEAN something.
Those “tech guys” we called crazy? Why they are crazy is because they think making up big words that are impressive-sounding to the average person, but that actually add no meaning or precision to the discussion, makes them seem smarter. Within the field, these words are used to prove to one’s colleagues that they are on the cutting edge of technology.
To put it another way, a guy with six monitors on his desk is making up for SOMETHING.
“But you guys are tech guys, right? So are you crazy too?”
Yep. We are. The difference is we KNOW we’re crazy and we don’t inflict our crazy on the rest of society.
We LOVE playing around with new technologies just as much as the next guy. But we do NOT believe that using big, fancy, imprecise words to describe those technologies adds value to our clients or adds dollars to our hourly rates. The rest of the world sees these words and thinks, “Wow, this CTO sounds really smart. I should invest.” We see it and think, “That guy’s mom didn’t hug him enough.”
We believe in telling the truth about technology. This is going to make some of our competitors, colleagues, and past bosses upset. We don’t mind. We care more about unveiling the truths in technology because technology is so meshed into the average person’s everyday life that it is virtually inescapable.
To that end, this blog will debunk myths about the “language” of software and technology, reveal what the average user of any given word is actually trying to say, and help educate anyone who is interested in the truth about how to interpret technologists and their products.
And hey, if you really WANT to pay us more per hour, we won’t say no.
By: Cynthia Delaria, CEO/COO @ Raika Technologies, LLC