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.
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.
Uttering the phrase, “monetizing the user experience” should be punishable by death
“Our vision is to create Value for the shareholders.”
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If nobody understands what my job is, they have no idea whether I’m doing it.
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.
Big/many word is good replacement for big idea!
Kinda like this?
This is true, but I like to say
“Things should be a simple as possibe, but no simpler!”.
Some people also have a tendency to over simplfy things to the point that they are substandard.
You must work where i work, in public education. Too many administrators without enough to do, who just keep stirring the pot and then scheduling meetings about the shitstorm they created.
If you get good at it, you’ll become a CEO.
