Secret language | Hacker News Reader

Secret language

joelonsoftware.com

95 pointsstakent24 comments

The hiring manager probably meant for it to be an internal only posting but failed at posting. The training you get very early on as a manager-of-managers covers how to write good job postings, and avoiding ridiculous acronyms is part of it.

Fear of IP taint has traditionally kept most MSFT teams away from direct external contact, except through legal-approved intermediaries. Maybe Joel has forgotten that after fifteen years away? I'd stake money he didn't "talk to anyone outside the company" when working on VBA :-)

Joel's not really contributing anything here, and as I've said elsewhere, this is marketing-speak, not Microsoft-speak. At least, I never heard anyone talk like this when I was there over the summer. I learned some new words ("dogfooding") and people do call Ballmer "SteveB" (just as they often refer to coworkers by their email aliases), but I can assure you this posting is as incomprehensible to most Microsoft engineers as it is to you.

DogFooding is such a universally well known phrase in the technical industry, that I was utterly shocked when I ran into someone for whom it was new. It may be an insular phrase, but it's at least insular to a _very_ broad community.

Fair enough. I've been a student my whole life, and had never worked for a software company before, which is why it was new to me. If you met someone 10 years into his career, then sure, that could be surprising - but everyone has to hear the term for the first time at some point.

Microsoft is certainly not the only guilty party in this respect. Overuse of jargon and, more egregiously, failure to appropriately define all but the most universally well-known abbreviations at the point where the abbreviated form is first used in the text is a pervasive problem in the field. For example, the first few responses to this article use a total of four domain-specific abbreviations (IP, MSFT, VBA, and DSL), none of which were defined by the authors. Worse, within the field, the meaning of one of the abbreviations (DSL) is context-sensitive and the author's intended meaning is the lesser known one. The appropriate convention, used in virtually every other technical domain, is to explicitly state what the abbreviation or acronym stands for when it is first used in the text and then use it as much as you like in the rest of the text. Only a very small subset of abbreviations that are certain to be recognized by everyone in the field, regardless of their subspecialty, may be used without defining the term.

Somehow I find it difficult to believe that anyone who even knows about Hacker News, much less anyone who actually reads it would have interpreted the one comment to have said "any model complicated enough is best expressed in terms of a Digital Subscriber Line".

Unless there is some other computer-related meaning for the abbreviation DSL (besides Domain-Specific Language, of course) that I'm not aware of. :-D

The point is not that anyone would mistakenly believe that Digital Subscriber Line was the correct interpretation of DSL in that context. The point is that the nature of human cognition is such that Digital Subscriber Line is the term most likely to pop into consciousness first and it will be the wrong answer. The abbreviation DSL is not widely recognized as meaning Domain-Specific Language, or at least not so widely known that one may reasonably assume that any practitioner in the field will immediately know what you are talking about. They'll know that Digital Subscriber Line doesn't fit into context, but they won't necessarily know what meaning the author was trying to convey.

Not to disagree, but when I see DSL (and other acronyms of its ilk) I treat it the same as any other homonym.

In fact, when I read in general I read the whole sentence and parse it all together and not on a word by word basis. I thought most people read this way so that they are more resilient to typos and other small errors.

So if they simply do not recognize the term DSL->Domain Specific Language acronym, readers simply mentally flag it as a possible typo/other error instead of confusing the telecom notion with the um.. trendy ruby-world? term.

We'll connect offline about when I have some free cycles to get that on my radar.

Judging from their performance in the marketplace, it sounds like their internal jargon describes a model of the competitive landscape that's pretty successful. Just like in programming, any model complicated enough is best expressed in terms of a DSL.

Already noted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022403

I find the similarity between the style of jargon in that job posting and the jargon used by the Church of Scientology ('sea-org', 'OT', 'out-ethics' etc.) a little creepy.

There's no reason for a job posting to be jargon-free, but the jargon used should be understandable by anyone who might be qualified for the role. I find it hard to believe that detailed knowledge of MSFT culture would be required to work in a group whose goal is to help the company compete with open source stuff. If anything, this knowledge is a detriment. Had the poster used acronyms like FOSS, I would have no issue.

Jargon arises because it is useful for compressing information exchanged within a given culture. If this really was an internal posting which was accidentally exposed, what is the problem with using the jargon of Microsoft's culture?

What's a v-team?

"They are not supposed to work on campus (although they may attend meetings, etc.) and should not have an office or telephone assigned to them. These contractors are called "v dashes" because the first two characters of their alias/userID are v-. There are no restrictions on how long a "v dash" can work for Microsoft." http://www.edsguild.org/contracting.htm

This is not how it works in practice. In reality a "v-team" is made up of "vendors" who are not full-time employees but unlike agency temps they don't have a limit on how long they can work at Microsoft without a break. They do very much work on campus, though often they tend not to have their own offices (instead they work in bays or are doubled up with others).

I'm guessing they mean 'virtual team', maybe? i.e. a team spread across a bunch of reporting lines, functions or offices that works on this one specific project, forming a 'virtual' team.

Yes, exactly. "v-team" is Microsoft-speak for a virtual team, most often a subset of people in a larger team who do not all report to the same lower-level manager. If you have a team of 12 people, then select 4 of them to deal with issues in the product's installation and set-up, you might call them "the setup v-team".

Not to be confused with "v dash", which refers to a contract employee from a vendor. In the Microsoft email system, contractors have an email that begins with "v-" and temps/interns have an email that begins with "t-", and just as employees are sometimes referred to by their abbreviated email aliases, contractors and interns as a group are referred to as "v dash" or "t dash".

Now you know... although I doubt you'll ever need to know :)

Spot on. V-team also often connotes geographic dispersal, as well as reporting to different orgs.

IBM say DASD when they mean "hard disk"...

OK, but to be fair to MS, this appears to have been written by a nonnative English speaker. Indian, I think. So there's another factor at work.

What points that out to you?

"Top of mind" doesn't quite sound native to me. The use of the ampersand like that seems Indian too. Finally the exclamation point is slight evidence.

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