A sticky problem that evaporated
blog.plover.com
blog.plover.com
Having worked as a bioinformatician on the interface of wet lab biologists and software devs, this became blatantly apparent.
Most IT people i know actually like it when people outside their field don't understand what they're doing when they're using jargon and acronyms and technical slang. It makes them look bright (or so they think).
One thing i like to tell people outside the field is daily software development is 99% convention over very simple concepts wrapped in jargon (aka: that's the way it works because people designed it this way, and gave it this name, not because of some fundamental law of physics), and 1% of "hard" things (the very rare times in your carrier when you had to implement a brand new complex algorithm yourself). The percentage may vary depending on the particular job you have, but unless you're working in R&D that's pretty much the idea.
Once you realize that you actually are brighter when you manage to remove all the cruft around what you're doing and explain it simply to "normal" people, all of the sudden you're much more successful at doing it.
This applies to any specialized job. Some will use laymen's terms and explanations when talking to people outside the field so they can also follow (if it is appropriate to do so). Others will insist on using the most arcane jargon and convoluted forms regardless of actual need, possibly to wow the audience. Or maybe because they can't explain it in simple terms or don't want to bother with "dumbing it down".
(I've found this often requires constructing a sequence of explanation - almost a kind of a narrative, that starts with an answer to the question "what are we trying to do and why do we care about it?", and is followed by introducing constraints, until it becomes obvious what the concept is, what its moving parts are, and why we actually care about it. But then again, a good analogy can cut through all that. In the article, "just like TV", that was perfect.)
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[0] - I mean, an average human is an adequate stochastic generator of surjections from words to concepts, under adequacy criterion defined as the capacity of ingroup/outgroup border delineation.
I was once diagnosed with "non-specific gingival inflammation" which apparently meant "You have a mild gum infection and we have no idea why."
- We haven't yet figured out what's causing it, but - [the official name for the body part involved], - is notably red and puffy, which is probably caused by an infection, - but there could be any number of other root causes, we haven't run sufficient tests to find the exact cause, and we're not worried enough to recommend a million expensive and invasive tests for what's 99% likely to be a common, simple infection."
Jargon is very information dense, and everyone in every field uses it to convey a lot of information quickly. Take a phrase that would be very clear to any reader here: "there's too much RF from my Wi-Fi router, so I switched from a Bluetooth mouse to USB". Suppose this is how I fixed my friend's mouse problems, and he got the gist of what was happening but didn't really understand the details. His girlfriend comes over and asks why he suddenly has a wired mouse. He hands her a piece of paper where I've written exactly the sentence above, she reads it, says "oh, weird. Makes sense though."
Now, my friend may not understand every word of what I wrote. Even "mouse" is jargon, albeit something that's been around forever so it's widely understood. However, his technical girlfriend would immediately understand what the actual problem was and why that was a good solution to it. The diagnosis wasn't for him specifically. The diagnosis was for the next technical person to understand where we're at with the problem.
You see this a lot on reddit's /r/explainlikeimfive, but the best example I've seen is the answers here: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/55343/how-to-ex... - with the top-voted XKCD cartoon as a counterexample.
> Clearly, that was what I should have said in the first place, but I hadn't thought of it.
as in the linked article as opposed to
> Most IT people i know actually like it when people outside their field don't understand what they're doing when they're using jargon and acronyms and technical slang. It makes them look bright (or so they think).
Obviously, we all have different experiences, and I'm not trying to say what you've seen isn't a thing. But I'm happy to report that most of the people I know don't like it when their communication is ineffective and are happy when they find an effective way to remove a layer of jargon (at least as long as it doesn't come with a loss of precision) to make things clearer for everyone.
For example "a random process" could mean "any process in existence" whereas "a stochastic process" clearly states stochastic as being a property of the process.
I however agree that things can sometimes get a bit wrapped up in sounding cool just to sound cool.
1. Stochastic.
2. Unbiased.
3. Typical and average.
4. Unprompted or unjustifiable.
5. Habitually using non sequiturs.
So, I might use a random sort algorithm like, I don't know, heapsort. Or I might be reading through some code and find a random sort algorithm --- why is there a mergesort in the middle of this calendar routine? Or, if you want a random sort algorithm, you should be sure to use the Fisher–Yates shuffle. Or, to avoid the quadratic worst case of treesort and quicksort with high probability, you can convert them into random sort algorithms by picking partition elements randomly.
Of these four random sort algorithms, only the fourth is stochastic. (I haven't figured out how a sort algorithm could habitually use non sequiturs.)
Random is a property of the world itself; stochastic means "we allow ourselves to think of this process as random because we can't/don't want to deal with it exactly".
Following this is the difference between Random Differential Equations and Stochastic Differential Equations.
At least where I come from, the term has often been used to (successfully) diminish skills that I'd consider essential.
Unless you're happy to have someone above you handle any and all communication, so that you can disappear behind your screens, you need to be able to communicate effectively. For us "effective" can mean "Geek Boy" language/jargon, but in most other cases we have to step it up. But you knew that already :)
Soft as a word feels like the skills. They are wooly, malleable, and many other adjectives of imprecise application to the topic at hand!
I have never, ever, seen this happen. I have seen lots of people complaining about it on twitter, though.
Can you give us three concrete examples of times people have used the term to discount soft skills?
From where I come from, people obsessed by soft skills are those that hardly have any "hard skills" to talk about.
It's like you either are demonstrably good in your craft OR you have "lots of soft skills". You can never have both because :
- If you have neither hard nor soft skills, you should be fired - and no ont wants that
- If you have both hard and soft skills, you should be promoted - and no one wants that either
So "soft skills" are used as a modulator to keep the status quo. And the best thing is that you dont need to really grade/score/assess them, just tell the employees to "work on them".
It's my single biggest selling point when I'm a consultant. I'm very technical, always was, but I also have great language skills. I've written tech books, tech news, regular news, interviewed people, plenty of academic writing, and lots of creative fiction writing, so I've got a lot of experience crafting messages. This has helped me immensely in my career as I can explain things in terms the client can understand. People will pay extra for being able to understand where their money is going and why.
So after explaining that it wouldn't work they spent a lot of time with the product owner guy holding a bit of paper next to the monitor until the color matched.
Then he walked out, only to run back upset after checking it on his laptop: "you changed it!"