What non-geeks hear when you speak techie | Hacker News Reader

What non-geeks hear when you speak techie

newyorker.com

86 pointspetewarden27 comments

Excellent article, misleading post title. It's a satire on book marketing trends from a writer's point of view. It attacks the Web 2.0 trend. The article is not about "techie" speak, at all.

It has some pearls on the situation of a decaying industry.

Coming from the marketing world, this is all too true. Marketers think that everyone cares as much about fads as they do, so they think that when they spew about them everyone knows what the hell they mean.

Everyone who is very deep in a single area with jargon and fads has a hard time sorting out what is a reasonable level of knowledge to expect.

In this sense, marketers & programmers are kin.

Yes but really really bad post title. Is nothing to do with techie talk, that was the first thing that bugged me.

I think the use of the term "geek" is reasonable: I am seeing that term apply more and more to anyone with a deep/obsessive interest in a subject.

I agree. "Geek" has become, to me, anyway, a synonym for "enthusiast". One can be a computer geek, or a business geek, or an artisan bread geek. One characteristic trait of any kind of geekdom is using jargon with an inappropriate audience.

You'll have to pardon me, I've got a batard that needs to proof.

Its also rarely seen as insulting these days.

The message of the article (or the combination of the article and title) appeared to be that geeks should work to make tech-speak more "manageable" for business types.

While this might be true in specific situations X and Y, as a general rule I disagree quite strongly. We have technical words because they are an accurate way of describing stuff. I would much rather have business and marketing people speaking with their real jargon than "talking down" to me. I'm perfectly capable of consulting a dictionary or asking for assistance if a business type throws a strange term my way. This is because I respect business knowledge and don't trivialize what those people do and/or expect it to be easily understood.

Sure, marketing types shouldn't need to get a CS degree. But if we should definitely be using real words like "router" and "system memory" and not invoke a whole basket full of failed birds-and-bees analogies to explain these concepts (at least not by default. If they ask for an explanation an analogy can be invoked.)

The submitter's point (which I realize is not the original sense of the article) is that technical jargon is needlessly complex, complex to no useful end. If network topology and time complexity and so on were really one-to-one with nice neat English words, we wouldn't need 4-year (or masters, or doctorate) degrees in technical fields, and to assume that alternate English words exist is to assume the simplicity of technical work. But every technical term exists for a needful purpose--to describe something for which an existing word is inadequate. Thus in the general case, the technical term for something is the optimal word to use, in that it most-precisely describes its object.

This reveals (on the part of people with this mindset, not necessarily the submitter) some sort of superiority complex, or at least not showing proper respect for people who are probably every bit as smart as you.

This is indeed a comparison of how book promotion works now versus then, told in magazine-friendly fictional story format. While the use of awkward phrasing could be pinned on the lack of proper terminology, much of it is obviously conceived out of thin air in order to underscore the rapid pace of technology change, as well as make it a more fun, more accessible read.

Actually, this is what I hear when non-geeks try to fake "techie."

That's because to non-geeks, this and "techie" are the same.

Instructions received by the woman previously known as Julie and currently known as online shopping facilitator.

Marketing: What to do when we are having a sale:

"Post to your tumblr and submit to all major social news services. It's better if these get submitted by your followers (you can let them know by tweeting), but you can do it yourself if necessary. Check on these a few times a day (as often as you can) and jump in identifying yourself as the author if they seem to be getting any traction. Respect the norms of whatever community you are participating in."

IT: What to do when we are having a sale:

"Log in to your site admin account using your username and password. Edit each of the product entites for price. Swap 'RRP', with 'Display Price' and reduce the number in the priceA and priceB fields to the appropriate levels. If the sale is a promotional sale make sure that the 'customFied3' is set to 'false.' If you are doing this for a large number of items there is an online sale applet available to help you. The marketing department informed me that they are planning to use rss feeds in their viral marketing campaigns. To enable this, tick the appropriate box in the a 'advanced settings tab.' Note 'xml(rss1) is not the same as 'xml(sitemap)' & 'xml(basefeed).' I'm not sure if you want those other two on, that is something you should discuss with Greg from marketing."

Its funny that IT tends to be so antagonistic towards marketing.

What if it all made perfect sense and you were, in fact, the clueless one?

I'm just saying...

What you hear when non-geeks try to fake "techie" is what non-geeks hear when you speak techie. That's why, when they try to fake something that sounds to them like what they've heard previously, it comes out that way.

There is actually a subtle difference, which is why even non-scientists can see when Star Trek, for example, is BSing. The cadence of fake tech talk is all wrong. Apollo 13 was pretty good about this, actually; even though I don't know the lander or anything like it I could follow what was going on and it sounded right.

Title here bears no relation to title of article.

That's my fault - I wanted to highlight what I thought would be interesting to HN readers, the passages of tech-speak, eg:

"If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent."

This gave me a horrible feeling of recognition, he completely captured the rhythm and sound of a lot of my attempts at technical explanation. Substituting nonsense words for some of the real terms gave me a feel for how they must sound to other people, hence the title.

I have to say this part of the passage made me laugh out loud, it's funny and captures what it probably sounds like to non-techies...

I was with a bunch of nurse and doctor friends and they launched into acronym-speak and jargon. Every profession has its own jargon.

I think non-geeks don't know or particularly care what technology/acronyms they rely on/are using as long they like the experience (e.g. teenagers with iPhones - do they really care it's Objective-C or openGL ES?)

> Every profession has its own jargon.

Exactly. Just switch to bloomberg or msnbc and listen to how "cable breaks out against yen out from consolidation range which was a result of previous head and shoulders resistance level." I made that up, but could be true and make sense.

Funniest thing is, it did make sense & I understood exactly what you meant.

Translated to non-trader speak.

The cable (British pound)

breaks out (starts a significant upward movement)

against the yen (Japanese Yen - ie, we're talking currencies, foreign exchange or forex here)

from a consolidation range> (a period where the markets 'consolidate' against each other, ie, just get bunched up & go nowhere - it's where the traders sit around, scratch their arses & nobody knows what to do or what's happening)

which was the result of a previous head and shoulders (this is a pattern where this is a slight peak (looks like a human shoulder) which drops down followed by a larger peak (the head) which drops again followed by another slight peak, roughly the same size as the previous peak (the other shoulder))

resistance level (this explains the consolidation bit before - namely, it's a level above which the market seems to have difficult getting above - large numbers like Dow 10,000 are like this. It's kinda mystical mumbo jumbo, but enough people believe it & it becomes true. So the market hovers, maybe goes up to, occasionally slightly breaks, but always pulls back below this 'resistance level' - until it breaks through & takes off - as it just did)

in other words: british pound is getting stronger against the yen, after pissing about for quite a while.

[uhh, just in case anyone was curious, bored and/or didn't already know. hehe]

I remember reading an essay comparing engineer-speak and manager-speak to an "impedance mismatch"? Anyone know what I'm talking about? Wish I could find it ...

By Rands, I think.

That was....weird. I understand the intent, but in my experience it isn't quite that thick of a fog.

As startups go, the successful ones worry about how they sound to the layman and explain things clearly, using everyday analogies and can relate to experiences "normal" people have.

Although obviously "normal" is a relative term :-P

For some people I'm sure it's a thicker fog.

Was any of that jargon fake? A good chunk of it was real and recognizable.

I'm certainly guilty of "speaking techie" at times, even though I try not to.

The hardest part of not doing it is that I don't mind if other people speak in the jargon of their profession, since I'm always interested in learning more about anything, and I'd love to know wtf they're talking about.

Most people don't think like that, sadly.

The real trick is gauging your audience. I think that's where perhaps some techies (and some subset of any profession) fall down. If you assume the person knows too little about tech then you can come off condescending, if you assume they know too much then you go right over their heads.

Actually it's no different than any conversation on any topic you might have with someone, it's just that in tech the jargon can tend to get thick fast.

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