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This is totally an incomplete thought, and I'm not trying to be down on this author in particular: It's interesting to see a lot of management thoughts and col

This is totally an incomplete thought, and I'm not trying to be down on this author in particular: It's interesting to see a lot of management thoughts and colloquialisms slowly creep into the "other side" of software development (i.e. the actual developers) and become fairly well-tolerated. We still make fun of phrases like "paradigm" or "synergy", but we're all mostly on-board with phrases like "own <x>" or "growth mindset". You can see the author using the word "leverage" here repeatedly in the same way that we often chide managers for using words like "synergy". Interestingly the conversation around "effective engineers" has also shifted to really de-emphasize that technical ability - the best engineer is a good teammate, first and foremost (and I think a not-so-subtle implication also is that a good engineer is mostly extroverted as well). In the past decade or so, it seems like the "effective engineer" has become one who straddles that line between management and technical ability. I don't really have an opinion on this yet (I think there's good and bad, as with most things), but it's just fascinating to watch.

pm90 9y ago
I think you're being a little too pessimistic, although I do see where you're coming from. Technical jargon and vocabulary aren't created out of thin air: they are meant to efficiently and effectively convey certain facts and behaviors. Sometimes (perhaps many times?) there are co-opted and misused by certain people (many times managers, since they're further away from actual coding). The thing about engineer being a good teammate: I don't think it is about extroversion as much as realizing that modern software systems are very non-monolithic and thus require cooperation among many different services to work effectively. This means that the days when a person could write the entire thing by himself/herself is over, and a lot more co-operation is required among engineers to design and build effective systems. That cooperation requires a certain amount of communication skills (apart from stellar technical skills), but it doesn't mean that you have to be an extrovert.
- meddlepal 9y ago
  I think often lost from the whole introversion vs extroversion debate is that: 1. It's not a binary. It's a bell curve where many people fit near the middle and some are extreme outliers in either direction. I know personally that I am an introvert, but I confuse a lot of proclaimed extroverts who mistake me for being extroverted because I have a fairly gregarious and willing to try anything once personality. 2. Introvert / extrovert really has nothing to do with communication skills except that introverts appear to be bad at verbal communication usually because that skill isn't as practiced as extroverts. But good verbal communication is totally a developable skill rather than something innate to a person.
- IronKettle 9y ago
  > That cooperation requires a certain amount of communication skills (apart from stellar technical skills), but it doesn't mean that you have to be an extrovert. Yeah, and I realize it's a spectrum and not a binary thing. My point was more: If we use the simplistic, trendy definition of introversion/extroversion as "do you gain energy having conversations or does it require energy?" and then say that regular conversations are an extremely important part of doing modern development work, I think it's fair to say that you're implicitly selecting for extroverts. And again, I don't really put a judgement on that. I think it's fair to say "regular conversations are required to be successful as a software developer." I'm just noting the shift (as you've also done!).
- wallflower 9y ago
  > That cooperation requires a certain amount of communication skills (apart from stellar technical skills), but it doesn't mean that you have to be an extrovert. There are many people (including myself) who can operate quite successfully in the text-based world (Slack, email) and collaborate that way. I think Slack (and other tools like it) helps the introvert be a more active participant or even a leader in certain technical discussions. Most especially, the ones where the servers are melting down.
  - IronKettle 9y ago
    That's very true! I wasn't really thinking about Slack/etc. when I made that statement. Excellent point.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  This means that the days when a person could write the entire thing by himself/herself is over, and a lot more co-operation is required among engineers to design and build effective systems. At that point, you're not really talking about being an effective engineer, though. You're only talking about being an effective engineer in a large organisation working on a large project. I know plenty of people in the freelancing and startup world who can build and maintain very significant systems single-handedly. Take someone with the skill and experience to do that, give them a free hand in choosing whatever tools and processes work for them to get a good job done, and remove the overheads of micromanaging this and co-ordinating that. It's not unusual for that person to outperform an entire team working for a competitor under more traditional constraints, or for a small number of such people who can keep the overheads down to outperform a more traditionally organised but mediocre team an order of magnitude larger. Of course these people also need good soft skills, but those are not why they are so productive.
jakevoytko 9y ago
This is a mindset that I encountered a lot from managers and VPs at Google. The premise is that the best way to improve one's incremental technical contribution is to improve an entire team. If you bust your ass for a year and improve your own technical chops, you might be able to implement stuff 10% faster. Instead, you could help a team of 30 people to produce 10% more work. This is achievable from my anecdotal experience, but citation needed. At this point, you can throw your 10% incremental improvement out the window because now your incremental engineering improvement is 10% of a 30 person team, or 3 engineers. Now imagine you organized a department of 300 engineers to develop the right mix of infrastructure, forward-looking projects, and core projects such that the organization runs and grows efficiently. Now your incremental technical contribution is so much larger than the initial 10% that it's laughable. This doesn't have to be limited to management, which is where I think the Google VP perspective falls a little flat. You can do this kind of work through pure technical contributions. I think managers write about this kind of leverage more often, but it can come from any kind of organization. A core library or tool has a massive impact, because it's reusable past the bounds of your team. Maybe you're change isn't 10% distributed across 30 people, but you could improve 3000 people by 1%.
- IronKettle 9y ago
  Yeah, and I think this is where it's fair for the author to use terms like "leverage", since you're effectively multiplying force. To be fair, though, I don't think having that team-first mentality (where you're focused on improving the team's productivity as opposed to your own) necessarily implies pervasive "management thinking" (for lack of a better phrase) or even soft skills. I imagine we can all think of teams where that isn't the case.
- LrnByTeach 9y ago
  This Leverage concept can be applied to a family . Instead of YOU, as head of household putting more hours to solve Home chores/issues, if you teach other 3 members of your family how to solve issues/do chores , you get 3X return . An example is online shopping for Home: Instead of you spending time for all the research each time, teaching family members, you can achieve leverage . > If you bust your ass for a year and improve your own technical chops, you might be able to implement stuff 10% faster. Instead, you could help a team of 30 people to produce 10% more work. This is achievable from my anecdotal experience, but citation needed. > At this point, you can throw your 10% incremental improvement out the window because now your incremental engineering improvement is 10% of a 30 person team, or 3 engineers
edmondlau 9y ago
It's less about management and technical ability, and more about soft skills and hard skills. A recent Washington Post article shared an analytical study from Google on what made engineers at the company successful: "Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas." Unfortunately, almost all computer science education nowadays focuses on pure technical skills and hiring interviews at most tech companies also focus on the technical skills. The impact is that many engineers plateau in their careers because they've underinvested in (and oftentimes looked down upon) the "soft skills" that actually separate the top engineers from everyone else. Here's the article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/12/20/the-surprising-thing-google-learned-about-its-employees-and-what-it-means-for-todays-students/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/12/...
- robotsonic 9y ago
  >Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. This result seems a bit unsurprising. People who work at Google would already be in the top n-th percent in terms of STEM expertise. If everyone you hire is 'above average' then being a bit better than that has marginal gains and other factors would lead to your success. I'd be curious to see how this plays out at smaller firms where they cannot afford to hire the top-end STEM expertise.
  - edmondlau 9y ago
    Your observation is a great one, and I'd love to see more data on this as well. A related point, though, also rings true. Soft skills like being a good coach and effective listening are so underinvested in, that even marginal improvements in those skills lead to huge differences in success. I see this in engineering leadership workshops that I've run with Jean Hsu and Diana Berlin, where even teaching a handful of coaching and listening skills can have a transformative impact on participants. If you're interested in future workshops, you can sign up to hear about them here: https://effectiveengineer.typeform.com/to/cDMeZu https://effectiveengineer.typeform.com/to/cDMeZu
simonbc123 9y ago
I do have an opinion on the phenomenon. There are more and more mediocre engineers who need this sort of thing in order to justify their existence. Once the majority is mediocre, it becomes accepted practice.
lazyasciiart 9y ago
As far as I'm aware, 'growth mindset' comes from education/psychology with Carol Dweck, not from management - did I miss something?
- IronKettle 9y ago
  Not the first or the last time management has co-opted terms from academic fields :). Social psychology is especially ripe for this. See also: "Paradigm shift" was coined by a physicist to talk about scientific revolutions, IIRC.
guelo 9y ago
I don't think so. Leverage has a precise concrete meaning in this article. We shouldn't avoid a descriptive accurate term just because it's for an abstract higher-order concept.
- IronKettle 9y ago
  > Leverage has a precise concrete meaning in this article. Er, not really. From the article: > Leverage = Impact Produced / Time Invested "Impact Produced" has a precise, concrete meaning?
  - barrkel 9y ago
    Sure. For software, it might be reuse of a component. Reuse leverages existing code. This is precise, unambiguous, and frankly uncontroversial.
    - IronKettle 9y ago
      > it might be > This is... unambiguous, :)
  - davidjnelson 9y ago
    How about revenue or moving the needle on a key business metric like churn or order flow conversion rate.
- brucephillips 9y ago
  "Synergy" is a precise term as well.
barrkel 9y ago
"Leverage" has real meaning. Another word for it that you might be more familiar with from software is "reuse". Reuse is leverage. If a piece of software (function, class, module, service, tool, whatever) is used for 1 task, it's not leveraged. If it's used for 10 tasks, that means the creation of the reused thing had 10x leverage: working on that reused thing created 10 times more value than working on something that's only used once. It's not quite that straightforward as everyone knows, there are costs to reuse (abstractions (both lowest common denominator and leakage), more dependencies, higher maintenance costs owing to risk of breakage of multiple clients, etc.). But the leverage is very often real.
- halter73 9y ago
  What's your point? Synergy has real meaning as well. The problem is when concepts like leverage or synergy become goals in and of themselves. That might be something you'd expect from someone who's read a lot of management books, but you'd expect engineers to see these as means to an end.
  - ralmeida 9y ago
    While I don’t advocate the use of these terms in every situation, it’s hard to have all ends in mind and to carefully choose which tool should be applied to each end. That may be why these properties are used as goals. Easier to spot, easier to reason about. Basically, they are heuristics.
goialoq 9y ago
Many adults have an aversion to new words. Foods too! Over time, they grow accustomed.
Waterluvian 9y ago
I'm first in line to make fun of the title "scrum master" and other nonsense. But the things that have crept in seem to have because they work. I'm results driven. I don't care who comes up with what or what it's named. If it works, I'm on board. If it doesn't, I'll lambast it.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >But the things that have crept in seem to have because they work. Keep in mind that things like Agile and Scrum might have had buy-in from team members because a team member adopting it wasn't as high of a cost as the same team member leaving the job. You might be able to object, but you'll probably be overridden. There's some amount of reprogramming that happens there to keep the team cohesive, so people might begrudgingly adopt new habits. So in those cases, "it works" is barely sneaking in because everyone was forced to make it work. It's not as easy to prove/disprove as more objective things like program performance, size, or correctness. There's a whole lot of flavors of "it works" out there.
dejawu 9y ago
This frustrates me greatly. Many "engineering management" professors will show Dilbert strips and Office Space memes, then immediately fall into using the same kind of vocabulary that these works mocked. (Recall that Initech in Office Space had "Hawaiian Shirt Fridays" - one of the core features of this manager-speak is to try to appear human and relevant as much as possible.)
dualogy 9y ago
> You can see the author using the word "leverage" here repeatedly Or maybe devs/engineers are just growing more eloquent than used to be? "Leverage" is truly the most intrinsic essence of everything engineering/developing. Reducing man-days, eliminating manual efforts, extracting infinitely reusable abstractions, code that emits+evals code .. I could go on and on and on --- hard to find a more sufficiently terse umbrella moniker that captures the mindset behind it all than "leverage"!
- IronKettle 9y ago
  I've heard multiple similar arguments in favor of the word "synergy" or "paradigm". Let me turn the tables: Why is "leverage" acceptable to use but "synergy" engenders scoffing?
  - brucephillips 9y ago
    Fashion
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    The terms themselves don't induce scoffing, it is the specific usage patterns over time, which then becomes associated with the term, devaluing it as a meaningful way to communicate. Synergy was frequently used in a mindless, vague way by individuals who wished to appear in-the-know. Thus, it was devalued, as people actually in the know did not want to be mistaken for those those who didn't know how to use the term. This dynamic usually happens with high-level abstractions that have much complexity and nuance, as it is difficult to assess if the term is being used in a meaningful way. "Paradigm" and "synergy" are good examples of such powerful yet tricky concepts prone to misuse and buzzification. Some philosophers say that the meaning of a word is determined purely by its usage. In this view, a word like synergy loses much of its meaning, as it is commonly used in such a jumbled and unclear manner.
    - IronKettle 9y ago
      > Synergy was frequently used in a mindless, vague way Again, I'm really not trying to put the author down here - but "leverage" is a term that can very easily and often is used in a mindless and vague way. Not always, of course, in the same way that "synergy" can absolutely be used properly. Still, it would be extremely easy for me to mindlessly posit whatever I want as "high impact", or at the very least "minimal time investment". "Minimal" and "high impact" are inherently subjective phrases (minimal compared to what? high compared to what?) and without a baseline are effectively useless. So, I guess I still don't see a huge difference between "synergy" and "leverage" in terms of vagueness. And if vagueness exists, mindless usage is pretty soon to follow.

pm90 9y ago

I think you're being a little too pessimistic, although I do see where you're coming from. Technical jargon and vocabulary aren't created out of thin air: they are meant to efficiently and effectively convey certain facts and behaviors. Sometimes (perhaps many times?) there are co-opted and misused by certain people (many times managers, since they're further away from actual coding). The thing about engineer being a good teammate: I don't think it is about extroversion as much as realizing that modern software systems are very non-monolithic and thus require cooperation among many different services to work effectively. This means that the days when a person could write the entire thing by himself/herself is over, and a lot more co-operation is required among engineers to design and build effective systems. That cooperation requires a certain amount of communication skills (apart from stellar technical skills), but it doesn't mean that you have to be an extrovert.

meddlepal 9y ago
I think often lost from the whole introversion vs extroversion debate is that: 1. It's not a binary. It's a bell curve where many people fit near the middle and some are extreme outliers in either direction. I know personally that I am an introvert, but I confuse a lot of proclaimed extroverts who mistake me for being extroverted because I have a fairly gregarious and willing to try anything once personality. 2. Introvert / extrovert really has nothing to do with communication skills except that introverts appear to be bad at verbal communication usually because that skill isn't as practiced as extroverts. But good verbal communication is totally a developable skill rather than something innate to a person.
IronKettle 9y ago
> That cooperation requires a certain amount of communication skills (apart from stellar technical skills), but it doesn't mean that you have to be an extrovert. Yeah, and I realize it's a spectrum and not a binary thing. My point was more: If we use the simplistic, trendy definition of introversion/extroversion as "do you gain energy having conversations or does it require energy?" and then say that regular conversations are an extremely important part of doing modern development work, I think it's fair to say that you're implicitly selecting for extroverts. And again, I don't really put a judgement on that. I think it's fair to say "regular conversations are required to be successful as a software developer." I'm just noting the shift (as you've also done!).
wallflower 9y ago
> That cooperation requires a certain amount of communication skills (apart from stellar technical skills), but it doesn't mean that you have to be an extrovert. There are many people (including myself) who can operate quite successfully in the text-based world (Slack, email) and collaborate that way. I think Slack (and other tools like it) helps the introvert be a more active participant or even a leader in certain technical discussions. Most especially, the ones where the servers are melting down.
- IronKettle 9y ago
  That's very true! I wasn't really thinking about Slack/etc. when I made that statement. Excellent point.
Silhouette 9y ago
This means that the days when a person could write the entire thing by himself/herself is over, and a lot more co-operation is required among engineers to design and build effective systems. At that point, you're not really talking about being an effective engineer, though. You're only talking about being an effective engineer in a large organisation working on a large project. I know plenty of people in the freelancing and startup world who can build and maintain very significant systems single-handedly. Take someone with the skill and experience to do that, give them a free hand in choosing whatever tools and processes work for them to get a good job done, and remove the overheads of micromanaging this and co-ordinating that. It's not unusual for that person to outperform an entire team working for a competitor under more traditional constraints, or for a small number of such people who can keep the overheads down to outperform a more traditionally organised but mediocre team an order of magnitude larger. Of course these people also need good soft skills, but those are not why they are so productive.

jakevoytko 9y ago

This is a mindset that I encountered a lot from managers and VPs at Google. The premise is that the best way to improve one's incremental technical contribution is to improve an entire team. If you bust your ass for a year and improve your own technical chops, you might be able to implement stuff 10% faster. Instead, you could help a team of 30 people to produce 10% more work. This is achievable from my anecdotal experience, but citation needed. At this point, you can throw your 10% incremental improvement out the window because now your incremental engineering improvement is 10% of a 30 person team, or 3 engineers. Now imagine you organized a department of 300 engineers to develop the right mix of infrastructure, forward-looking projects, and core projects such that the organization runs and grows efficiently. Now your incremental technical contribution is so much larger than the initial 10% that it's laughable. This doesn't have to be limited to management, which is where I think the Google VP perspective falls a little flat. You can do this kind of work through pure technical contributions. I think managers write about this kind of leverage more often, but it can come from any kind of organization. A core library or tool has a massive impact, because it's reusable past the bounds of your team. Maybe you're change isn't 10% distributed across 30 people, but you could improve 3000 people by 1%.

IronKettle 9y ago
Yeah, and I think this is where it's fair for the author to use terms like "leverage", since you're effectively multiplying force. To be fair, though, I don't think having that team-first mentality (where you're focused on improving the team's productivity as opposed to your own) necessarily implies pervasive "management thinking" (for lack of a better phrase) or even soft skills. I imagine we can all think of teams where that isn't the case.
LrnByTeach 9y ago
This Leverage concept can be applied to a family . Instead of YOU, as head of household putting more hours to solve Home chores/issues, if you teach other 3 members of your family how to solve issues/do chores , you get 3X return . An example is online shopping for Home: Instead of you spending time for all the research each time, teaching family members, you can achieve leverage . > If you bust your ass for a year and improve your own technical chops, you might be able to implement stuff 10% faster. Instead, you could help a team of 30 people to produce 10% more work. This is achievable from my anecdotal experience, but citation needed. > At this point, you can throw your 10% incremental improvement out the window because now your incremental engineering improvement is 10% of a 30 person team, or 3 engineers

edmondlau 9y ago

It's less about management and technical ability, and more about soft skills and hard skills. A recent Washington Post article shared an analytical study from Google on what made engineers at the company successful: "Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas." Unfortunately, almost all computer science education nowadays focuses on pure technical skills and hiring interviews at most tech companies also focus on the technical skills. The impact is that many engineers plateau in their careers because they've underinvested in (and oftentimes looked down upon) the "soft skills" that actually separate the top engineers from everyone else. Here's the article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/12/20/the-surprising-thing-google-learned-about-its-employees-and-what-it-means-for-todays-students/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/12/...

robotsonic 9y ago
>Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. This result seems a bit unsurprising. People who work at Google would already be in the top n-th percent in terms of STEM expertise. If everyone you hire is 'above average' then being a bit better than that has marginal gains and other factors would lead to your success. I'd be curious to see how this plays out at smaller firms where they cannot afford to hire the top-end STEM expertise.
- edmondlau 9y ago
  Your observation is a great one, and I'd love to see more data on this as well. A related point, though, also rings true. Soft skills like being a good coach and effective listening are so underinvested in, that even marginal improvements in those skills lead to huge differences in success. I see this in engineering leadership workshops that I've run with Jean Hsu and Diana Berlin, where even teaching a handful of coaching and listening skills can have a transformative impact on participants. If you're interested in future workshops, you can sign up to hear about them here: https://effectiveengineer.typeform.com/to/cDMeZu https://effectiveengineer.typeform.com/to/cDMeZu

simonbc123 9y ago

I do have an opinion on the phenomenon. There are more and more mediocre engineers who need this sort of thing in order to justify their existence. Once the majority is mediocre, it becomes accepted practice.

lazyasciiart 9y ago

As far as I'm aware, 'growth mindset' comes from education/psychology with Carol Dweck, not from management - did I miss something?

IronKettle 9y ago
Not the first or the last time management has co-opted terms from academic fields :). Social psychology is especially ripe for this. See also: "Paradigm shift" was coined by a physicist to talk about scientific revolutions, IIRC.

guelo 9y ago

I don't think so. Leverage has a precise concrete meaning in this article. We shouldn't avoid a descriptive accurate term just because it's for an abstract higher-order concept.

IronKettle 9y ago
> Leverage has a precise concrete meaning in this article. Er, not really. From the article: > Leverage = Impact Produced / Time Invested "Impact Produced" has a precise, concrete meaning?
- barrkel 9y ago
  Sure. For software, it might be reuse of a component. Reuse leverages existing code. This is precise, unambiguous, and frankly uncontroversial.
  - IronKettle 9y ago
    > it might be > This is... unambiguous, :)
- davidjnelson 9y ago
  How about revenue or moving the needle on a key business metric like churn or order flow conversion rate.
brucephillips 9y ago
"Synergy" is a precise term as well.

barrkel 9y ago

"Leverage" has real meaning. Another word for it that you might be more familiar with from software is "reuse". Reuse is leverage. If a piece of software (function, class, module, service, tool, whatever) is used for 1 task, it's not leveraged. If it's used for 10 tasks, that means the creation of the reused thing had 10x leverage: working on that reused thing created 10 times more value than working on something that's only used once. It's not quite that straightforward as everyone knows, there are costs to reuse (abstractions (both lowest common denominator and leakage), more dependencies, higher maintenance costs owing to risk of breakage of multiple clients, etc.). But the leverage is very often real.

halter73 9y ago
What's your point? Synergy has real meaning as well. The problem is when concepts like leverage or synergy become goals in and of themselves. That might be something you'd expect from someone who's read a lot of management books, but you'd expect engineers to see these as means to an end.
- ralmeida 9y ago
  While I don’t advocate the use of these terms in every situation, it’s hard to have all ends in mind and to carefully choose which tool should be applied to each end. That may be why these properties are used as goals. Easier to spot, easier to reason about. Basically, they are heuristics.

goialoq 9y ago

Many adults have an aversion to new words. Foods too! Over time, they grow accustomed.

Waterluvian 9y ago

I'm first in line to make fun of the title "scrum master" and other nonsense. But the things that have crept in seem to have because they work. I'm results driven. I don't care who comes up with what or what it's named. If it works, I'm on board. If it doesn't, I'll lambast it.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
>But the things that have crept in seem to have because they work. Keep in mind that things like Agile and Scrum might have had buy-in from team members because a team member adopting it wasn't as high of a cost as the same team member leaving the job. You might be able to object, but you'll probably be overridden. There's some amount of reprogramming that happens there to keep the team cohesive, so people might begrudgingly adopt new habits. So in those cases, "it works" is barely sneaking in because everyone was forced to make it work. It's not as easy to prove/disprove as more objective things like program performance, size, or correctness. There's a whole lot of flavors of "it works" out there.

dejawu 9y ago

This frustrates me greatly. Many "engineering management" professors will show Dilbert strips and Office Space memes, then immediately fall into using the same kind of vocabulary that these works mocked. (Recall that Initech in Office Space had "Hawaiian Shirt Fridays" - one of the core features of this manager-speak is to try to appear human and relevant as much as possible.)

dualogy 9y ago

> You can see the author using the word "leverage" here repeatedly Or maybe devs/engineers are just growing more eloquent than used to be? "Leverage" is truly the most intrinsic essence of everything engineering/developing. Reducing man-days, eliminating manual efforts, extracting infinitely reusable abstractions, code that emits+evals code .. I could go on and on and on --- hard to find a more sufficiently terse umbrella moniker that captures the mindset behind it all than "leverage"!

IronKettle 9y ago
I've heard multiple similar arguments in favor of the word "synergy" or "paradigm". Let me turn the tables: Why is "leverage" acceptable to use but "synergy" engenders scoffing?
- brucephillips 9y ago
  Fashion
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  The terms themselves don't induce scoffing, it is the specific usage patterns over time, which then becomes associated with the term, devaluing it as a meaningful way to communicate. Synergy was frequently used in a mindless, vague way by individuals who wished to appear in-the-know. Thus, it was devalued, as people actually in the know did not want to be mistaken for those those who didn't know how to use the term. This dynamic usually happens with high-level abstractions that have much complexity and nuance, as it is difficult to assess if the term is being used in a meaningful way. "Paradigm" and "synergy" are good examples of such powerful yet tricky concepts prone to misuse and buzzification. Some philosophers say that the meaning of a word is determined purely by its usage. In this view, a word like synergy loses much of its meaning, as it is commonly used in such a jumbled and unclear manner.
  - IronKettle 9y ago
    > Synergy was frequently used in a mindless, vague way Again, I'm really not trying to put the author down here - but "leverage" is a term that can very easily and often is used in a mindless and vague way. Not always, of course, in the same way that "synergy" can absolutely be used properly. Still, it would be extremely easy for me to mindlessly posit whatever I want as "high impact", or at the very least "minimal time investment". "Minimal" and "high impact" are inherently subjective phrases (minimal compared to what? high compared to what?) and without a baseline are effectively useless. So, I guess I still don't see a huge difference between "synergy" and "leverage" in terms of vagueness. And if vagueness exists, mindless usage is pretty soon to follow.