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Oh man, I hate to be negative, but this word is my #1 pet peeve in tech today. It's becoming more and more prevalent and is driving me crazy. Why do people ke

Oh man, I hate to be negative, but this word is my #1 pet peeve in tech today. It's becoming more and more prevalent and is driving me crazy. Why do people keep using this non-word? What do they think it means, and why? It's pure jargon, at best. The word's meaning is completely ambiguous and loosely implies numerous qualities without actually committing to any of those potential meanings. Does it load fast? Consume little memory? Respond promptly/clearly to user input? Do an acrobatic dance? When someone uses this word, I can't help but feel that they are trying to gain the approval/validation of people who like to hear that something "performs well", without having to support the assertion with any concrete substantiation.

tabtab 7y ago
My pet peeve is "monolithic". It implies that anything without microservices is Flintstones technology, encouraging clueless managers to bloat up software with microservices to get things like "separation of concerns". It's often separation of productivity from reality. A lot of IT press is "fake news".
- closeparen 7y ago
  The IT press is unnerving. It implies a whole ecosystem: managers making technical decisions they don't begin to understand, and predators grooming the managers' egos in order to pounce on their budgets. I get that the right person to lead a large organization might not be technical, but you'd hope they'd delegate those calls to someone who is. Not try to figure it out personally based on what they read in a trade publication for "visionary thought leaders."
musicale 7y ago
^ This. "Performs well" doing... what, exactly? And how is "performance" measured? (Some basic and often conflicting measures include latency, throughput, power/cooling, reliability, cost...)
neurobro 7y ago
It is a word because people keep using it. That's where words come from. Apart from the number of characters, it is no better or worse than other words/phrases having the same meaning. Sometimes the precise meaning is clear from the background context. Sometimes additional details need to be supplied outside of the title or bullet point where it is used. What does "it" mean above? Devoid of context, it could be just about anything.
- amatecha 7y ago
  I understand the concept of "it's a word because people use it" - but what does it actually mean? No one can give a consistent defininition because it's nebulous jargon with no clear or specific meaning. Without fail, every single usage is obfuscating or otherwise hiding the intended meaning. Check out this Unity blog post I just came across: "Achieve beautiful, scalable, and performant graphics with the Universal Render Pipeline" What exactly are "performant graphics"? Does that mean high frame-rate? High-poly? Extremely vibrant colors? HDR? Can run on a 486 with software rendering? It doesn't tell me anything, and is essentially "vocabulary clickbait" - it "sounds good", without really communicating anything. This is why I despise this word.
  - neurobro 7y ago
    In context, I would expect "performance" to refer to how quickly a scene can be rendered, and another buzzword, "scalable", to refer to the size and complexity of scenes that can be drawn. "Beautiful" probably means "lots of detail and snazzy effects." Actually, the article says "scalable across platforms", which is confusing to me. Maybe they mean scalable to different screen sizes?
  - runaway 7y ago
    It seems pretty obvious to me in context what the word means. You could play that game with literally every word in the sentence. What does "achieve" mean? It's that way out of the box? If I invest in a special team of Unity developers it's possible? They'll give it to me if I work hard enough? What does "beautiful" mean? High poly? Vibrant color? Critics or fans say it looks good? There's an object beauty score that it has high marks in? ad nauseam

tabtab 7y ago

My pet peeve is "monolithic". It implies that anything without microservices is Flintstones technology, encouraging clueless managers to bloat up software with microservices to get things like "separation of concerns". It's often separation of productivity from reality. A lot of IT press is "fake news".

closeparen 7y ago
The IT press is unnerving. It implies a whole ecosystem: managers making technical decisions they don't begin to understand, and predators grooming the managers' egos in order to pounce on their budgets. I get that the right person to lead a large organization might not be technical, but you'd hope they'd delegate those calls to someone who is. Not try to figure it out personally based on what they read in a trade publication for "visionary thought leaders."

musicale 7y ago

^ This. "Performs well" doing... what, exactly? And how is "performance" measured? (Some basic and often conflicting measures include latency, throughput, power/cooling, reliability, cost...)

neurobro 7y ago

It is a word because people keep using it. That's where words come from. Apart from the number of characters, it is no better or worse than other words/phrases having the same meaning. Sometimes the precise meaning is clear from the background context. Sometimes additional details need to be supplied outside of the title or bullet point where it is used. What does "it" mean above? Devoid of context, it could be just about anything.

amatecha 7y ago
I understand the concept of "it's a word because people use it" - but what does it actually mean? No one can give a consistent defininition because it's nebulous jargon with no clear or specific meaning. Without fail, every single usage is obfuscating or otherwise hiding the intended meaning. Check out this Unity blog post I just came across: "Achieve beautiful, scalable, and performant graphics with the Universal Render Pipeline" What exactly are "performant graphics"? Does that mean high frame-rate? High-poly? Extremely vibrant colors? HDR? Can run on a 486 with software rendering? It doesn't tell me anything, and is essentially "vocabulary clickbait" - it "sounds good", without really communicating anything. This is why I despise this word.
- neurobro 7y ago
  In context, I would expect "performance" to refer to how quickly a scene can be rendered, and another buzzword, "scalable", to refer to the size and complexity of scenes that can be drawn. "Beautiful" probably means "lots of detail and snazzy effects." Actually, the article says "scalable across platforms", which is confusing to me. Maybe they mean scalable to different screen sizes?
- runaway 7y ago
  It seems pretty obvious to me in context what the word means. You could play that game with literally every word in the sentence. What does "achieve" mean? It's that way out of the box? If I invest in a special team of Unity developers it's possible? They'll give it to me if I work hard enough? What does "beautiful" mean? High poly? Vibrant color? Critics or fans say it looks good? There's an object beauty score that it has high marks in? ad nauseam