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They seem to take inspiration from ER teams or the military It’s probably nothing but overestimation but I feel like I’m seeing more of this later in my career

by dvtrn 5y ago

They seem to take inspiration from ER teams or the military It’s probably nothing but overestimation but I feel like I’m seeing more of this later in my career than I did early on, or maybe I’m paying more attention? Whatever it is: past experience (which includes coming from a military family in the states) has taught me to avoid companies that crib unnecessary amounts of jargon, lingo and colloquialisms from the military. Curious if others have noticed or even feel the same and what your experiences have been for feeling similarly?

pinko 5y ago
Agree completely. It's a strong signal that someone has a military cosplay fetish (which very few people with experience in the actual military do), which in turn tends to come along with other dysfunctional traits. It's a warning for me that the person is not likely to be a good vendor, customer, or collaborator.
- dvtrn 5y ago
  My favorite one was when a superior was explaining a plan to right-size some new machines as we slowly migrated customers onto the appliance, and some particularly aggravating issues we were having with memory consumption that upon inspection and a lot of time spent-made no real sense to us why it was occurring the way it was. "dvtrn you are to take the flank and breach this issue with Paul" And this ran all the way up to the top of the org. Senior leaders were constantly quoting that Jocko Wilink fella. It was...something. My old man (a former Dill Instructor, made for an interesting childhood) found it utterly hilarious when I'd call him up randomly with the latest phrase of the day, uttered by some director or another. To my knowledge, and I sure-damn asked, the only affinity anyone on the executive team had with the military was two of them having buddies who served.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Yup. It's misplaced machismo, with all that implies.
igetspam 5y ago
I don't know how old you are but my career now exceeds two decades. I definitely see this more now but that's because I institute it. Earlier in my career, we failed at incident management and at ownership. We now share the burden of on-call not just with the operators (sysadmins or old) but also with the people who wrote the code. We've spent a lot of time building better models based on proven methods, quite a few come from work done in high intensity roles paid by tax dollars: risk analysis, disaster recovery, firefighting, command and control, incident management, war games, red teams.
- dvtrn 5y ago
  You've got a couple of years on me, I've been in the game a little over 13 years now. I support the notion there's a strong difference between lingo that's properly applied to the situation and lingo that is recklessly applied because it "sounds cool". The examples you gave seem to be fair game for the work being done-in the interest of brief, specific language; the examples I gave in another comment though ("flanking","breaching") however are just grating and...weird to use in a work environment. Your point is nevertheless well met.

by dvtrn 5y ago

pinko 5y ago

Agree completely. It's a strong signal that someone has a military cosplay fetish (which very few people with experience in the actual military do), which in turn tends to come along with other dysfunctional traits. It's a warning for me that the person is not likely to be a good vendor, customer, or collaborator.

dvtrn 5y ago
My favorite one was when a superior was explaining a plan to right-size some new machines as we slowly migrated customers onto the appliance, and some particularly aggravating issues we were having with memory consumption that upon inspection and a lot of time spent-made no real sense to us why it was occurring the way it was. "dvtrn you are to take the flank and breach this issue with Paul" And this ran all the way up to the top of the org. Senior leaders were constantly quoting that Jocko Wilink fella. It was...something. My old man (a former Dill Instructor, made for an interesting childhood) found it utterly hilarious when I'd call him up randomly with the latest phrase of the day, uttered by some director or another. To my knowledge, and I sure-damn asked, the only affinity anyone on the executive team had with the military was two of them having buddies who served.
pjc50 5y ago
Yup. It's misplaced machismo, with all that implies.

igetspam 5y ago

I don't know how old you are but my career now exceeds two decades. I definitely see this more now but that's because I institute it. Earlier in my career, we failed at incident management and at ownership. We now share the burden of on-call not just with the operators (sysadmins or old) but also with the people who wrote the code. We've spent a lot of time building better models based on proven methods, quite a few come from work done in high intensity roles paid by tax dollars: risk analysis, disaster recovery, firefighting, command and control, incident management, war games, red teams.

dvtrn 5y ago
You've got a couple of years on me, I've been in the game a little over 13 years now. I support the notion there's a strong difference between lingo that's properly applied to the situation and lingo that is recklessly applied because it "sounds cool". The examples you gave seem to be fair game for the work being done-in the interest of brief, specific language; the examples I gave in another comment though ("flanking","breaching") however are just grating and...weird to use in a work environment. Your point is nevertheless well met.