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Vocabulary Is Not Job Security

Laurie on April 23, 2019

In honor of my talk at Indy.Code() this week I want to talk about vocabulary and communication. I was having a great conversation the other day abo...
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Marek Zaluski

I like that you point out Puppet as an example, because the website entirely fails to answer "What problem does this solve for me?"

It's not always marketing jargon. If I visit the Haskell website I also don't get a clear answer to that same question.

But in their defense, it might be because I'm not the target audience for either of those websites.

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Laurie

I hate the idea that you need to be the "target audience" though. Too often someone mentions a piece of technology in a meeting and we all go to their site to quickly understand what it does/why it's there. Every site should make the information understandable to the majority of people.

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Will

I do agree, we should try to simplify things. At the same time saying that just because you want to be included, a company should appeal to you, is wrong. I say "you" by the way as an example and with no disrespect or insult intended.

At the end of the day if a company wants to appeal to a very, very specific individual - let them. It does 2 major things.

  1. You'll spend about 2-3min on their site and give up, saving you time and headache in the long-run with a product you would probably buy but never actually use (hello dozens of "unique and helpful" software packages).

  2. If someone actually DOES need their service they'll almost immediately know, and their on-boarders / sales teams will be able to work with clients that they can actually help/assist.

This really focuses on platforms that are very, very B2B and not B2C (or even B2D Biz to Developer). Example being Puppet as you said. I opened their site, saw the word "DevOps" and immediately got turned off slightly. Then I read the "one liner" and realized I have no idea who they are, what they do, or if I can use them in anyway whatsoever - resulting in me closing their site. Even if my company COULD use them their marketing jargon and lack of "wtf do you do" turned me off.

I'm sure someone out there though loved the page and immediately wanted more information. =]

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Laurie

While that’s fair in the “it shows me I don’t want to work with them sends” I’d like us all to strive for better. But I see your point.

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Vincent Milum Jr

This is a very good perspective! I'm now trying to approach with a few tools that I know very well.

php.net has two sentences at the top explaining what it is.

mariadb.org has a very large "about" card right on the homepage.

arduino.cc also has a nice large "about" card on the homepage.

ansible.com is sort of a middle ground. it feels more like marketing jargon then actionable items.

redis.io has a nice explanation on the homepage.

sublimetext.com has quite possibly the simplest and most direct "about" one-liner at the top. fitting for what it is! plus the homepage animations are a great introduction to what the text editor is and does.

code.visualstudio.com assumes you're already looking for a code editor and know what all the buzzwords around them means.

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Tyler Roberts

This has frustrated me for so long, and what turned me off of AWS for so long, even though I still had to dive in at some point.

Even today I was looking at Tapad, and it took me 3-4 page clicks to figure it out, looking at their solutions and reverse engineering their copy written jargon.

Some sites I swear I'll browse every page and still not understand what they do...
I can understand the approach to appeal to, let's say, sales or non-tech oriented people using THEIR jargon, so it's not tech industry specific but probably annoying and pedantic for everyone..

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Gil Blinov

Amazon are crap in naming their stuff.

I just learned (well, about a month ago) the reason some services are AWS xyz and some are Amazon xyz.

If it's used internally by Amazon and started there: it's Amazon xyz.
If it was developed as a service first: AWS xyz.

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Laurie

Never knew that. Interesting.

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Gil Blinov

We are partnered with AWS for the last few years. Even our GM didn't know this. 😂🤣

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Michel Renaud

Speaking of being bad at naming things. Every time I see "naming" mentioned, I'm reminded of a coworker in the early '90s. She named all her source files like this:

TOTO1.SAS
TOTO2.SAS
...and so on (that was MS-DOS, so filenames were uppercase).

You opened one of the files and what were the variables name?

Yup: TOTO1, TOTO2, TOTO3, and so on...

Somehow she could figure this out. But, good luck to anyone else going in there. Mind you, I started with interpreted BASIC in the early '80s and because of limited RAM we usually named variables A, B, C, D, .......

As for product names, I won't even go there.

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Vincent Milum Jr

My biggest gripe is not on a social level, but a professional level. Even switching from one toolkit to another, vocabulary changes, and not knowing the right vocabulary during an interview can prevent you from getting a job. Knowing the skills and tools isn't enough, but knowing all possible names for the tools because you never know which background the interviewer is coming from is just insane!

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rhymes

Thanks for reminding me of this :)