Buzzwords #2

I’ve got another great quote which features a combination of buzzwords within the same sentence, stated by the same manager as documented here: Buzzwords

The proof-of-concept endpoint is the culmination of efforts across the application space. It will migrate into an integration account used by teams going forward for the integrated product.

I can’t stand it when people churn out nonsense like that. What does it even mean? Does it just mean “a team has written a framework”?

Indian English

I always knew there was English (UK) and English (USA) which has minor differences in spelling e.g. localize instead of localise, and words/phrases like “sidewalk” instead of “pavement”. UK folk can understand it fine, although we often joke about it not being “proper English”. In recent years, I’ve sometimes worked with Indian staff and quickly came across some strange words and phrases.

So it turns out there should be a English (India) too. Here are some classics:

“Today morning” instead of “this morning”
“Have some doubts” instead of “have a query/question”
“Prepone the meeting” instead of “bring the meeting forward”. Prepone is the opposite of postpone. I actually really like that one. It’s incredibly logical and is easier to say.
“to do the needful”. This one often throws me off. I think it’s like “please action this”, or “do whatever is required”.
“Kindly revert”. Indians love prefixing sentences with kindly. Apparently “revert” means “respond” which is just weird. This causes confusion when they leave this as a code comment on a Pull Request/Code Review. You think they are telling you to roll back your changes, but they just want you to respond with a reply.
“The same”. They use this instead of “it”, sometimes it sounds fine, other times it is really jarring. “Can you fix the bug and update the documentation for the same”.

Bonus one: Some people pronounce GitHub as “JitHub”. This probably is in the same category as the pronunciation of the Gif image format.

2020 Vision

Recently, we have had a few meetings where Senior Management have given updates of the plans for the year. I always come out of these meetings non-the-wiser since they just talk buzzwords and marketing jargon. To me, it just translates to “we are doing work to improve our products”, but yet they ramble on for 45-60 mins.

I wrote down some words and phrases from the meeting. So here are the plans/vision/roadmap for 2020:

interoperability
driving efficiencies
minimise the pipeline
bringing on-stream
embedding the modules
mobility strategy
rolling enhancement program
put us in a strong position as we go through 2020
decoupling the need for multiple products
gain focus
add value and retain customer base
technical debt being addressed
a step forward in innovation
marketplace acceleration
improve discoverability
improve sign-up flows
laying the architecture down
building into propositions
specifically aligned with the digital proposition
product portfolio
leverage across different markets
release the roadmaps imminently

Buzzwords

There’s a manager that constantly reels off jargon and buzzwords, then at the end of his speech, I always think “what the hell is going on?”.

I was watching a few of his video updates and wrote down a few phrases that took my interest. The first video was about “latest developments” and how these changes are going to “accelerate development” as we “integrate with teams“.

The next video asked “how do we get the backlog to illustrate we are moving in the right direction?” with a respect to “data-driven timelines”. There’s gonna be a “high level plan” which will allow us to “commence application development come Q2”. We can “tally up with the timeline” and when we “consider ourselves integration ready”, we then “help teams work with integration-ready architecture”. Finally, when we get “all bases covered”, “collectively we have a whole backlog and roadmap of work”.

Can we achieve this? Let’s hope it is clearer come Quarter Two.