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Obfuscation Mitigation (Lexicon):
Best Practices (link)
Making sure your blunders are popular ones. Rationally, this term should mean "methods that meet professional standards of competence and due care", but tends instead to be a managerial code phrase meaning "If anything goes wrong, I want to escape being a specific target of blame by pointing out that our hapless cock-up was the same one countless others made, too."
Bike Shed Effect (link)
Social dysfunction syndrome first noted by C. Northcote Parkinson in his 1957 book Parkinson's Law, and Other Studies in Administration, whereby getting permission to build a billion-dollar atomic power plant is easy, but a proposal to build a cheap bicycle shed will founder under the weight of endless discussion. Parkinson noted that, because an atomic plant is so vast, expensive, and complicated that people cannot grasp it, rather than try, they'll fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked details before it got that far. However, everyone knows all about bicycle sheds, and feels no inhibition against debating their pettiest details without limit.
E.g., most technical mailing lists spend at least half their time drowning in redundant posts, trivial quibbles, and offhand opinions of no conceivable public interest. Why? Because people can — and because it's a way for them to demonstrate involvement with near-zero effort.
Cheeto Factor (link)
Semantic death-spiral, first identified by Fred Clark (1, 2) in which each incrementally attached modifier renders a noun less true, e.g.:
"Cheese": real cheese.
"Processed cheese": cheese, sort of.
"Processed cheese food": cheese, sort of, plus other stuff that's not cheese.
"Processed cheese food snack product": the food in question is vaguely orange and squishy, but contains no actual cheese.
The term has obvious broader application, e.g., when Linux Gazette editor Ben Okopnik pointed out that the term "commercial open source" most commonly denotes "not actually open source at all".
Compromise (link)
Concept touted by American commentators as an inherently desirable approach to solving other people's problems. (By contrast, all disputes touching on those commentators' own interests are exempt — as clearly entailing "important principles" that must be defended.)
This guideline's Solomonic wisdom can be seen in the hypothetical example of you, the reader (unless, of course, you're American) being attacked by some thug attempting to kill you: A typical American observer might recommend a "fair compromise" of you being left half-dead.
Computer Associates (link)
Place where formerly useful software companies go for zombification after dying. Also seen in verb form, as in "Apologies for the new support and upgrade policies, but our firm was recently Computer Associated."
Deirdre Saoirse Moen's Law of Management (link)
"Bad managers always outlast good employees."
Management should be expected to always terminate the staffer and protect the manager. Therefore, if you find yourself under such a manager, move sideways to elsewhere but never, ever, file complaints with the company instead.
Why do companies consistently do this, strongly contrary to their long-term self-interest? Some guesses: 1. Inherently, managers are given more trust than the employees they manage. Thus, in a conflict, upper management will typically back the manager. 2. Many managers have contractual arrangements that make them very difficult (and slow) to terminate. 3. Management typically cares not at all about who's the reasonable party, but just wants the immediate problem to vanish. Firing the peon is less troublesome; peons tend not to sue, and the embarrassment and organisational disruption costs are lower. 4. Relevant to the prior point, firing the manager would implicitly reflect discredit on higher-ups who vouched for him. 5. In cases where the manager might have committed torts or crimes, management often fears terminating his/her job might, ironically, increase company liability for those acts. 6. Short-term thinking is the rule in most businesses, rather than the exception.
Dueling Banjos Effect (link)
Term coined by Jim Penny for self-perpetuating Internet prominence caused by feedback loops between search engines and Internet discussion fora. Refers in particular to bizarre and perplexing instances of such freaky fame.
The eponymous example was triggered by one Martin Eldridge's deeply mistaken query on the Debian Linux distribution developers' mailing list (debian-devel), in July 2000: "Could you please send me the sheet music for Dueling Banjos, Regards Martin". Which in turn lent that mailing list high prominence on all subsequent Google searches for "sheet music Dueling Banjos", which lead to other people's (completely inappropriate) queries much like Eldridge's, and so on.
To head off the inevitable queries I would otherwise get: No, I don't have that sheet music. Neither does the Debian Project, despite porting efforts.
Edwards's Law (link)
"You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem." Nobody seems to know who Edwards was, but pretty much the entire system administrator profession rests on the implicit assumption that he/she was egregiously mistaken.
This plausible-sounding but empty-headed dictum is most often referred to as "Edwards' [sic] Law" — by the depressingly huge mass of semi-literates unable to correctly write possessives of singular nouns ending in "s".
-ENOPATCH (link)
Laconic expression meaning "You have failed to include substantive, useful content, among all that verbosity."
The expression was (to the best of my ability to tell) originally coined by Alan Cox in private mail copied back to the Linux kernel mailing list, on 2000-10-16, simulating for humourous effect a parser error ("Error: no patch") — thus advising a correspondent he'd omitted his source code patch. Some subsequent posters have used it in its current, figurative sense, e.g., Randy Dunlap's sardonic response to Luke Leighton's meandering advocacy post.
(No doubt related is Alexander Viro's similar creation: "Backwards compatibility is nice, but preserving every undocumented quirk that nobody sane would use... Sorry, but we really need an addition to errno.h: EBITEME. Exactly for such cases.")
Frogery (link)
Yet another new and fabulous Internet invention, a "frogery" (alternatively, "froggery") is a forged Usenet posting (or, by extension, e-mail or Web site) whose address was crafted to be visually as indistinguishable as possible from that of its intended victim — substituting, e.g., "1" for "l" or "0" for "O" — to either slur the victim by association or troll him into complaining to the froger's Internet provider or a public forum, and thereby look stupid.
The term originated on the Usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.usenet in the late 1990s. The best known frogery episode was occasioned by an obscene January 13, 1997 soc.culture.thai post from "Lawrence Godfrey", leading the better-known Dr. Laurence Godfrey (whose e-mail address was used in the frogery) to file a defamation action against Demon Internet Ltd. for failing to remove it from the company's news spool when so requested.
Hawthorne Effect (link)
Initial improvement in a process of production caused by obtrusive observation of that process. Industrial researchers studying General Electric's Hawthorne Plant in Cicero, Illinois (in 1927 - 1932) noticed that, when they raised lighting levels as part of a visible study of worker activity, worker efficiency went up. They lowered lighting levels: Efficiency went up again. They changed the humidity: Efficiency rose. And so on. The lesson seemed to be, narrowly speaking, that workers do better when they think somebody actually cares about and notices achievement — or, more broadly speaking, that work is strongly influenced by social factors. |
