Crap 'Buzzwords'

"so, you mean "tell the cunts in the other teams", rather than "cascade that down through the relevant thought-shower hives""...

Reminds me of:

I don't think anyone has posted the new classic IT term performant.

As in, 'is the application performant on this hardware?'

Means either 'very fast' or 'fast enough', depending on who you ask. Or maybe 'efficient'.
But rather than use such a specific term, or even a measure, performant adds a generous cloud of uncertainty.

It's ripe for use in the general business world.

performant

Oh.

Sean Kelly has been using it in his TDF commentary.

Now my thought-shower is conflicted: the Sean Kelly vs crap buzzwords...

Means either 'very fast' or 'fast enough', depending on who you ask. Or maybe 'efficient'.

I use this from time to time. It muddies the water, distributing some of the blame from my code being too slow and seeks to associate any issues with hardware, and possibly (if lucky) user error.

Has anyone ever challenged someone using this buzzword/management bollocks ?

At one job in the US I had:-

• Management = all Americans
  
• People who did the actual work = Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi plus a few Brits and Aussies
  
• Unlucky mug from the vendor = Brit (me)
  
  

In all of the meetings I used to translate all of the US Sports terms (baseball/NFL, e.g. hit it out of the park, whole 9 yards, 1st and inches, out of left field, batting a thousand, hail mary, 4th and goal, etc) into equivalent cricket/football/rugby terms for everyone who wasn't from the US.

For a while we used to use just cricket terms when it was our turn to present to management, often to blank stares from them - they rarely had the bottle to question it since they were worried it was something that they should already understand/know and admitting otherwise would be a sign of weakness.

I also coached them quite well to question, with entirely very believable sincerity, what a phrase meant if they were unsure, e.g.
By 'pick the low hanging fruit' do you mean 'do the easy stuff first'?
or
"Sorry, I don't understand what you mean when you say 'soup to nuts'. Can you explain?"

I like to think there's a tiny little corner of KS/MO where some management types have been questioned so many times that they've stopped using the bollocks.

Really, how did Mr Kelly use it?

Talking about how riders were doing: something like "so-and-so is performant on this sort of terrain", or "x is struggling, but y is performant".

Apart from being new to me, what made it stand out was that how often he used it: three or four times each time he commented.

Apart from being new to me, what made it stand out was that how often he used it: three or four times each time he commented.

Sure not just Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon?

Good work

Could it be because he has a lot of experience in French-speaking countries? It's less of a controversial word in French. I'm fine with it, but I've also lived in France.

This is quite good for some occasional bullshit - http://whatis.techtarget.com/ - see box in top right to subscribe to 'word of the day' - today's word? 'T-shaped employee'...

Exactly! @Scilly.Suffolk: Kelly's use of the term as a neutral-ish 3rd party seems to just mean 'performing well', or be comparative (as in 'x outperforms y').

But in IT it's more loaded: vaguely defensive when used by a 1st party as per @christianSpaceman, or vaguely critical when used by a second party:

We appreciate the work christianSpaceman's put in, and that it takes 20% less time to run, and has saved £1000 storage costs per month. But the fact is, we're still not feeling it's performant from our users point of view. Could he take some time to engage with them and find out where their pain points are?

I'd assumed that a T-shaped employee was a reference to Tetris. Perhaps that they seemed a bit awkward on arrival, but adaptable, and ultimately a good fit in many situations.

https://microcosm.app/out/9DZzh

I can't get past the subscription barrier. No doubt it's not terribly difficult, but loads of Lucy Kellaway's anti-jargon FT columns are available as podcasts: https://www.ft.com/listen-to-lucy

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:d1pwDlT6SxwJ:https://www.ft.com/lucycolumn%3Fmhq5j%3De1+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

For any FT article simply google for the same content and then click the link, the fact that it is a referral from google will let you read it.

If you want to post a link to it then google for it and select the "cached" version, the subsequent link can be posted for all to read (as above).

Thanks. I did find the Google AMP version of that article as well. But I also have years and years of the podcasts archived in case they vanish...

Performant. Been using that when describing ascribing a scriptural amendment within the architecture of an infrastructure supporting nodal legacy platforms networked via UDAs where the end user experience should be like...the same.

The use of the phrase "on point" when not referring to a dancer's foot position, a role in a military patrol or the concise arguing of a point in court by a legal professional.

Linguistics game is strong.

I'm OK with that one, seeing as it's only a short semantic hop from the latter two examples in your post. The first example is en pointe though.

My former boss was all about T-shaped people. It actually makes sense when explained in context, i.e. someone with some expertise across a number of areas, but deep expertise in one area.

or as used by that shouty bleached blonde fat man who presents that shit restaurant show.

I've not heard that one for years, it was quite prevalent at IDEO about 10-15 years back. I always thought it seemed quite reasonable.

Dancers do say on point although you are right, the literal translation is more "on tips" rather than on point.