JARGON!!!

A chapter in a software engineers life

A two month sabbatical was to have cured me from a lot of ailments, and i guess it did too....I am not hating my work.....Maybe i was not doing any.....My depression is more or less gone...In fact, I am on a high most of the time...No, I do not use pot...But there is one thing that seems to have gotten worse and that is my abhorrence of Management speak...JARGON!!!!

It is a phenomenon that you get to see more in the software industry...People trying to reinvent the wheel...Why use catchy phrases, when a simple word can do the same in a much more understated way..
In my managers words "It is all about perception matching".
"You mean satisfying...rite?"
"No....Perception matching..."
"oh ok!!" and a vigorous nod of the head.

The higher you go up the corporate ladder the amount of well dressed crap that goes around is humongous...sample this...
The best practices awards are coming up, why dont we pitch process evolution as a paradigm that has helped redefine the way offshoring has helped the client get more baing fozh the buck...open quotes in the air " Pezzh se" close quotes in air..vis-ahhh-veeee the competition.....and so on and so forth...Bewilderment...Brain cranking to decode....a smirk as the realisation dawns..."Bang for the buck","Per se", "Vis- a-vis"...all in a texan twang...and the speaker (originally from Madras) lost me...

This was one of the first things I heard as i was settling in to my seat on the first day after my vacation. And all I could manage to mutter was..
"mmm..can be done"....

Though felt like standing up and apploading the seamless way in which seemingly disconnected words formed apparently meaningful sentences...More of the same for a couple of more days and I decide to rate my tormentors on a scale of 1 to 5. This but then had to be based on a few normalized parameters that also took into consideration the innovation and the Out-of-box thinking that they brought to the job.

I set about formulating a methodology and the standardised unit that I arrived at was "Jar-in-Hundreds"...(subtle Pun intended)... Jarring Hundreds ...Get it?...No???...better stay away from the IT industry then..It measures the number of Jargons in every hundred words..(will patent this soon...so forget it)...
And i think i hear my manager calling me for a Re-org meeting to discuss specific niche' sets....so as i try and figure out what it all means and perfect my scoring system, let me leave you pondering on your career paths....