
Secret language - stakent
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/12/30.html
======
larsberg
The hiring manager probably meant for it to be an internal only posting but
failed at posting. The training you get very early on as a manager-of-managers
covers how to write good job postings, and avoiding ridiculous acronyms is
part of it.

Fear of IP taint has traditionally kept most MSFT teams away from direct
external contact, except through legal-approved intermediaries. Maybe Joel has
forgotten that after fifteen years away? I'd stake money he didn't "talk to
anyone outside the company" when working on VBA :-)

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endtime
Joel's not really contributing anything here, and as I've said elsewhere, this
is marketing-speak, not Microsoft-speak. At least, I never heard anyone talk
like this when I was there over the summer. I learned some new words
("dogfooding") and people do call Ballmer "SteveB" (just as they often refer
to coworkers by their email aliases), but I can assure you this posting is as
incomprehensible to most Microsoft engineers as it is to you.

~~~
ghshephard
DogFooding is such a universally well known phrase in the technical industry,
that I was utterly shocked when I ran into someone for whom it was new. It may
be an insular phrase, but it's at least insular to a _very_ broad community.

~~~
endtime
Fair enough. I've been a student my whole life, and had never worked for a
software company before, which is why it was new to me. If you met someone 10
years into his career, then sure, that could be surprising - but everyone has
to hear the term for the first time at some point.

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medgeek
Microsoft is certainly not the only guilty party in this respect. Overuse of
jargon and, more egregiously, failure to appropriately define all but the most
universally well-known abbreviations at the point where the abbreviated form
is first used in the text is a pervasive problem in the field. For example,
the first few responses to this article use a total of four domain-specific
abbreviations (IP, MSFT, VBA, and DSL), none of which were defined by the
authors. Worse, within the field, the meaning of one of the abbreviations
(DSL) is context-sensitive and the author's intended meaning is the lesser
known one. The appropriate convention, used in virtually every other technical
domain, is to explicitly state what the abbreviation or acronym stands for
when it is first used in the text and then use it as much as you like in the
rest of the text. Only a very small subset of abbreviations that are certain
to be recognized by _everyone_ in the field, regardless of their subspecialty,
may be used without defining the term.

~~~
nocman
Somehow I find it difficult to believe that anyone who even knows about Hacker
News, much less anyone who actually reads it would have interpreted the one
comment to have said "any model complicated enough is best expressed in terms
of a Digital Subscriber Line".

Unless there is some other computer-related meaning for the abbreviation DSL
(besides Domain-Specific Language, of course) that I'm not aware of. :-D

~~~
medgeek
The point is not that anyone would mistakenly believe that Digital Subscriber
Line was the correct interpretation of DSL in that context. The point is that
the nature of human cognition is such that Digital Subscriber Line is the term
most likely to pop into consciousness first and it will be the _wrong_ answer.
The abbreviation DSL is _not_ widely recognized as meaning Domain-Specific
Language, or at least not so widely known that one may reasonably assume that
_any_ practitioner in the field will immediately know what you are talking
about. They'll know that Digital Subscriber Line doesn't fit into context, but
they won't necessarily know what meaning the author _was_ trying to convey.

~~~
litewulf
Not to disagree, but when I see DSL (and other acronyms of its ilk) I treat it
the same as any other homonym.

In fact, when I read in general I read the whole sentence and parse it all
together and not on a word by word basis. I thought most people read this way
so that they are more resilient to typos and other small errors.

So if they simply do not recognize the term DSL->Domain Specific Language
acronym, readers simply mentally flag it as a possible typo/other error
instead of confusing the telecom notion with the um.. trendy ruby-world? term.

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cschep
We'll connect offline about when I have some free cycles to get that on my
radar.

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andreyf
Judging from their performance in the marketplace, it sounds like their
internal jargon describes a model of the competitive landscape that's pretty
successful. Just like in programming, any model complicated enough is best
expressed in terms of a DSL.

------
wglb
Already noted at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1022403>

------
ghosttrails
I find the similarity between the style of jargon in that job posting and the
jargon used by the Church of Scientology ('sea-org', 'OT', 'out-ethics' etc.)
a little creepy.

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ShabbyDoo
There's no reason for a job posting to be jargon-free, but the jargon used
should be understandable by anyone who might be qualified for the role. I find
it hard to believe that detailed knowledge of MSFT culture would be required
to work in a group whose goal is to help the company compete with open source
stuff. If anything, this knowledge is a detriment. Had the poster used
acronyms like FOSS, I would have no issue.

------
lonestar
Jargon arises because it is useful for compressing information exchanged
within a given culture. If this really was an internal posting which was
accidentally exposed, what is the problem with using the jargon of Microsoft's
culture?

------
dmoney
What's a v-team?

~~~
Raphael
"They are not supposed to work on campus (although they may attend meetings,
etc.) and should not have an office or telephone assigned to them. These
contractors are called "v dashes" because the first two characters of their
alias/userID are v-. There are no restrictions on how long a "v dash" can work
for Microsoft." <http://www.edsguild.org/contracting.htm>

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is not how it works in practice. In reality a "v-team" is made up of
"vendors" who are not full-time employees but unlike agency temps they don't
have a limit on how long they can work at Microsoft without a break. They do
very much work on campus, though often they tend not to have their own offices
(instead they work in bays or are doubled up with others).

------
gaius
IBM say DASD when they mean "hard disk"...

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occam
OK, but to be fair to MS, this appears to have been written by a nonnative
English speaker. Indian, I think. So there's another factor at work.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
What points that out to you?

~~~
occam
"Top of mind" doesn't quite sound native to me. The use of the ampersand like
that seems Indian too. Finally the exclamation point is slight evidence.

