

What non-geeks hear when you speak techie - petewarden
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2009/10/19/091019sh_shouts_weiner

======
alecco
Excellent article, misleading post title. It's a satire on book marketing
trends from a writer's point of view. It attacks the Web 2.0 trend. The
article is not about "techie" speak, at all.

It has some pearls on the situation of a decaying industry.

~~~
maudineormsby
Coming from the marketing world, this is all too true. Marketers think that
everyone cares as much about fads as they do, so they think that when they
spew about them everyone knows what the hell they mean.

~~~
netsp
Everyone who is very deep in a single area with jargon and fads has a hard
time sorting out what is a reasonable level of knowledge to expect.

In this sense, marketers & programmers are kin.

------
cruise02
Actually, this is what I hear when non-geeks try to fake "techie."

~~~
Eliezer
What you hear when non-geeks try to fake "techie" _is_ what non-geeks hear
when you speak techie. That's _why_ , when they try to fake something that
sounds to them like what they've heard previously, it comes out that way.

~~~
gchpaco
There is actually a subtle difference, which is why even non-scientists can
see when Star Trek, for example, is BSing. The cadence of fake tech talk is
all wrong. Apollo 13 was pretty good about this, actually; even though I don't
know the lander or anything like it I could follow what was going on and it
_sounded right_.

------
gaius
Title here bears no relation to title of article.

~~~
petewarden
That's my fault - I wanted to highlight what I thought would be interesting to
HN readers, the passages of tech-speak, eg:

"If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets
open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious),
because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at
the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your
social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent."

This gave me a horrible feeling of recognition, he completely captured the
rhythm and sound of a lot of my attempts at technical explanation.
Substituting nonsense words for some of the real terms gave me a feel for how
they must sound to other people, hence the title.

~~~
paulodeon
I have to say this part of the passage made me laugh out loud, it's funny and
captures what it probably sounds like to non-techies...

------
wallflower
I was with a bunch of nurse and doctor friends and they launched into acronym-
speak and jargon. Every profession has its own jargon.

I think non-geeks don't know or particularly care what technology/acronyms
they rely on/are using as long they like the experience (e.g. teenagers with
iPhones - do they really care it's Objective-C or openGL ES?)

~~~
Keyframe
> Every profession has its own jargon.

Exactly. Just switch to bloomberg or msnbc and listen to how "cable breaks out
against yen out from consolidation range which was a result of previous head
and shoulders resistance level." I made that up, but could be true and make
sense.

~~~
sidawson
Funniest thing is, it did make sense & I understood exactly what you meant.

Translated to non-trader speak.

 _The cable_ (British pound)

 _breaks out_ (starts a significant upward movement)

 _against the yen_ (Japanese Yen - ie, we're talking currencies, foreign
exchange or forex here)

 _from a consolidation range_ > (a period where the markets 'consolidate'
against each other, ie, just get bunched up & go nowhere - it's where the
traders sit around, scratch their arses & nobody knows what to do or what's
happening)

 _which was the result of a previous head and shoulders_ (this is a pattern
where this is a slight peak (looks like a human shoulder) which drops down
followed by a larger peak (the head) which drops again followed by another
slight peak, roughly the same size as the previous peak (the other shoulder))

 _resistance level_ (this explains the consolidation bit before - namely, it's
a level above which the market seems to have difficult getting above - large
numbers like Dow 10,000 are like this. It's kinda mystical mumbo jumbo, but
enough people believe it & it becomes true. So the market hovers, maybe goes
up to, occasionally slightly breaks, but always pulls back below this
'resistance level' - until it breaks through & takes off - as it just did)

in other words: british pound is getting stronger against the yen, after
pissing about for quite a while.

[uhh, just in case anyone was curious, bored and/or didn't already know. hehe]

------
audionerd
I remember reading an essay comparing engineer-speak and manager-speak to an
"impedance mismatch"? Anyone know what I'm talking about? Wish I could find it
...

~~~
stilist
By Rands, I think.

------
endlessvoid94
That was....weird. I understand the intent, but in my experience it isn't
quite that thick of a fog.

As startups go, the successful ones worry about how they sound to the layman
and explain things clearly, using everyday analogies and can relate to
experiences "normal" people have.

Although obviously "normal" is a relative term :-P

~~~
dasil003
For some people I'm sure it's a thicker fog.

------
efaith
Was any of that jargon fake? A good chunk of it was real and recognizable.

------
steveklabnik
I'm certainly guilty of "speaking techie" at times, even though I try not to.

The hardest part of not doing it is that I don't mind if other people speak in
the jargon of their profession, since I'm always interested in learning more
about anything, and I'd love to know wtf they're talking about.

Most people don't think like that, sadly.

~~~
dasil003
The real trick is gauging your audience. I think that's where perhaps some
techies (and some subset of any profession) fall down. If you assume the
person knows too little about tech then you can come off condescending, if you
assume they know too much then you go right over their heads.

Actually it's no different than any conversation on any topic you might have
with someone, it's just that in tech the jargon can tend to get thick fast.

