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votes
Developers/sysadmins: What marketing terminology do you find most enraging?
Which buzzwords, used in marketing to techies, are the biggest turnoffs?
I'll start:
- Accelerate innovation
- Single pane of glass
- End-to-end
- Best practices
- The developer experience
There are valid reasons to use all of these, but 90% of the time... nope.
If I get enough response to this, I'm thinking of turning into a listicle of "N Buzzwords That Developers Hate."
Not sure if this qualifies as "marketing to techies" (it probably doesn't), but I always groan when someone advertises "military grade encryption". That usually means AES if you dig further, but to me it also signals that you'd better give wide berth to whatever product they're selling...
Edit: Eh, looks like the reddit post already had that.
In something marketed toward me?
It seems lately that the meaning of "VPN" has been thrown out a window and is used to make "proxy" sound better.
"Experience" — Not everything has to be an experience. The "login experience," the "onboarding experience," the "opt-out experience." None of these warrant the kind of transformative sensory profundity their names would suggest.
"Conversion" — It's an obfuscatory euphemism for "we got money from somebody." It smacks of dehumanizing marketing/SEO nonsense when plain language will do just fine.
"Engagement" — Seems like maximizing for user engagement is the #1 goal of most web companies, over things like customer satisfaction and public good. This focus leads to development of addictive loops, dark patterns, and algorithms that surface ragebait and conspiracy theory.
"Impressions" — Marketing nonsense that means "somebody downloaded an ad." Doesn't mean they looked at it, wanted it, cared about it, were changed by it, or that ad-blocking software didn't prevent it from even rendering.
I'm not 100% sure this list is what you asked for, but as a dev these are some of my biggest pet peeves.
Sometimes the contemporary use of most of the terms you mentioned is annoying to me too. They're useful terms, though. As always, people looking for cool sounding vocabularly to help them sell things (sometimes themselves) eventually suck the usefulness out of terms.
Experience: It's a filler word at this point, but it was once an attempt to communicate that there's a difference between what we think users want and what the experience actually feels like to someone going through it. It was a call for empathy.
Conversion: This is actually a specific term that comes from the earlyish days of internet advertising. Rather than refering to a sale, it refers to the point in the process where a user transitions from being a lead/visitor. So it refers not just to sales but to any action that is the ultimate goal of the process (download, signup, list subscription, etc.). It's useful shorthand in metrics that anyone involved is going to understand, in lieu of a bunch of extra words
Historical aside: conversion tracking, on top of PPC advertising, changed the world. It feels like it was for the worse at this point, but that's how capitalism is, early on the market does a lot of good things, later it becomes increasingly evil.
Engagement: A useful shorthand term for the whole bucket of ways to measure user interaction with an application. See above about capitalism :)
Impressions: Here again the term has a useful meaning. In the early internet the units most advertising were sold in were impressions (views). Then pay per click (per visitor) came along and made things far better for advertisers, drawing in all sorts of new advertising dollars and funding a huge part of the innovation that has happened on the internet since.
The term also has value in metrics. It distinguishes a page load from other measures of user interaction.
Side note: A good ad blocker should stop the request from happening, so it wouldn't be recorded as an impression. Maybe some ad blockers don't do that, but they'd be wasting bandwidth and compromising privacy if so.
I'm not sure I've heard the first two terms before, but the others don't personally bother me. End-to-end has a specific meaning in encryption, developer experience is a meaningful distinction form user experience, and "best practices" also seems useful. eg. Password best practices include a special character because it disrupts dictionary attacks. It's often not required, but it's a best practice.
See the /r/SysAdmin post for other answers.
Many of those terms have a genuine meaning where the distinction matters, with "end to end" being a good example. In security, sure, where it is important to distinguish between security at an endpoint (prevent someone from picking a lock) and through the entire process (encryption throughout).
But OH GOD SO MANY documents use it as noise.
Not a developer, “best practices” is lousy in any context. This is because it’s a vague dodge. It can mean anything an nothing. A well defined protocol is always better.
I'm not sure it's that hard to define. Something like "Recommended to ensure long-term stability, correctness or security, but not outright required". You could quibble over the exact meaning, but that's true for any term.
Sure it can, be defined, as can any term, but it rarely is, especially in a marketing context. It’s a glittering generality, devoid of any standardized meaning, used in place of identifying the actual practices which are best (which would introduce accountability). Even your definition is vague. What constitutes “long term”, for example, will be different for everyone.
Ransomware-proof backups. We call them "backups that you test."
Immutable backups. They're filesystem snapshots that get mounted read-only to restore from.
Zero-trust. I've hear people marketing that it obviates need for firewalls. No, it's called 'defense in depth'.