What's a v-team?
Secret language
11–20 of 25 posts
Re: Secret language
#12I 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.
Re: Secret language
#13What's a v-team?
I'm guessing they mean 'virtual team', maybe? i.e. a team spread across a bunch of reporting lines, functions or offices that works on this one specific project, forming a 'virtual' team.
Re: Secret language
#14OK, 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.
What points that out to you?
Re: Secret language
#15Microsoft 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 D…
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
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.
Re: Secret language
#16What's a v-team?
"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
Re: Secret language
#17What's a v-team?
I'm guessing they mean 'virtual team', maybe? i.e. a team spread across a bunch of reporting lines, functions or offices that works on this one specific project, forming a 'virtual' team.
Yes, exactly. "v-team" is Microsoft-speak for a virtual team, most often a subset of people in a larger team who do not all report to the same lower-level manager. If you have a team of 12 people, then select 4 of them to deal with issues in the product's installation and set-up, you might call them "the setup v-team".
Not to be confused with "v dash", which refers to a contract employee from a vendor. In the Microsoft email system, contractors have an email that begins with "v-" and temps/interns have an email that begins with "t-", and just as employees are sometimes referred to by their abbreviated email aliases, contractors and interns as a group are referred to as "v dash" or "t dash".
Now you know... although I doubt you'll ever need to know :)
Re: Secret language
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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…
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.
Re: Secret language
#19What's a v-team?
"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
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).
Re: Secret language
#20There'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.