I tracked most of it as it was happening, and TBH the number of fairly well known people who played along was just staggering. Although there is some flak being taken about making this "too real", I have an impression that many people played along because it was, in fact, very symptomatic of the hype-driven approach to tech the industry has these days. So it wasn't just about recruiting, and resumé keyword stuffing (…
Hi! I’m the tweeter quoted in this article. Love the description of lifelong learning turned lifelong marketing, that is a much more eloquent way to capture the frustration than I managed.
Totally agreed on the staggering nature of the response, it’s been a real weird couple of days. Great to see some people playing along in the comments too ;)
This reminds me of a practical joke a co-worker and I pulled some years back, we made up a new project called the LMNOP project (just letters out of the alphabet). We used a program i wrote based on the old foggy where whenever we would see a good BS line from an email or document we put it in the BS generator DB. We had the program spit out several pages of total BS and some fake but impressive looking diagrams made up of a bunch of boxes with random letters as labels and lines between them. We did put some actual sentences of our own in the beginning and end to hype it.
Then we set the trap and left it on the copy machine half copied and walked off. Within a couple of days, bootleg copies were flying around and someone scanned it in and it was being emailed around. A lot of people in our department and even other departments were asking about it. If someone asked us we would say "sorry I can't discuss it" in a very mysterious way. Then we started hearing other people saying that same phrase when they were asked about it.
The whole things started to take on a life of it's own, we joked about how it was like a Dilbert come true and there would be an entire team headed by a director with a budget running a program that was fake.
Of course that never happened, our director called me in and had a copy of the fake document, and said "this looks like something you may have had something to do with ?". I laughed and said just having a bit of fun. She sent out a blast email telling everyone that it was a practical joke gone viral and for everyone to ignore it.
Even so, for a long time people kept coming up with conspiracy theories that was a cover story.
It just shows how people like believing stupid stuff.
I tracked most of it as it was happening, and TBH the number of fairly well known people who played along was just staggering. Although there is some flak being taken about making this "too real", I have an impression that many people played along because it was, in fact, very symptomatic of the hype-driven approach to tech the industry has these days. So it wasn't just about recruiting, and resumé keyword stuffing (…
For me one of the joys of this, and of many Twitter jokes, is the way many people can play.
I think the Infinidash thing was especially rich because there were so many ways you could engage with it. Are we making fun of tech hype? Of recruiting? Of AWS's amorphous and ever-growing blob of offerings? Yes, yes, yes. And so much more.
This reminds me of a practical joke a co-worker and I pulled some years back, we made up a new project called the LMNOP project (just letters out of the alphabet). We used a program i wrote based on the old foggy where whenever we would see a good BS line from an email or document we put it in the BS generator DB. We had the program spit out several pages of total BS and some fake but impressive looking diagrams made…
> this looks like something you may have had something to do with ?". I laughed and said just having a bit of fun.
Surely this would've been the best time to reply with "Sorry, I can't discuss it"
People in tech are constantly chasing the next big thing, but honestly I feel like most of the major software paradigms have been discovered , things like website UX, AI etc are already at the state of maximum effectiveness and "innovation" is basically just a way of locking in devs who want to learn something that's "industry standard." Look at all the pointless wheel spinning created by having multiple large JS frameworks. The real efficiency gains most organizations are going to see from technology is in integrating their engineering/tech infrastructure side with the rest of the organization, simple stuff like teaching people to use Ipython notebooks instead of PowerPoints and spreadsheets.
People in tech are constantly chasing the next big thing, but honestly I feel like most of the major software paradigms have been discovered , things like website UX, AI etc are already at the state of maximum effectiveness and "innovation" is basically just a way of locking in devs who want to learn something that's "industry standard." Look at all the pointless wheel spinning created by having multiple large JS fra…
The path of discovery of new software development paradigms is far from linear but over the long term the improvements are impressive and ongoing. One of my favorite recent examples is declarative (Flutter, SwiftUI) vs imperative UI. The gains to efficiency and clarity are significant.
I tracked most of it as it was happening, and TBH the number of fairly well known people who played along was just staggering. Although there is some flak being taken about making this "too real", I have an impression that many people played along because it was, in fact, very symptomatic of the hype-driven approach to tech the industry has these days. So it wasn't just about recruiting, and resumé keyword stuffing (…
Hi! I’m the tweeter quoted in this article. Love the description of lifelong learning turned lifelong marketing, that is a much more eloquent way to capture the frustration than I managed. Totally agreed on the staggering nature of the response, it’s been a real weird couple of days. Great to see some people playing along in the comments too ;)
Thanks! That was really funny (and still is). Great idea :-)