I think I've accumulated enough acronym cruft in my middling age where it has introduced serious imprecision in my language and understanding. Particularly when the recycling of acronyms is so common. PTP, P2P, PVP, NTP, LDAP, DNS, SMTP, B2B, CRM, SAP, SATA, IDE, PCI...at some point these terms stop meaning anything to me anymore and my eyes glaze rather than recollect context
Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
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Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#22I Have always found that acronyms are not the problem. They are necessary. However they become a problem when a lot of people start shoehorning them as attention targets instead of using them naturally in flow.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#23I was disappointed that KAOS was not an acronym.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#24I agree that acronyms can be overused, especially in marketing. However, a big part of why Tech, software, computer science, etc. have a lot of acronyms is because there are a lot of new, often abstract things to name, and acronyms are an easy and straightforward way to create a reasonably unique and short name for a new thing. And I don't think anyone would really want to write out all of "hypertext transfer protoco…
when naming the protocol part of a url, obviously you don't want to pick something so verbose, but that doesn't mean you gotta pick an acronym. could be hyper:// or smth. not saying it should be, just saying there are other ways that a more verbose concept can be shorted for certain contexts
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#25I actually think it’s even worse than the author suggests. Acronyms promote the illusion of understanding. You know the words the acronym stands for and it makes you feel a little bit like you know what it means, but you don’t. All names are meaningless words until we assign them a meaning, but acronyms trick you into thinking the name itself tells you something about what it is.
There's also a power dynamic with which definitions take precedence.
You will always have to dumb it down for upper management. As soon as the acronyms come out, they will delay making decisions so that they don't have to take questions or be held accountable. If there is an acronym they use that's spelled the same way but means something totally different, you will have to avoid using yours even when it's the most appropriate term to avoid confusion.
My favorite example is ServiceNow using the term "CI" for "configuration item". You'll have to tell them in a lot more words what the deployment process is. :)
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#26Agree acronyms are often used to signal expertise and depth that isn’t really there, or even needed.
But I do think non serious acronyms should be still allowed: YAGNI, YAML, SNAFU, BHAG, GNU, etc.
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#27Acronyms I can handle. What I've always hated is aNz style compressions. a11y, a16z, stuff that you can't even guess at a decoding unless you know it already.
Yep, I've always thought they were f5g s4d.
Although that would make a cool number plate. Someone called Kate should get k8s c4r as her number plate. It would be an accurate description and also s4dly confusing.
If you don't understand anything I've written, you can catch my technical sales pitches here: https://t7ls3sp5s.com
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#28My pet peeve = authors who start using an acronym without ever "introducing" it. Suddenly there is an acronym used throughout an article, and one has to carefully go back and find the phrase to which it refers. Necessitated because the author was too lazy to introduce the acronym in parens after first using the phrase. Not sure how AI does this, but this problem predates AI by quite a bit.
YGTR!
My girlfriend does not throw rugs!
Re: Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms
#29Agree acronyms are often used to signal expertise and depth that isn’t really there, or even needed. But I do think non serious acronyms should be still allowed: YAGNI, YAML, SNAFU, BHAG, GNU, etc.
It's very similar to people that feel compelled to constantly name drop people and companies they've heard off that supposedly did some cool stuff that impressed them. A lot of the tech scene is people just blabbing at each other about who and what they've heard about.