It had been a month at my first full-time job out of university and I was completely lost at every meeting. I remember vividly coming out of one meeting and feeling like a foreigner walking out of their first ESL (English as a Second Language) class. What are all these big words being used? “Wow, these people are so smart using all these big words”, I frequently thought. To add insult to injury, the telecom domain of the job was so prominent that it made things even more complex. I needed context so desperately to find my bearings. But wait, was it my fault that I lacked the required context or jargons this early in the job, or did the onus fall on the the communicator to know the audience of the room and adjust accordingly?
As you grow (literally and figuratively), you learn a lot from your surroundings. The nuances of each environment shape who you are growing up to be - and it is no different as a budding developer. Over time, you learn from all the senior developers and pick up some traits along the way. Not all traits are good though. The more senior I got, the smarter I wanted to sound to my peers. I will learn some new jargon or acronym the week prior and will try so hard to regurgitate it, even it was marginally in context. The funny part of this was that it was beginning to happen “naturally” without catching myself. Because that’s how (senior) engineers talked.
So far, I’ve been purposely not been concrete about these jargon, acronyms, and terminology I’m referring to, just so you the reader can reflect and see if you have a tangentially similar story as I’ve shared above. Do you remember when you first heard these phrases - “low hanging fruit”, “abstraction”, “prod”, “staging”, “CI/CD”, “memoization”, “syntactic sugar”, “middleware”, “UI/UX”, “DX”? These were the first few that came off the top of my head but you get the point. It may sound like ubiquitous language to you now but at some point, it wasn’t - and that’s my point. You may not always know the background of your audience and we should be clear and concise with our communication and not overly clever. When speaking or writing to a wider audience, assume they are intelligent but new to the topic. This will avoid speaking down to them but still communicate effectively. I recently read a blog post by Sarah Drasner on written communication which hammers home this point perfectly
On the subject of clarity, when you’re writing a document it’s important to get to the point. Blather includes any kind of overstated, corporate jargon that sounds official but means very little. For some reason, it’s quite popular and completely gets in the way of communication. It’s tempting to use overcomplicated language so that you sound official, but try your best to steer clear of this.
So here am I, 11+ years in and still trying to unlearn this behaviour. Look, I get it - the more senior you get, the greater the tendency for these jargons to unintentionally roll off your tongue. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. The point I’m trying to drive home here is to know your audience and read the room. Is a younger Elom who is starting his career in your audience? Does your audience look confused? Research says that if one person has a question, then at least 3 other people have a similar question. Figured out the shared context and tailor your communication accordingly.
So what jargon, concepts or acronyms do you use frequently at work that could be easily replaced by clear and concise words or phrases?