on language and culture
In a lot of ways Microsoft is a great place to work, but one of the weirdest things about the culture is how people use language. There's the nounification of verbs, the verbification of nouns and the wordification of acronyms. Oh acronyms, how we love thee even and especially when you don't make sense. No one goes on vacation, they go OOF. OOF? "Out Of oFfice". Yes, it would make a lot more sense if we went OOO but say that outloud to yourself. "I'm going ooooo next week." People don't send meeting requests, they send you a S+. One presumes it's left over from when calendaring was done through Schedule+. Abbreviations are almost as bad - a few months ago I was having a conversation with someone as they were talking about handing files to Eugene. Well, it turns out they weren't giving files to a dude named Eugene, they were putting files through a tool called "EUGen". Raymond Chen has a series of blog posts about Microspeak which is an entertaining read if you're looking to waste some time.
Where am I going with all of this? I've realized that I'll have been at Microsoft for eight years as of this week and it occurs to me that I might have some parts of the culture a bit too ingrained. I was out walking the dogs this evening when a loud late model* Corvette turned the corner and drove by - the license plate included some w's m's p's. Reading the license plate I immediately thought his plate called him "wimpy" which I suspect is not quite what he was going for :)
*When I was growing up and watching cop shows the phrase"late model" referring to newer cars always confused the crap out of me. Shouldn't "late" mean they're old?