humantypo

Recently I took a mental stroll through back through past development projects Good and Bad and couple of memes popped into my head like well folded socks in the drawer. As one never to turn down the coining of a phrase I present the following…

Sword of Righteousness: The unwavering belief that a given design or process is the only True Way to solve a problem. All alternative approaches are not only inferior, but are by definition submitted by authors of limited intellect or who are evil saboteurs. This social armament is typically wielded by technical alpha males as a means of establishing and maintaining control of a project’s design and/or architecture.

Shield of Propriety: A specific form of Corporate Judo whereby the wielder applies arcane (and often conflicting or nonsensical) Company policies to drive a technical decision in a desired direction. The Shield may be applied subtly (“I really wish we could implement X but it would have to approved the Corporate Cabal and we all know how long that will take.“) or as a weapon (“Legal says we have a zero tolerance policy toward Open Source software so you will need to find a commercial package that will run on Apache.”)

Corporate Judo: The ability to use a corporate opponent’s mental momentum against them to a desirable end. In its most refined form the CJ practitioner is able to gain approval for increased staff to perform legitimate company business while assuaging the fears/demands of others in wholly unrelated topics. “Bob, I know that The Mgmt is really concerned that all source code in the company be formatted the same way so I have put in a request to hire two (grade A) developers to ensure that my project conforms.“