2020-06-20 Capital Letters Considered Harmful

I have a theory that you can often tell scamminess/sincerity by whether someone is capitalising concepts and using them as Very Definite Terms or not.

When you see people talking about lower-case-a “agile”, they’re often discussing the ideas in the original agile manifesto- people over process, customer collaboration, responding to change. When people talk about capitalised “Agile” there’s all too often a rigid process (that they’re selling you) with certification (that they’re selling you) that will totally solve all your problems, honest guv.

When you see people talking about lower-case “devops”, they’re often discussing breaking down silos, encouraging collaboration, empowering others to do things and achieving a common goal. When people talk about capitalised “DevOps” then all too often they mean “we bought this tool / renamed our sysadmins / fired our technical operations team / gave all the developers root”.

Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, Big Data, Machine Learning, and more - so often when I see them capitalised, someone doesn’t really know what they’re talking about, is jumping on a buzzword bandwagon, and/or is trying to sell me something counter to my interests.