I don't want to be too negative, I generally agree with and am aligned with the content of the article, but this struck me as a really bad take:

> In my experience, “show me the data” is often a tactic employed by weak managers who don’t know how to hang as part of a design process.

I really don't understand how asking to see data and talk in facts, rather than opinions, is a bad thing? This take seems to be implying the "design process" is just a giant, strictly qualitative "appeal to authority" fallacy and anyone who doesn't "get it" is some kind of naive rube?

A tangentially related pet peeve of mine is using code names for everything internally. They’re fine in moderation, but should be used sparingly.

It’s easier for a new engineer to understand and remember that your “foo-retriever” service calls “foo-processor” than to keep track of how “Zephyr” interacts with “Ceres”

In Laravel, every single feature has a name like "Vapor" or "Forge" or "Octane" or "Dusk". I toyed around with Laravel a few months back, and ended up bouncing off it pretty quickly, because I simply couldn't remember what anything was.

"My account" is innocent enough, compared to some other real life examples. And it sometimes doesn't come from marketing, but from development too.

I've worked in company which added a "funny" codename to everything: features, libraries, sprints, sections of backoffice interface. I don't know, maybe for some developers it makes things more engaging, for me it added a ton of unnecessary stuff to memorize or look up.

Also one of the reasons I don't like AWS. You really can call a router just "router", virtual machine "virtual machine" and so on.

Tangentially related: memberships and their 'benefits' is something commonly used to disconnect the payment from the thing you get. You think it's extra. It's not. In fact, I don't use most of the 'benefits' and I'm still paying for them.

And the other weird use of language is showing a discount for when you get a credit card as 'take 5%'. Not 'take 5% off'.

Like, I don't get to 'take' that. It doesn't appear in my pocket. I'm just spending less on your already overpriced product.

This is a rare advantage nonenglish programming teams have.

We have additional namespace for free. If it's the class it's account. If it's just an account it's konto or however you say account in your language.

Sometimes stuff is overloaded many times. Like transaction the user makes with the company, the DAO entity representing it, the db transaction, the spring transaction...

Counterpoint: if you are giving a user instructions (how tos, support interactions etc) then having the buttons, and concepts clearly marked out is really helpful.

E.g. if support tells a customer "click on your account" - then what does that mean? account is a generic abstract thing, how does one click on that? The customer must deduce that support is referring to one particular button on one particular place. Or support must say "the button labeled 'account' on the top right hand corner of the screen". If there is a unique name, then saying "click on 'Your Account"' is simpler.

It's even more critical when support needs to explain something abstract to a customer. Like, imagine explaining the difference between the temporary and EBS storage of a EC2 instance without any of the capitalized feature names.

I hope this idea makes the rounds. It's so terrible when you have to learn the idiosyncratic nomenclature of products.

It feels like it was already worse some years ago, but this piece spells it out. And, ironically, gives the problem a name, which is a good thing in this case.

"Features", like hurricanes?

Naming them is stupid, it's emotional and irrational.

The Japanese have a much better system of numbering them...

Specifying "My Account" implies potential access to someone else's account, but marketing and security rarely meet.

Yeah it's weird. Didn't it start with Jobs?

I'd say "I'm going to Harrods", but never "has anyone seen iPhone?" to mean my iphone.

They've been trying this for over a decade and it still just sounds jarring.

"Please place the Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube on the Aperture Science Super-colliding Super-button".