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MerrimanIndyesterday at 10:47 PM2 repliesview on HN

> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

The cognitive load is unavoidable and in some ways worse in industries with highly technical names.

At one point in my career I was an engine calibrator at a large automotive OEM. Our lexicon included physics industry terms (BMEP, BTDC, VVT, etc), a large software package where every variable, table, and function was an acronym (we had about 75k tunable parameters, each with an acronym), and all the internal company jargon and acronyms you'd expect in a large corporation. But every name was as technical and functional as the author would desire.

During my first month I was exhausted. I would doze off in afternoon meetings or pass out in my car as soon as I pulled in the driveway. I finally mentioned this to a more senior coworker and his insight was that my brain was working overtime because it was busy learning another language. He was entirely right! The constant mental load was a very real and tangible load. He relayed an anecdote when he went to S. America on his honeymoon and despite him and his wife having taken ~4 years of HS/college Spanish the mental work they had to do to function basically nixed half the daily activities they had planned due to exhaustion. That was what I was experiencing.

The idea that more technical and specific names reduces mental load does not track with my experience. The complexity is intrinsic not incidental and I don't think it has much to do with the specific names chosen.


Replies

jaggederestyesterday at 11:45 PM

I thought this was a wonderful example of "some things are just intrinsically challenging to represent in your brain":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZwWG1nK2fY

Apparently they've found structural differences in the brains of people undergoing London's famously difficult taxi qualification.

I think I saw a video that said people studying for "the knowledge" as it's known report massive fatigue.

YurgenJurgensentoday at 12:07 AM

In mobile telephony, one of the first things new hires are told is “don’t even try to work out what all the acronyms stand for; it won’t help”. You just have eat all the alphabet soup. Worse is that they nest themselves. You can have acronyms where every letter stands for another acronym. Writing a thousand words without using a single noun is easy. And of course all the short ones are overloaded. Is an AP an Application Processor or an Access Point? Depends on which subfield the person you’re talking to is from.

But they’re a necessary evil, since MSISDN is still less cumbersome than Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number.