Missing Technical Phrases

Each season seems to bring a slew of new buzz words. Synergy, paradigm, core competencies and others have all graced our ears.

I'd like to officially propose some new, more down-to-earth ones. Please feel free to leave a comment with your own additions. Perhaps, we can create a list to present to those on high at Google and truly establish some meaningful phrases.

Inverse Redundancy:

Rather than putting one application on multiple servers in order to add stability and scalability, this is the practice of putting every application and service on the same server(s) in an apparent effort to increase clutter and decrease stability.

It has a related term...

Inverse Staff Redundancy

this is the condition of having the same person assigned to multiple roles on many projects. Typically, a project team or manager will present an org chart with many layers and lots of boxes. But looking closely, you'll see that most of the boxes below the management layer have the same resource. This is also known as "Office Space Syndrome", in a reference to the guy in the movie Office Space, who had 14 bosses.

Psychotic Optimism

This is the view that things are going well in spite of substantial evidence to the contrary. You've been on that project. I know I have. It's 4 days from delivery. You're 7 weeks behind schedule and have no resources actually working on it anyway. And your executive manager declares that the project is going well and will be delivered ahead of schedule.

Security By Annoyance

This is the practice of making security policies that serve no real purpose except to annoy the users, thereby creating the illusion of security. Technical examples include things like password restrictions that are so complex, MIT students can't understand them, sessions that conveniently expire right before work is committed, and locally-running software (hard drive encryption, virus checkers, etc.) that consume 60% of PC resources.

The primary value of this is three-fold. First and foremost, it safeguards the jobs of the security team, since their work is visible and seemingly important. Second, it drives off would-be hackers by making the common functionality too painful to bother hacking. And third, it decreases system load as common users simply give up and resort to pencil and paper.

It should be noted that this is not strictly an IT term, but can be seen in any airport security checkpoint.

Feel free to add your own.