Re: "add any other overly fancy use of language and management terms at will"
acronyms - it irritates me when people use acronyms and then try and look smug when you ask what they are
I spent quite some time at a mobile phone company to assist them with some network related issues and, not coming from the mobile world, I had to absorb quite a lot of data in a short while on how things work and a large part of that was acronyms. Thank God I've been knee deep in electronics and radio since I was about 10 so I had at least a baseline in how things work :). In this case, the acronyms weren't there to impress people but simply shortcuts to name components of express a way of working and they had a LOT of them. That's IMHO also the proper place for jargon, increasing efficient communication, not to impress people.
Anyone who uses jargon and TLAs and gets very annoyed when you ask them to explain tends to skate on the edge of their knowledge. Someone with actual expertise tends to have less of an issue switching it off, but doing it to, for instance, a sales rep is fun as it breaks their rhythm (very evil grin :).
Personally, anyone who attempts to claim "secret" expertise in any way, shape or form and is unwilling to clarify is telling me in no uncertain terms that they actually don't have a clue. Want an example? Ask a politician what exactly they mean when they utter the word "Cloud"...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
