At some point in my carer I became allergic to buzzwords. Significant enough exposure will cause involuntary twitches and even projectile vomiting. The young and excited I mentor often have a feverish addiction to them, like sugar to a 5 year old. And to this end perhaps I am not so much allergic, but rather years of bad diets filled with them has left me diabetic. I was having a discussion one day with some colleges when some one of authority became a bit upset that I would not “drink the koolaid”. For this reason I decided to provide an explanation here, perhaps to hep those who work with me now, and in the future, to understand my repulsion a bit better.

To start with, the phrase “Drinking the Kool Aid” should never be used in a positive way. At one point a company I was working for actually printed there brand on Kool Aid packets so you could literally drink the Kool Aid. I was personally horrified; and here is why. The phrase “Drink the kool aid” originated from the 1978 Jones Town massacre where members of the Peoples Temple, followers of reverend Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking kool aid laced with cyanide. Thus anyone who held an unquestioning belief or philosophical view that aliened with a group, with out critical examining it, was said to be drinking the cool aid. Their unquestioning belief is so strong they are willing to follow a path to the death with out ever questioning it. And that is the salient point here. Questioning and critically examining the path is absolutely critical (pun intended). But for some reason the need to believe, to belong, is so strong that people just swallow the hype like so much beverage created from a popular powdered soft drink flavoring agent laced with cyanide.

When some in IT hears “The Cloud” they should envision this Continue “Predictive Analytics using Big Dark Data in the Cloud to promote Synergy on a NoSQL OpenStack Platform! – Or why I hate buzwords”