faetal on 5/8/2014 at 19:06
Habit I guess, but point taken.
SubJeff on 5/8/2014 at 19:24
No faetal, calling him out on his nonsense is exactly what you should have done.
Tony was asked to clarify and acted a dick about it. And never apologised.
We've ever right to go on about it.
ZylonBane on 5/8/2014 at 22:29
Someone remind me whose alt Tony is.
catbarf on 6/8/2014 at 02:45
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
If you work in an environment where different payscales are used (ie, an office that's mostly contractors) then it becomes a bit of a necessary for HR purposes, when most people will use "GS" to refer to the employees that are paid off the federal pay scale and "contract" refers to people who were hired by an outside firm.
My office is roughly half contractors and half staff. The official terms used are contractors and staff employees, and student intern every once in a while. The unofficial terms refer to the color of our badges. I have never in my experience with several agencies heard anyone self-identify by the pay scale, especially since there are staff employees with the same legal and leave standing as GS-salary employees who aren't paid on GS (like anyone on WG, SES, ES, or Foreign Service for State). I don't doubt that some office somewhere in the federal government uses GS to refer to their staff employees but your pretentiousness about terms that nobody here can be reasonably expected to know is completely unwarranted.
ZylonBane on 6/8/2014 at 05:00
In the military it's commonplace to refer to government employees by their GS level, since it's roughly comparable to rank. Military ranks are themselves often referred to by pay grade, eg, "O6". This has the advantage of being unambiguous across services, which don't all have the same rank names.
Gryzemuis on 6/8/2014 at 05:40
In my experience, the dumber people are, the more abbreviations they use. And they more they expect everyone else to know what those abbreviations stand for.
ZylonBane on 6/8/2014 at 06:33
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
In my experience, the dumber people are, the more abbreviations they use.
Your experience must not include anyone in any sort of tech industry.
faetal on 6/8/2014 at 07:59
If I had to do biology research without acronyms, I'd need to work a lot more weekends.
SubJeff on 6/8/2014 at 17:09
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Someone remind me whose alt Tony is.
CCCToad
Gryzemuis on 6/8/2014 at 23:00
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Your experience must not include anyone in any sort of tech industry.
I used to work in computer science stuff. Networking. First running our own network. Then working in support at a growing networking company. Then doing software development. Including developing new stuff, new protocols. Doing trainings about it. Going to IETFs, writing RFCs, etc. (There you go: if you are into networking, you know that the Internet Engineering Task Force the organization is that develops new protocols for the Internet. And the documents they produce are called Request For Comments. If you're not into networking, you won't have a clue).
I think it is here where I realized that the dumbest people use the most abbreviations. Of course every field has a few abbreviations that everybody knows, and that are just too long to say out loud every time. But besides those, there are a zillion abbreviations that aren't used every day. That are outside of the field of expertise. Words that are 4 or 5 letters long, abbreviated to 3 letters. Madness. It makes everything unreadable. In stead of focusing on the meaning of a sentence or a document or a presentation, you keep wondering what the heck all those random letters mean.
I think it's because dumber people have a harder time putting themselves in someone else's position. "How can you not know what GS is ?". If you're even a bit smart, you should realize that not everyone has the same vocabulary as you have. Sometimes it's fine to use abbreviations. Often it is not.
When you talk, the goal is not to make it easy for you.
Your goal is to make it easy for others to understand you.
