So, I’ve now had the “opportunity” to deal firsthand with two people I’d consider “frauds.” That is, they’re people who present themselves as “experts” in a field, but know essentially nothing about what they’re talking about. They have managed to acquire, for reasons I don’t understand, some measure of experience relevant to their field, but the *quality* of the content that they’ve both produced is absolutely abysmal.

It’s occurred to me that there are a few similarities between the two.

1.) They cater to an audience of non-experts. That is, the people they talk to aren’t experts in the field. These aren’t people who talk to programmers about programming, for instance – they talk to garbagemen about how to become programmers.
2.) They throw a lot of words at the issue. In both cases, where something can be said with five words, they’ll say it with fifteen buzzwords jammed in there, as well.
3.) They enumerate everything. It’s “Five things to do,” or “Twenty-Seven techniques of (blah).” The interesting thing about these enumerations is that they’re not actually followed up with anything. If it were a list of “Five Important Directions,” for instance, the list would look like, “Left, Up, Right, Down, Sideways.” And that’d be it. But the list said “important” directions – why are these directions important? How are they different? In the case of both of these people, though, they believe that the creation of the list of items is the *end* result, not the beginning.

I don’t know. This isn’t really all that new, or even that interesting, given that I’ve left out the details about the two people I’m talking about. Maybe one of them… is YOU! No, it’s not. At least, it seems unlikely that it is. But I just find both of these people incredibly frustrating, because they’re *clearly* so inept at their jobs, yet they’re in positions of power, exert considerable influence, and somehow, get paid to do something that they’re *absolutely terrible* at.

I dunno. Pisses me off.