From time to time, Musk will send out an e-mail to the entire company to enforce a new policy or let them know about something that's bothering him. One of the more famous e-mails arrived in May 2010 with the subject line: Acronyms Seriously Suck:
There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.
That needs to stop immediately or I will take drastic action - I have given enough warning over the years. Unless an acronym is approved by me, it should not enter the SpaceX glossary. If there is an existing acronym that cannot reasonably be justified, it should be eliminated, as I have requested in the past.
For example, there should be not "HTS" [horizontal test stand] or "VTS" [vertical test stand] designations for test stands. Those are particularly dumb, as they contain unnecessary words. A "stand" at our test site is obviously a test stand. VTS-3 is four syllables compared with "Tripod", which is two, so the bloody acronym version actually takes longer to say than the name!
The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication. An acronym that most engineers outside of SpaceX already know, such as GUI, is fine to use. It is also ok to make up a few acronyms/contractions every now and again, assuming I have approved them, e.g. MVac and M9 instead of Merlin 1C-Vacuum or Merlin 1C-Sea Level, but those need to be kept to a minimum.
I worked at a large company where I found 13 different glossaries of acronyms that people had created over the years trying to bring clarity to the madness. The glossaries conflicted with each other on definitions.
I created a list of the lists, hoping to point out the absurdity.
During onboarding sessions, after new employees had been there a few months, they were asked for feedback about what made onboarding difficult. Acronyms were the number one thing people brought up. The person running the session laughed it off. She thought it was a joke. I thought she was.
People have no idea how much damage these abbreviations do to their organizations, because they're terrible at root cause analysis. It's not just confusion in meetings. It's company-wide ossification. You're already facing insurmountable complexity trying to fix core architectural issues across hundreds of components. Now add the fact that three different teams all use "TGP" to mean three different things, and only one of them ever documented it. So when you search, you find that one, and you build your entire mental model around it. The other teams never wrote theirs down. They just all know. You don't even know you're wrong. You can't. Now multiply that across every acronym in the organization.
There are two forces that keep this going. First, there are people who introduce acronyms because it gives them job security. If nobody else can understand what you've built, you can't be replaced. Their actual skills are thin, so they obfuscate instead.
Second, there are people who mistake complexity for competence. "If this person is saying things I don't understand, they must be very smart." The opposite is true. Smart people aren't afraid to teach others, because their ability to produce results speaks for itself. They don't need to hide behind obscurity.
Acronyms Seriously Suck