Noun
yak shaving (uncountable)
(idiomatic) Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome >intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.
I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off.
So I'm after phrases like "yak shaving" that mean something to the developer community that non-developers don't understand. Not anecdotes.
Setting up automated Builds. Why waste 2 hours on setting up a build script when the build only takes 5 minutes and only requires 6 manual actions?
Reading the manual.
It is amazing how many people think "I don't have time to do that!" but then waste hours and hours bumbling through something that they don't understand.
Main Entry: dé·jà moo
Pronunciation: "dA-"zhä-'mü, dA-zh[a']-m[UE]
Function: noun
Etymology: Ebonian, adjective, literally, already stepped in
Date: 1999
1 : a feeling that one has seen or heard this BS before
OK answer 2 now that the question has been clarified:
"Mocking"
And a personally one I use - which I cannot recall seeing elsewhere is "making a mockery of x" as a way of saying "writing a mock framework of x".
Fixing PEBKAC* errors. Developers sometimes think it's pointless to "educate" the user, yet a few minutes with the customer often adjusts their attitudes enough to improve the overall product.
* *P*roblem *E*xists *B*etween *K*eyboard *A*nd *C*hair
Edit, 17 months later: changed Keyborad to Keyboard. Were the upvotes for subliminally committing a PEBKAC error in my answer?
What's the equal-but-opposite phrase for yak shaving, something that may seem expedient initially, but turns out to be a colossal productivity-killer? Time sink doesn't convey the entire concept, just the end result.
In that category, one of my favorite entries is clipboard inheritance, a phrase I learned here on SO. I'll look for the originator....
Commenting something out
Sometimes, if you ignore or hide a problem temporarily, you can remove the noise it causes and give yourself an environment that's more conducive to actually solving it.
At times this works with people, too: He tends to talk a lot without saying very much, so I usually comment him out.*
* Ok, I've never actually said or heard this, but I'd really like to!
Noise
Anything that's not informational or helpful:
The presentation on corporate restructuring lasted an hour and a half, but it was mostly noise.
You can ignore the noise in the email from Tech Support. The only important symptom is the green smoke.
I occasionally use the word "overload" in contexts other than operator overloading.
Example: "You shouldn't overload your DVD drive by putting a coffee cup in it."