- Company hires tens of people to build an undefined problem. They have a solution (and even that is rather nebulous) and are looking for a problem to solve.
- Company pushes the thing down your throat. The goal is not clear. They make authoritative-sounding statements on how it improves productivity, or throughput, or some other metric, only to retract later when you pull off those people into a private meeting.
- People who claim what all the things that nebulous solution can accomplish when, in fact, nobody really knows because the thing is in a research phase. These are likely the "charlatans" OP is referring to, and s/he's not wrong.
- Learning "next hot thing" instead of the principles that lead to it and, worse still, apply "next hot thing" in the wrong context when the trade-offs have reversed. My own example: writing a single-page web application with "next hot JS framework" when you haven't even understood the trade-off between client-side and server-side rendering (this is just my example, not OP's, but you can probably relate.)
etc. etc. Perhaps the post isn't very well articulated, but it does make several points. If you haven't experienced any of the above, then you're just not in the kind of company that OP probably has worked at. But the things they describe are very real.
I agree there is nothing wrong with "hype" per se, but the author is using the word in a very particular context.
- Company hires tens of people to build an undefined problem. They have a solution (and even that is rather nebulous) and are looking for a problem to solve.
- Company pushes the thing down your throat. The goal is not clear. They make authoritative-sounding statements on how it improves productivity, or throughput, or some other metric, only to retract later when you pull off those people into a private meeting.
- People who claim what all the things that nebulous solution can accomplish when, in fact, nobody really knows because the thing is in a research phase. These are likely the "charlatans" OP is referring to, and s/he's not wrong.
- Learning "next hot thing" instead of the principles that lead to it and, worse still, apply "next hot thing" in the wrong context when the trade-offs have reversed. My own example: writing a single-page web application with "next hot JS framework" when you haven't even understood the trade-off between client-side and server-side rendering (this is just my example, not OP's, but you can probably relate.)
etc. etc. Perhaps the post isn't very well articulated, but it does make several points. If you haven't experienced any of the above, then you're just not in the kind of company that OP probably has worked at. But the things they describe are very real.
I agree there is nothing wrong with "hype" per se, but the author is using the word in a very particular context.