Glossary of Corporate-Speak for College Grads

Introduction

Lately it has occurred to me, amidst all the bad news about the job market, that it’s still technically possible for young college grads to land a spot in corporate America. Instead of bemoaning the loss of entry-level jobs to AI—a topic that has already received plenty of attention—I figured I’d help out those who have been hired, who are probably rather mystified by all the corporate jargon.

[Art by ChatGPT. No rights reserved.]

The glossary

AI (artificial intelligence): Of course we all know what this is, but it’s useful to define it in the specific context of the white-collar workforce: to wit, AI is the software capability that is purportedly rendering humans increasingly unnecessary. That you, recent college grad, have landed a job demonstrates that your new employer believes you possess capabilities that AI hasn’t developed—yet.

Alignment: The state of a company when all the stakeholders (e.g., Sales, Finance, Marketing, Engineering) are working well together toward the same goals. You will generally encounter this term when there is an alignment gap, that being a disconnect between what leadership is prioritizing and what employees are doing day-to-day. This could signal trouble in the form of a reorg, which can cause distraction to say the least.

AOP (annual operating plan): This is a comprehensive 12-month roadmap for how the company will turn its long-term strategic goals into specific targets, usually financial, for the coming year. It shouldn’t directly concern a new hire like you, other than to recognize that, in keeping with the adage “man plans, God laughs,” these plans can and do fail to come to fruition, which in the modern cutthroat realm can lead to swift and often severe consequences.

ATS (applicant tracking system): If you managed to get a job, you’re probably well versed with this recruiting tool, which is essentially a bot that screens résumés so humans don’t have to. Since it lacks the acumen of a human who can discern subtleties, such as a candidate’s rise through the ranks of a company or industry, it is basically screening for skills—that is, buzzwords—on the assumption that recruiting an intelligent, hardworking person you can train on the job is a hopelessly outdated and obsolete notion. If you possess actual intelligence and a real work ethic on top of having obviously mastered the art of listing desirable skills, you may well thrive in your new job.

Attrit: The linguistically unsupportable verb form of “attrition.” Its main purpose is to imply that downsizing at a company is the result of some natural phenomenon akin to erosion. For example, leadership might say, “The workforce is bound to attrit over time.” See also Downsizing, Rightsizing, Managed attrition

Bandwidth: Except in obvious technical contexts, this generally means an employee’s capacity for taking on more work. It is not only a handy metaphor, but adds to the overall conception of employees as basic implements of labor, in this case pipes through which you can shove workloads. See also Resource

Bias for action: A mindset that favors swift decision-making over careful, analysis-driven planning. Its popularity reflects growing impatience among executives, whose compensation is often based on the short-term results demanded by stockholders. In the current layoff-forward business climate, this bias can present serious risks to rank-and-file employees. Note that there is no longer any corresponding bias for analysis. See also Data-driven

BAU (business as usual): This is used to describe the routine, day-to-day operation of a company. In general this idea is threatening to ambitious leaders who want to “disrupt” business and turn existing models on their heads. If you find yourself using the term BAU, make sure to adopt an air of derision. See also Disrupt

Boomerang hire: This refers to the rehiring of an employee who was previously either laid off or coaxed into quitting but who the company has realized it actually needs. Oftentimes in the case of voluntary severance (i.e., a buyout), the boomerang hire is only permitted to return as a contractor, meaning the company is paying more for him or her than it used to, while he or she earns less. See VSP, Involuntary attrition, Voluntary attrition

Data driven: This refers to the idea that decisions should be made based on analyzing real-world data rather than going by somebody’s hunch. Unfortunately, the amount of available data is increasing much faster than any human’s ability to analyze it. Thus, when leadership wants to act quickly, they will lean on AI for answers, e.g., “Read these documents and advise whether I should shut down Project Unicorn.” See also Bias for action

DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion): These all add up to workplace fairness, which—though it may seem an unalloyed good thing—has become a political football. Depending on where you work, you should be careful how you use this term. The tech sector in particular is a minefield here, having tacked to the right with tech bros like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk seeking favorable treatment from the candidly anti-DEI Trump administration.

Disrupt: To use technology, especially in the absence of regulation, to upend a traditional business model and corner a market. Probably about 1% of businesses are actually in a position to disrupt anything, while about 99% only pretend they can. Watch out for force-fits like connected bidets or autonomous razors.

Downsizing: Euphemism for a round of layoffs. In times past, downsizing was reluctantly performed when a company was failing to produce a profit because too much money was going toward salaries. Oddly, the current fashion is for companies that are producing record profits to downsize anyway, just to show off.

EAP (employee assistance program): This is a type of voluntary intervention program designed to help employees cope with the mental health problems caused by their workplace. An EAP is generally easier and less expensive for corporations than treating employees well, and is useful in keeping them from harming themselves and/or becoming less productive.

Efficiency: In Corporate-speak this is generally used as a euphemism for layoffs, and may even be used to indicate a person laid off, as in “We are forecasting about 3,000 efficiencies in the fourth quarter.” See also Impact, RIF, Reduction, Synergy

Flattening the organization: The strategy of reducing the number of layers of management in order to speed up decision-making and facilitate layoffs.

Follow the puck: This is a fairly meaningless bit of advice resulting from the erosion of a pithy aphorism from the hockey great Wayne Gretzky, “I stake to where the puck is going, not where it’s been.” It’s a nice example of how a corporate-speak cliché can get mangled over time without losing popularity. Another example would be “peel back the onion,” which means essentially nothing but perhaps started out as something meaningful from, like, Julia Child.

Forced distribution: Also called stack ranking, this is the practice of requiring managers to categorize their employees by performance rating. It may mandate, for example, that only 10% can be “top performers,” 80% must be considered “average,” and 10% must be classified as “low performers.” Since the job market is currently so tight, and so many corporations have had massive layoffs, it’s kind of hard to believe anyone who has managed to land or keep a job is a low or even average performer. Still, that quaint notion cannot get in the way of the benefits of this practice: namely, that a company doesn’t have to give very many good raises, and can instantly lay off employees en masse by telling managers, “Jettison all your low performers.” See also Stack ranking

FTE (full-time equivalent): A unit of measurement representing the workload of a 40-hour-per-week employee. This is often used as a synonym for “employee,” to suggest that these are not so much humans as machineries of work that are essentially interchangeable, and by extension expendable. See also Resource

Ghost posting: This is a fake job posted to LinkedIn or a company’s recruiting web page, usually to create the illusion of growth or to frighten current employees into thinking their employer is seeking to replace them. Such postings cause countless hours of soul-crushingly pointless activity by job seekers. See also Requisition aging

Guidance: Refers to the predictions, aka “forward-looking statements,” that publicly traded companies make to Wall Street. If the guidance is too conservative, the stock will suffer, yet if a company realizes it won’t deliver on its guidance (i.e., “misses guidance”), it has to backtrack and “restate guidance.” This leads to severe punishment from investors, resulting invariably in layoffs. It doesn’t actually matter that the employees being laid off had nothing to do with the guidance; Wall Street tends to respond favorably to layoffs and that’s all that matters.

HR (human resources): This is the department that manages employee’s affairs beyond the recruitment phase, including “organizational health.” In theory it gives employees a way to pursue remediation in the event they are mistreated. In practice, HR employees can easily be punished by leadership for making waves, whereas rank-and-file employees cannot harm anyone in HR. For this reason, distrust of HR is commonplace if not ubiquitous.

Impact: As a verb, indicates a person was laid off, e.g., “Unfortunately, Tom has been impacted.” There is no need to say by what; staff reduction is always implied. See also Attrit, Downsizing, Efficiency, Involuntary attrition, RIF, Rightsizing, Synergy

Involuntary attrition: Euphemism for laying off employees. See also Voluntary attrition

KPI (key performance indicator): A measurable contribution to a company, the absence of which suggests that an employee is underperforming. Corporate America doesn’t seem to see any issue in pretending that all employee contributions are easily measurable. If marriage partners adopted this same mindset, divorce could be prevented only by documenting specific marital deliverables like income generated, sex acts committed, chores completed, and hours of childcare performed.

Leaning in: Generic term for actively engaging instead of stepping back or hiding out. This started out as the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s call to action for women to stop being reticent, but was genericized to mean “take initiative,” regardless of gender, and then further genericized to simply mean “work harder.” I suspect that this term’s popularity stems partly from the word “lean” lurking in there, implying “trim the fat,” which is to say a smaller workforce.

Managed attrition: A workforce-reduction strategy of resolving not to replace employees who leave voluntarily. A hiring freeze, especially when accompanied by unpopular changes such as eliminating perks or eschewing raises, is much easier and cheaper than laying people off. See also RTO, Voluntary attrition

Missed guidance: see Guidance

North Star metric: This is the single most important measurable result of a company’s efforts, and rather than being about the revenue received, tends to focus on what customers have gotten; e.g., Airbnb nights booked, Spotify time spent listening, WhatsApp messages sent. When a company needs to justify underpaying employee bonuses, it’s useful to have a solid-numbers goal that employees are powerless to meet, since it’s based on the whims of customers. Needless to say, this is a very northern-hemisphere-centric term. There is no southern-hemisphere equivalent, such as “Southern Cross metric.” South of the equator people still use the term “North Star metric,” which might feel a little strange, but then these people also celebrate Christmas in the summer.

OKR (objectives & key results): Similar to KPIs, except these are assigned in advance as the way an employee’s performance will be measured. These tend to be quantitative (e.g., “grow revenue 10%) and “stretch goals” meaning they’re conveniently unachievable. If you achieve 100% of your OKR, it will be deemed “not enough of a stretch” and increased for the next measurement period. The main benefits of the OKR model are, obviously, justification for underpaying bonuses and assigning a poor stack ranking. See also Forced distribution, Involuntary attrition, KPI, Stack ranking

Parking lot: This is a metaphorical space where tangential ideas introduced during a meeting are set aside for a separate discussion. It is more polite than telling a colleague to shut up. See also Take it offline, HR

Pre-wire: This is an informal discussion between two or more leaders before a formal meeting to make sure they already agree on the way forward. This prevents them from embarrassing each other during the meeting by having different strategies. It also prevents the meeting from generating friction-inducing embellishments to the existing plan, while giving non-leaders the feeling of being involved. See also Alignment

Requisition aging (aka Req aging): This is a measurement of how long a job posting has been open and unfilled. Traditionally this was a way to see if a company’s recruiter was doing a good job of finding candidates, and was an input into deciding to revise the salary offer or requirements as needed. In the modern climate, however, this metric is essentially meaningless because most reqs are fake and there is actually no job on offer. See also Ghost posting

Resource: A generic word for employee, which is used to imply that all employees are interchangeable; e.g., “We will get a resource on that task right away.” See also FTE

RIF (reduction in force): Standard term for a wave of layoffs, frequently used as a verb; e.g., “Unfortunately, Tim was the only one who understood that system and he just got RIF’d.” See also Attrit, Downsizing, Impact, Efficiency, Rightsizing, Synergy, Involuntary attrition

Rightsizing: This is just a euphemism for downsizing, emphasizing that if you don’t like it, you’re simply wrong. See also Downsizing

RTO (return to office): This refers to the growing practice of companies requiring teleworkers to return to offices despite widespread acknowledgement that remote work is highly effective. There is a generally accepted theory that RTO mandates are imposed solely to erode employee morale as part of a managed attrition strategy. See also Managed attrition, Voluntary attrition

Skip-level: This is a meeting with your boss’s boss, so that he or she can get candid feedback about the health of the team and the effectiveness of middle management. Of course, you need to be very careful about just how candid to be, and channel your inner Dirty Harry by asking yourself, “Do I feel lucky today?”

Stack ranking: See Forced distribution

Synergy: This formerly described the way in which partnerships or mergers could deliver more value than the sum of their parts, but has lately evolved to simply mean layoffs, and usually indicate a person laid off, as in “We are forecasting about 3,000 synergies in the fourth quarter.” See also Downsizing, Efficiency, Impact, RIF, Reduction, Rightsizing

Take it offline: This is a way, during a meeting, to table a side discussion. It can be confusing because it suggests data network connectivity but is actually totally unrelated to being online or not. What does it mean to be “offline” when so many meetings are conducted via videoconference? Don’t overthink it. See also Parking lot

Ventilate: To lay off employees. This term suggests that downsizing is required because the workplace is being stifled by too many people. Leadership might say something like, “It’s no secret this workforce needs to be ventilated.”

Voluntary attrition: This is when employees leave a company of their own volition. Quite often they are either nudged along with unpopular changes (e.g., lack of raises, RTO mandates), or offered an attractive severance package. In the past, HR would analyze voluntary attrition levels as a way to measure company health and morale, but in the modern workplace it is widely considered the desired outcome of a well-played rightsizing strategy. In other words, practically a gift. See also Attrit, Managed attrition, Rightsizing, RTO, VSP

VSP (voluntary severance program): Also referred to as “buyout,” this can be an attractive alternative to a RIF, because it lets a company save face while downsizing. With a VSP, a company pays a severance that is generally better than what an employee would get if laid off, and is often tied to years of service, meaning the employees with the most tenure have the most to gain from it. It’s also particularly attractive to top performers who know they can find employment elsewhere, vs. the deadwood the company really hopes to lose. However, to the extent those left behind by a VSP are ill-equipped to cope, this strategy fits in nicely with subsequent managed attrition programs. See also Attrit, Boomerang hire, Downsizing, Efficiency, Impact, Managed attrition, RIF, Rightsizing, Synergy

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Wordle II - The Spawning

Introduction

Over three years ago, in this post here, I described how I came to enjoy the Wordle, which is a daily puzzle you can play on the New York Times website or on their app. Though I normally consider games a waste of time, this one is fun and quick. Best of all, since it’s the same puzzle for everyone each day, I can compete with my daughter Alexa who lives in SoCal, hundreds of miles away. It’s a fun way to keep in touch: we share each day’s result via text.

Well, over the years the fun has only increased. Not only are we better at the puzzle, but we decorate our game boards before sending them to each other, just for grins. I turn photos into virtual stickers, and Alexa creates original art. Meanwhile, we have the Wordle Bot analyze our game to see how it says we did, and whether or not we beat it. To the extent the Bot is inane or judges us unfairly, my daughter and I can bag on it together, united in our indignation.

And of course we end up with some pretty remarkable Wordle results at times. In this post I’ll share some highlights. If you don’t have a tradition of doing the Wordle with a friend or family member, I highly recommend you give it a try, and perhaps this post will inspire you.

[Art above by ChatGPT, based on James Cameron’s first feature film, “Piranha II – The Spawning.” No rights reserved.]

Some artistic highlights

It is no exaggeration to say my daughter and I spend significantly more time decorating our game boards than we do solving the Wordle. Even though we always do hard mode (i.e., any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses), the puzzle itself seldom takes us more than a few minutes. Here is some early Wordle art showcasing Alexa’s artistic talent and my resourcefulness:

The art, I think, gives us a chance to redeem ourselves when we get a lousy score. Who cares if we took five or even six moves, if the art is good?

Our chatter around the Wordle is fun, too. Of the above “GROSS” result I sent, Alexa wrote, “AI kinda roasted you with those photo picks LOL.” She’s referring to the fact that I use AI to find photos, from my collection, that pertain to the word. It’s hard to imagine how it comes to its conclusions. Above, going clockwise from the top left, we have one of my burritos which is far from gross (details here); a failed attempt to make candy which was Alexa’s fault, not mine (details here); some salad we had in Hawaii that was actually quite tasty; my friend Pete and me (who you callin’ gross?!); me after drinking GoLytely (okay, totally gross, fair enough); and me either yawning or sneezing (ibid).

Not all the art is good. Sometimes I can’t be bothered to try to come up with photo stickers for an abstract word like this one:

Art can seem beside the point when you’re recovering from the psychic exhaustion of almost crashing out. Perhaps this is why the same word failed to inspire Alexa to sketch anything:

But all is not lost; there’s almost always room for enjoyable chitchat about the day’s puzzle ... as you shall see.

AI for Wordle pictures?

Is AI fair game in decorating our pictures? I tried it once, but wasn’t too pleased with the effect:

I obviously don’t have any photos of lathes in my own archive, and figured photos of lathes pulled off the Internet wouldn’t be that interesting, hence my experiment. But there’s something creepy about what AI came up with so I was ready to call this a one-time thing even before seeing Alexa’s glorious drawing:

She wrote, “I have no idea what a lathe looks like so I just drew a complex doodad.” Well played!

Thinking alike

Often, Alexa and I will see that we made the same penultimate guess (before hitting upon the solution).

Or, we’ll even have the same second guess, as with this example, though we always start with different words:

Also, if you scroll up and look at the CROOK game boards, you will see we had three of the same guesses! On such occasions we like to point out, “Great minds think alike and so do ours!” We abbreviate this homegrown expression but don’t always get it right.

Occasionally I simulate this minds-thinking-alike phenomenon by pretending I know what the hell my daughter is talking about. Consider our dialogue around this word:

Alexa: Bonus points if you know what gland that is.

Dana: Pituitary. I mean, obviously.

Alexa: Good guess but no. That is in the brain. This is in the torso. It has alpha and beta units hence the little squiggles.

Dana: TBH, that looks like a carrot to me.

Alexa: It rather does. Looks phallic in some images but I try to avoid that in my drawing. J

Dana: I’m gonna say salutary gland. It’s the one that makes you want to salute.

Alexa: I’m learning something new every day!

Dana: Yeah, I guess that’s one of the benefits of being related to the D-Dawg!

Alexa: My drawing is of the pancreas. Which is only fractionally a gland. Only the purple spots are technically glands.

Dana: Oh, right. It being only fractionally a gland is what threw me off.

Alexa: It was a trick question.

Dana: Actually, I barely know that the hand bone is connected to the wrist bone. That’s about the scope of my understanding of the human body.

Alexa: That’s all you need TBH.

Dana: Exactly! I hope you like my non-glandular stickers. My photo library doesn’t include any glands, and I wasn’t about to comb the Internet for pictures of glands.

Alexa: Very understandable. Your pics are a lot more cheery!

Consolation

When I crash and burn on a Wordle (i.e., fail to solve it in six moves), it’s always a bummer, and then a small part of me hopes Alexa also crashed and burned so we can commiserate. (Of course, being a father, the bigger part of me wants her to succeed at everything.) Sometimes it just comes down to luck: with certain words there are so many possible answers, there’s no way (in hard mode) to eliminate all the wrong ones. We call this “Wordle roulette.” Here’s a word that stumped us both:

As you can see, we were both too disconsolate to do any art.

In at least one case I was able to console Alexa because she’d literally never heard of the word that was the solution:

Alexa: Gofer? What even is that?

Dana: It’s a guy who works on some sort of team that frequently needs an errand to be run. Probably it comes from “Hey, tom, go for some coffee.” Even this [texting app] voice recognition software knows that Tom is a nobody whose name doesn’t need to be capitalized consistently. So he becomes a gopher. As you can see the voice recognition software doesn’t even seem to know the word “gofer” even with all this helpful context provided. By the way, I love that you guessed “boner.”

Alexa: Yeah, I knew it wouldn’t be boner but I was feeling feisty. Go big or go home.

Talk about roulette: look at how many different words it could have been:

Occasionally I’ve crashed and burned on the same day Alexa forgot to do the puzzle. This leaves me hanging, and in such situations I can sometimes gain consolation from seeing that the bot also lost, like with this one:

(If you’re curious, the answer to the above puzzle was ROWER. Sheesh.)

Meanwhile, if I’m the second one to post my result, and Alexa crashed out but I did okay, I almost want to let the matter drop and not share my score. Like with this one:

Alexa: I can’t believe I lost today. Rouletted to death. There were only twelve possible words after my first guess. Not a good round.

Dana: OMG, I am so sorry. I kind of don’t want to send you mine now, though the stickers are quite good.

Alexa: Please do send!

Interesting results

Sometimes the results are just interesting in their own right, like when all the incorrect guesses are yellow, or they’re all green, or in one crazy case, all grey:

And then there are the strange coincidences, like when we both get all green on the same puzzle:

Alexa’s FUZZY puzzle is particularly strange because she had two guesses in a row where not a single letter was in the solution (i.e., all grey). What are the odds?

Regarding FUZZY:

Alexa: I like your fuzzys!

Dana: Thanks! It’s a lot more fun a word [to decorate] than “gland” or “dryer.”

Math in the Wordle

Sometimes math works its way into the decoration, like with this one:

Dana: Nooicin’ your art including the ever-useful quadratic formula.

Alexa: Haven’t used that equation in forever!

Dana: OMG, I use that equation constantly! Why, just the other day I was calculating … oh wait, I mean that I actually have no idea what it’s for and never have, though it’s still committed to memory.

Incidentally, my solution to this Wordle had to be faked. As sometimes happens to one or the other of us, Alexa accidentally sent me her completed puzzle prematurely, when I hadn’t done it yet. Obviously I could have then “solved” it in one or two or three moves, but that wouldn’t mean anything and would skew my averages across the years of doing the puzzle. I didn’t want that, but also didn’t want to end my streak, so I put in plausible guesses as though I didn’t know the answer already.

Getting back to math, check out this gaff:

I think that’s the first time I really goofed after solving the puzzle. Now, in case you somehow missed it, here is the corrected version:

A tough competitor

I tend to do the Wordle before Alexa, and whenever I solve it on the second move, I eagerly anticipate the BOO-YA! moment I’ll presumably get when we compare scores later in the day. But time and again, she matches my score of 2 and I’m denied! For example:

In one case, we both scored a 2 two days in a row! Considering we start with different words, what are the odds?

Bemused by the bot

The bot sometimes really confuses us with its analysis. And in fact, this can be downright annoying. For example:

How come when I guessed TUILE, the bot scored this as a 1 for skill, claiming it’s not even a possible solution, but when the bot guessed TUILE, it scored a 99 for skill? And if my guess is not a possible solution, how did it “eliminate one of the two remaining words”? To paraphrase the writer Muriel Spark, the silly bot is bats. And in this game (the solution being EXILE), the bot didn’t even beat me despite its self-professed superior skill.

I think I always bristle when I’m in the position of being evaluated by an intellect (in this case an artificial one) that makes mistakes I wouldn’t make. Consider Exhibit B:

Notice how it failed to point out the serious blunder that I did make—trying A as the first letter when I knew for a fact (based on the yellow in the first guess) that it couldn’t be—and yet it facilely points out that guessing “MACHO,” that being the answer to the puzzle, would have been a “better option.” You think?

The overall rating the bot assigns can be frustrating too. For example, check this out:

Given that I solved the puzzle in just 4 moves, vs. the NYT reader average of 5.6, I must have been either luckier or more skillful than average. But according to the bot, I was significantly less skillful, and only a tiny bit luckier. Huh?

If you yourself get frustrated by the bot’s judgments, check out this goof it made:

In its third move, it tried a word with an E in it, despite having learned in its first move that there’s no E. Weak, Wordle bot, weak!

And so, it’s very sweet when, as occasionally happens, both Alexa and I beat the bot. Here’s an example:

Wordle in 1?

I distinctly remember getting the Wordle in one move, and at the top the bot commented “GENIUS.” And I remember Alexa getting it in one move, once upon a time, as well. But despite sifting through many hundreds of snapshots while creating this post, I cannot seem to find either one of the Wordle-in-1s. But you can see them in our stats:

If it ever happens again, I will be sure to grab (and decorate!) the game board(s) and update this post! I hope my daughter and I have inspired you to continue Wordling, and to share the love...

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