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buzzwords—on the assumption that recruiting an intelligent, hardworking person you can train on the job is a hopelessly outdated and obsolete notion.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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