Because nothing says “I deserve my inflated salary” like using obscure technical jargon to describe turning your computer off and on again
Welcome to the inaugural edition of TechOnion’s “Urban TechBros Dictionary,” where we decode the mysterious lexicon of Silicon Valley’s finest specimens. Today, we’re exploring terms beginning with “A” – the first letter tech bros learn after securing their Computer Science degrees from prestigious institutions like “My Dad Knows The Dean University” and “I Watched A YouTube Tutorial Once College.”
A is for Abend (Tech Factor: 8)
TechOnion Definition: A German-sounding term used by developers to make “the program crashed” sound like a sophisticated European engineering phenomenon rather than admitting they forgot a semicolon.
How Tech Bros Use It: “We experienced an abend in the production environment due to unforeseen quantum fluctuations in the server’s tachyon emissions.” (Translation: “I pushed untested code on Friday afternoon before leaving for my kitesurfing weekend in Maui.”)
Seen in the Wild: During the all-hands meeting, Chad explained that the six-hour outage that cost the company $14 million was merely “a routine abend scenario within expected parameters” while discretely updating his LinkedIn profile under the table.
A is for Abstraction (Tech Factor: 6)
TechOnion Definition: The art of making something so unnecessarily complicated that you become the only person who understands it, thus securing your employment forever.
How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve created seventeen layers of abstraction in this function that converts Celsius to Fahrenheit. Now it’s enterprise-ready!”
Seen in the Wild: After implementing his “revolutionary” abstraction layer, Skyler couldn’t figure out why a simple customer name change required modifying 94 different files and restarting three microservices. His solution? Add another abstraction layer.
A is for Access Point (Tech Factor: 6)
TechOnion Definition: The mystical device in the office that everyone gathers around like ancient humans worshipped fire. Located precisely far enough from your desk that you must awkwardly hover in someone else’s workspace to get a signal.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our new mesh network of enterprise-grade access points optimizes throughput vectors across dynamic spatial configurations.” (Translation: “We bought the expensive routers so I can watch YouTube videos in the bathroom.”)
Seen in the Wild: The entire engineering team refused to sit in the east wing of the office after CTO Braden declared it an “RF shadow realm” with “suboptimal access point coverage,” despite the fact that he simply didn’t want to sit near HR.
A is for ACID (Tech Factor: 9)
TechOnion Definition: A database property that tech bros mention to sound intelligent in meetings while silently panicking because they’ve been using MongoDB wrong for three years.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our blockchain-enabled NoSQL solution maintains ACID compliance through quantum-resistant hash tunneling.” (Translation: “I have no idea if our database works, but I saw these terms in a Medium article.”)
Seen in the Wild: After the entire customer database was corrupted during a power outage, VP of Engineering Blake insisted that it wasn’t due to his decision to store mission-critical financial data in a non-ACID database, but rather because Mercury was in retrograde.
A is for Active Directory (Tech Factor: 8)
TechOnion Definition: Microsoft’s elaborate revenge against IT departments worldwide, designed to ensure that resetting a password requires three specialists, seven hours, and a ritual sacrifice.
How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a multi-forest Active Directory architecture with transitive trust relationships and federated schema extensions.” (Translation: “Nobody can log into anything, including me.”)
Seen in the Wild: After accidentally deleting his own admin account while “optimizing” Active Directory, Zack spent three weeks claiming it was an intentional security measure called “trust-absent authentication paradigm” before finally calling Microsoft support.
A is for Ada Lovelace (No Tech Factor Listed)
TechOnion Definition: The world’s first programmer, whom tech bros simultaneously worship and ignore by claiming “women just aren’t interested in coding” despite the fact that a woman literally invented it.
How Tech Bros Use It: “As a strong supporter of diversity, I often think about Ada Lovelace while explaining basic coding concepts to my female colleagues who have PhDs in Computer Science.”
Seen in the Wild: During Women in Tech month, startup founder Chet gave a 45-minute talk about Ada Lovelace, managed to mispronounce her name seven different ways, and somehow concluded that she would have loved his app that rates beer based on “crushability.”
A is for Agile (Tech Factor: Not Listed But Deserves 11)
TechOnion Definition: A development methodology that began as a way to avoid documentation and evolved into a religion complete with certifications, priests (Scrum Masters), and ritual sacrifices (daily standups).
How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re an agile shop, which means we plan two-week sprints but still change requirements hourly and expect the same deadlines.”
Seen in the Wild: Despite having 14 Certified Scrum Masters on staff, the company’s “agile transformation” resulted in the same waterfall process as before but with more expensive Post-it notes and an inexplicable obsession with calling everything “epics.”
A is for AI (Tech Factor: 4 But Really 10000 In Marketing Materials)
TechOnion Definition: Formerly known as “if-else statements,” now known as “billion-dollar valuation.” The art of convincing venture capitalists that your glorified pattern matching algorithm is sentient.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our disruptive platform leverages state-of-the-art AI to revolutionize the dog-walking industry.” (Translation: “We use if-then statements to send notifications.”)
Seen in the Wild: After declaring their spreadsheet formula =IF(A1>100,”High”,”Low”) to be “machine learning,” startup AnalytAI secured $75 million in Series A funding and immediately hired three Chief AI Officers.
A is for Algorithim [sic] (Tech Factor: 3)
TechOnion Definition: The misspelled version of “algorithm” used by tech bros in investor pitch decks, ironically when describing their spelling-correction AI.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our proprietary algorithim analyzes synergistic blockchain potentials across decentralized ecosystems.” (Translation: “I have a for-loop that counts to 10.”)
Seen in the Wild: Despite having “algorithim” misspelled on all 57 slides of his pitch deck, Carter secured $13 million for his startup because investors were too embarrassed to admit they didn’t know how to spell it either.
A is for Ajax (Tech Factor: 8)
TechOnion Definition: A programming technique invented in the mid-2000s that allowed web pages to update without refreshing, causing senior developers to reminisce about it the way grandparents talk about surviving the Great Depression.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Back in my day, we had to implement Ajax by hand, uphill both ways, in the snow, with Internet Explorer 6 compatibility.”
Seen in the Wild: During a technical interview, Xander asked a junior developer to “implement Ajax from first principles,” then rejected her for using fetch() instead of XMLHttpRequest, declaring that “real developers suffer properly.”
A is for Algorithm (Tech Factor: 3 But Actually 11 in Level of Misuse)
TechOnion Definition: A fancy word for “thing computer do.” Most commonly used to explain why your content isn’t going viral or to deflect responsibility for biased outcomes.
How Tech Bros Use It: “We don’t decide who sees your posts, the algorithm does.” (Translation: “We absolutely decide, but this way we can blame math.”)
Seen in the Wild: After their facial recognition system identified all company executives as “potential shoplifters,” CTO Bryce blamed “algorithmic anomalies” rather than admitting they trained the system exclusively on photos of their competitor’s employees.
A is for Amazon Web Services (Tech Factor: Not Listed But Too High to Measure)
TechOnion Definition: A cloud computing platform designed to make simple tasks complicated and complicated tasks financially ruinous. Features free tier that functions as a gateway drug to enterprise addiction.
How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re leveraging AWS’s scalable infrastructure to optimize our compute resource allocation.” (Translation: “I left an EC2 instance running for seven months and now owe $43,000.”)
Seen in the Wild: After moving the company’s entire infrastructure to AWS “for cost savings,” VP of Engineering Trevor couldn’t explain why their monthly bill exceeded the GDP of several small nations but insisted it was due to “essential enterprise-grade service utilization.”
A is for Anime Profile Picture (Tech Factor: Secret 10)
TechOnion Definition: The universal signal in tech that someone either has god-tier programming skills or terrifying political opinions, with no middle ground.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our new backend engineer has a Neon Genesis Evangelion profile pic, so either he’ll refactor our entire codebase to perfection or send troubling messages in the company Slack.”
Seen in the Wild: After joining the company with a Naruto avatar, quiet developer Eliot rewrote the entire authentication system in a single weekend, fixed 146 bugs, and then spent three hours explaining why katanas are superior to European swords during the sprint review.
A is for API (Tech Factor: 6)
TechOnion Definition: The digital equivalent of asking someone else to do your work for you, but making it sound like you’re a collaborative team player.
How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a RESTful API with GraphQL overlay for optimized microservice intercommunication.” (Translation: “We’ve found a way to make simple HTTP requests incredibly complicated.”)
Seen in the Wild: Despite bragging about “building a sophisticated API ecosystem,” Travis’s entire technical contribution was copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow that makes GET requests to Google Maps.
A is for Apple (Tech Factor: 2)
TechOnion Definition: A fruit company that somehow convinced the world that removing features is innovative and that $1,000 for a phone stand is reasonable because it’s made with “aerospace-grade aluminum.”
How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem for productivity reasons.” (Translation: “I like the blue bubbles in iMessage and am afraid of being judged.”)
Seen in the Wild: Despite giving a 30-minute presentation on why Apple products are “essential for creative professionals,” product manager Tyler exclusively uses his $5,000 MacBook Pro to check email and watch YouTube.
A is for ARM (Tech Factor: 7)
TechOnion Definition: A processor architecture that tech bros suddenly became experts on the minute Apple announced they were switching to it, despite having never mentioned it in their entire careers.
How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve always been a proponent of ARM’s RISC philosophy for optimized instruction set architecture.” (Translation: “I learned what ARM was yesterday from a YouTube video.”)
Seen in the Wild: After Apple’s ARM announcement, CTO Brandon gave a company-wide presentation on “Why ARM is the Future” using slides hastily converted from a “Why x86 is Superior” deck he had presented the previous month.
A is for Artificial Intelligence (Tech Factor: 4)
TechOnion Definition: See “AI,” but used when trying to sound more academic, usually when applying for government grants or trying to impress someone at a bar.
How Tech Bros Use It: “My team is working at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence research.” (Translation: “We imported scikit-learn and followed a tutorial.”)
Seen in the Wild: During a first date, software engineer Mason claimed to be “pioneering artificial intelligence solutions for autonomous systems” but later admitted he was writing if-statements for a smart toaster that burns images of Pikachu onto bread.
A is for ASP.NET (Tech Factor: 7)
TechOnion Definition: Microsoft’s web framework, primarily used by developers to indicate they’re being held hostage by corporate IT policies from 2007.
How Tech Bros Use It: “I specialize in ASP.NET architecture and implementation.” (Translation: “My company is too afraid to upgrade anything and I’m too afraid to learn new skills.”)
Seen in the Wild: After loudly proclaiming that “ASP.NET is the only enterprise-ready web framework” for five years, senior developer Clayton had a breakdown when asked to comment on a React component and locked himself in a server room with a copy of “ASP.NET 2.0 For Dummies.”
A is for Augmented Reality (Tech Factor: 6)
TechOnion Definition: Technology that overlays digital information onto the real world, allowing tech companies to charge $3,500 for the privilege of seeing ads floating in your living room.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our augmented reality solution creates immersive spatial computing environments for next-generation user engagement.” (Translation: “We put silly hats on people’s selfies.”)
Seen in the Wild: Despite securing $42 million to develop “revolutionary AR experiences,” startup founder Derek’s entire demo consisted of making a virtual rubber duck follow people around their kitchen while quacking cryptocurrency prices.
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