Because nothing says “promotion material” like confidently misusing “cache” in a way that makes your CTO visibly wince!
Welcome to the third installment of TechOnion’s “Urban TechBros Dictionary,” where we continue our anthropological expedition into the verbal plumage of the North American Tech Bro. Today, we’re exploring terms beginning with “C” – the third letter tech bros learn after securing their Series A from investors who still don’t understand what the company actually does.
C is for Cache (Tech Factor: 8)
TechOnion Definition: A special memory where computers store things they might need again soon, primarily used by developers as a universal scapegoat for inexplicable bugs. The digital equivalent of that drawer in your kitchen full of miscellaneous items that might be useful someday.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Your problem is definitely related to cache invalidation; have you tried clearing your browser cache?” (Translation: “I have no idea what’s wrong but blaming the cache makes me sound knowledgeable.”)
Seen in the Wild: After the entire production system went down for seven hours, senior engineer Kyle concluded his post-mortem presentation by solemnly declaring “it was a cache issue” without specifying which cache, how it failed, or what was done to prevent it happening again, yet somehow received a standing ovation from management.
C is for Cloud (Tech Factor: 4)
TechOnion Definition: Other people’s computers that companies rent at a premium to avoid having to explain to the CEO what a server room is. The technological equivalent of storing all your possessions in a neighbor’s garage then paying them whenever you want to access your own stuff.
How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re leveraging cloud-native infrastructure for scalable enterprise solutions.” (Translation: “We’re paying AWS $50,000 a month to host what could run on a decent laptop.”)
Seen in the Wild: After passionately advocating for a “cloud-first strategy” and migrating all company systems to AWS, CTO Bradley couldn’t explain to the board why their monthly infrastructure costs increased 800%, eventually blaming it on “premium enterprise-grade humidity control for the virtual environments.”
C is for Continuous Integration (Tech Factor: 7)
TechOnion Definition: The revolutionary practice of checking if your code works before deploying it to production, which somehow required naming and certification to convince developers it was a good idea.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our CI/CD pipeline enables seamless deployment through automated testing frameworks.” (Translation: “We have a script that runs ‘npm test’ and deploys anyway when it fails.”)
Seen in the Wild: Despite boasting about their “military-grade continuous integration system” during the interview process, new hire Trevor discovered the company’s vaunted CI pipeline consisted entirely of an intern named Chad who manually clicked “build” and “deploy” buttons while watching YouTube on another monitor.
C is for Cryptocurrency (Tech Factor: 9)
TechOnion Definition: Digital money backed by the power of wishful thinking and electricity consumption. The only financial system where losing your password can cost you $300 million and being robbed is called “a learning opportunity about security best practices.”
How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m heavily invested in emerging decentralized financial instruments.” (Translation: “I bought $45 of Dogecoin during a Zoom happy hour and now won’t stop talking about it.”)
Seen in the Wild: After spending three months convincing the company to accept cryptocurrency payments, lead developer Jason celebrated their first crypto transaction, only to discover the $17,000 payment was worth $4,300 by the time he finished his celebratory tweet thread about “the future of finance.”
C is for CSS (Tech Factor: 6)
TechOnion Definition: A styling language specifically designed to make things look correct on the developer’s machine and catastrophically wrong everywhere else. The only technology that can simultaneously be dismissed as “not real programming” and cause senior engineers to curl up in the fetal position.
How Tech Bros Use It: “The UI inconsistencies are due to cross-browser CSS rendering variations.” (Translation: “I have no idea why the button is upside down in Safari.”)
Seen in the Wild: After proclaiming CSS was “basically just art class for people who couldn’t make it as real engineers,” full-stack developer Brandon spent four days trying to center a div, eventually submitting a pull request containing 476 lines of CSS overrides that made the text vertically centered but only when viewed at exactly 1440px width while using Firefox.
C is for Command Line (Tech Factor: 8)
TechOnion Definition: A text interface for computers that tech bros use in public places to look like they’re hacking into the Pentagon when they’re actually just listing the contents of a directory for the fifth time.
How Tech Bros Use It: “I prefer leveraging command line interfaces for optimal workflow velocity.” (Translation: “GUIs are for the weak, and I’ve memorized exactly three terminal commands.”)
Seen in the Wild: While working at a coffee shop, developer Craig intentionally configured his terminal to use green text on a black background and ran a continuous ping command while loudly explaining to his date that he was “securing the networking perimeter,” despite actually just checking if Reddit was down.
C is for Cookie (Tech Factor: 5)
TechOnion Definition: A small piece of data stored in your web browser that tech companies like Google use to track your every move online while simultaneously releasing press statements about how much they care about your privacy.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our platform utilizes first-party cookies for enhanced user experience personalization.” (Translation: “We’re stalking you across the internet but in a legally compliant way.”)
Seen in the Wild: After implementing 47 different tracking cookies on the company website, marketing technologist Tyler sent a company-wide email celebrating their new “user-centric privacy initiative” because they added a cookie consent banner that automatically accepts after 3 seconds of inactivity.
C is for C++ (Tech Factor: 10)
TechOnion Definition: A programming language beloved by developers who enjoy suffering and believe that memory management should be a daily test of mental fortitude rather than something handled automatically.
How Tech Bros Use It: “I prefer C++ for performance-critical applications where hardware optimization is paramount.” (Translation: “I wrote C++ on my resume five years ago after taking a single college course and have been bluffing ever since.”)
Seen in the Wild: After insisting the company’s new project must be written in C++ “for maximum performance,” senior engineer Derek produced an application that ran 30% slower than the Python prototype and crashed whenever a user entered an emoji, which he blamed on “Unicode’s inherent inefficiency.”
C is for Compiler (Tech Factor: 9)
TechOnion Definition: A program that transforms human-readable code into machine-readable instructions while adding cryptic error messages specifically designed to question your intelligence and life choices.
How Tech Bros Use It: “The compilation process is failing due to syntax anomalies in the legacy codebase.” (Translation: “I forgot a semicolon somewhere.”)
Seen in the Wild: After receiving a compiler error message with 4,237 lines of output, junior developer Emma spent three hours debugging before senior engineer Chad glanced at her screen and pompously announced, “Oh, you just misspelled ‘string’,” then walked away while muttering something about “reading the error message.”
C is for CPU (Tech Factor: 7)
TechOnion Definition: The brain of a computer that tech bros obsess over despite most modern applications being so inefficient that having the latest processor is like putting a Formula 1 engine in a shopping cart.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our system requires multi-threaded CPU architecture to process computational workloads efficiently.” (Translation: “Our bloated Electron app will make your fan sound like a jet engine no matter what CPU you have.”)
Seen in the Wild: Despite insisting the company needed to upgrade all developer machines to 16-core processors “for productivity reasons,” engineering manager Blake was discovered using his high-performance workstation exclusively for checking email and editing spreadsheets while running a Bitcoin miner in the background.
C is for Cluster (Tech Factor: 9)
TechOnion Definition: Multiple computers working together, or more commonly, failing together in perfect synchronization. In Kubernetes contexts, a collection of containers specifically designed to generate job security for DevOps engineers.
How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a fault-tolerant distributed cluster architecture with redundant node orchestration.” (Translation: “We have three servers and pray only one crashes at a time.”)
Seen in the Wild: After boasting about their “enterprise-grade Kubernetes cluster with 99.99% guaranteed uptime” during a sales pitch, cloud architect Trevor frantically texted his team “EVERYTHING IS DOWN!!!” when a prospective client asked for a live demo, later explaining the outage as a “scheduled resilience verification exercise.”
C is for Chatbot (Tech Factor: 5)
TechOnion Definition: An AI program designed to make customers feel like they’re talking to a human while simultaneously reminding them why they prefer talking to humans. The digital equivalent of a customer service rep who only knows three phrases but says them with great enthusiasm.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our conversational AI implements natural language processing for seamless human-computer interaction.” (Translation: “Our bot recognizes ‘hello’ and ‘help’ but responds to everything else with ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.'”)
Seen in the Wild: After investing $2 million in a “next-generation AI chatbot” for customer support, e-commerce company ShopQuick discovered their most frequent customer complaint was about the chatbot itself, which responded to these complaints by recommending users contact customer support for assistance with their chatbot issues.
C is for Clickbait (Tech Factor: 2)
TechOnion Definition: The art of promising digital enlightenment in a headline while delivering the informational equivalent of a rice cake in the actual content. The cornerstone of modern tech journalism.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our content strategy leverages high-engagement headline optimization techniques.” (Translation: “We lie in the title and hope you don’t notice until after the ad loads.”)
Seen in the Wild: Growth hacker Mason’s LinkedIn post titled “How I Scaled My Startup to 10 Million Users in 30 Days” received 40,000 views before people realized the actual article explained that he “scaled” by changing the y-axis on his user graphs and the “10 million” referred to the number of unanswered marketing emails they sent.
C is for Code Review (Tech Factor: 7)
TechOnion Definition: A collaborative process where other developers suggest improvements to your code, which you interpret as deeply personal attacks on your character, intelligence, and ancestry.
How Tech Bros Use It: “I value the iterative refinement that comes through peer code review processes.” (Translation: “I will fight to the death over my use of tabs instead of spaces.”)
Seen in the Wild: What began as a routine code review for a simple bug fix evolved into a three-week philosophical debate about variable naming conventions, with senior developer Tyler eventually creating a 47-page manifesto titled “Why camelCase Is Morally Superior to snake_case: A Technical and Ethical Analysis,” which he now sends to all new hires.
C is for Core (Tech Factor: 6)
TechOnion Definition: A processing unit within a CPU, or more commonly, a meaningless prefix added to any concept to make it sound more fundamental and important than it actually is.
How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re focusing on our core competencies while leveraging core technologies to address core user needs.” (Translation: “I’ve run out of actual things to say but want to sound strategic.”)
Seen in the Wild: After a disastrous quarter, CEO Brandon’s all-hands presentation contained the word “core” 73 times, including phrases like “core vision,” “core values,” and “core strategy,” yet not once did he explain what the company actually planned to do differently, concluding with a slide reading “Core Commitment to Core Excellence.”
C is for Closed Source (Tech Factor: 7)
TechOnion Definition: Software whose code is kept secret, allowing companies to pretend that their revolutionary technology isn’t just 10,000 if-statements held together with duct tape and wishful thinking.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our proprietary algorithms remain closed source to protect our competitive intellectual property advantages.” (Translation: “If people saw our code, they’d realize our AI is just a bunch of if-else statements written by interns.”)
Seen in the Wild: After years of refusing to open source their “revolutionary” image recognition technology due to its “competitive advantage,” security startup SecureSight was embarrassed when a code leak revealed their flagship product was actually just sending images to Google’s public API and marking up the price 400%.
C is for Coding (Tech Factor: 3)
TechOnion Definition: The act of converting caffeine into software while Googling basic syntax questions you’ve looked up 600 times before. What non-technical people think involves typing frantically while numbers stream down the screen, and what technical people know involves staring blankly at Stack Overflow for hours.
How Tech Bros Use It: “I was coding all weekend to optimize our backend infrastructure.” (Translation: “I spent 15 minutes changing a configuration file, then played Elden Ring for 14 hours.”)
Seen in the Wild: After dramatically announcing he needed to “go into coding mode” and couldn’t be disturbed, junior developer Jason put on noise-canceling headphones, dimmed his monitor, and spent the next four hours scrolling through Twitter while occasionally typing random keyboard inputs when people walked by his desk.
C is for CTO (Tech Factor: 8)
TechOnion Definition: Chief Technical Officer, a role combining the technical knowledge of a developer with the communication skills of a manager and the existential dread of someone who knows exactly how fragile the entire system is. The corporate equivalent of the person in a horror movie who knows the killer is in the house but can’t get anyone to believe them.
How Tech Bros Use It: “As CTO, I provide strategic technical leadership while balancing innovation with operational stability.” (Translation: “I haven’t written code in 7 years but need to pretend I still could if necessary.”)
Seen in the Wild: During a technical interview panel, CTO Michael asked each candidate to complete a complex algorithmic challenge on a whiteboard, only to panic when a candidate asked him to solve it first, resulting in Michael claiming he had “a very important call” and leaving the room for 35 minutes while Googling the answer in a bathroom stall.
C is for Cybersecurity (Tech Factor: 9)
TechOnion Definition: The practice of protecting systems from external threats while ignoring that Dave from accounting still has his password on a Post-it note under his keyboard. The corporate equivalent of installing an advanced home security system but leaving your front door wide open.
How Tech Bros Use It: “Our robust cybersecurity posture implements defense-in-depth principles across multiple security domains.” (Translation: “We installed antivirus software and hope for the best.”)
Seen in the Wild: Despite giving three separate conference talks on “Zero-Trust Security Architecture,” CISO Brandon was discovered using “P@ssw0rd123!” across all his accounts and approving a system architecture that stored user passwords in a publicly accessible CSV file labeled “definitely_not_passwords.csv” for “debugging purposes.”
C is for Containers (Tech Factor: 8)
TechOnion Definition: A technology that solves the problem of “it works on my machine” by making the entire company’s infrastructure as complicated as your machine. The digital equivalent of packing your entire house every time you want to go on vacation.
How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re containerizing our microservices for improved deployment consistency and isolation.” (Translation: “I watched a Docker tutorial and now everything takes twice as long to deploy.”)
Seen in the Wild: After migrating their simple CRUD application to a “containerized microservices architecture,” what once ran on a single server now required 16 containers across 7 virtual machines, increasing costs by 500% while adding eight seconds of latency, which DevOps engineer Chad described as a “successful digital transformation journey.”
C is for Cryptocurrency (Tech Factor: 9)
TechOnion Definition: Digital money backed by nothing but clinging desperately to the hope that people will continue to believe it’s worth something. The financial equivalent of a game of musical chairs where everyone knows the music will stop but hopes they’ll find a chair before it does.
How Tech Bros Use It: “My diversified crypto portfolio provides asymmetric return potential uncorrelated with traditional market movements.” (Translation: “I’m down 94% but refuse to sell because it might go back up.”)
Seen in the Wild: After converting his entire 401(k) into various cryptocurrencies and launching a podcast called “Crypto Millionaire Mindset,” software engineer Jeff was discovered secretly applying for night shift jobs at Wendy’s when his portfolio collapsed, while still posting “WAGMI” memes during the day.
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