The Elite E-Vocabulary Revolution: 20 Extraordinary Engineering Terms That Will Transform Your Tech Status Overnight

Because nothing says “I deserve my inflated salary” like explaining “edge computing” to your relatives over Thanksgiving dinner

Welcome to the fifth installment of TechOnion’s “Urban TechBros Dictionary,” where we continue our anthropological expedition into the verbal mating calls of Silicon Valley’s most fascinating species. Today, we’re exploring terms beginning with “E” – the fifth letter tech bros master after securing enough funding to add “serial entrepreneur” to their LinkedIn profiles despite having never turned a profit.

E is for Encryption (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: The process of scrambling data to protect it from unauthorized access, or what tech bros claim their app implements right up until the moment 10 million user passwords are leaked in plaintext.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our platform leverages military-grade encryption protocols to ensure data confidentiality.” (Translation: “We’re using HTTPS and storing passwords with MD5 hashing from a Stack Overflow answer from 2011.”)

Seen in the Wild: After passionately explaining their “quantum-resistant encryption stack” during a security audit, CTO Blake was forced to admit that their “innovative security solution” consisted entirely of renaming user files to include the word “secret” and changing all database column names to Spanish “so hackers won’t understand them.”

E is for Edge Computing (Tech Factor: 10)

TechOnion Definition: A distributed computing paradigm that brings computation closer to data sources, or more accurately, a way to make cloud computing sound outdated so vendors can sell you the same services with a new name at higher prices.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re leveraging edge computing architectures to minimize latency in our real-time processing pipeline.” (Translation: “We installed a Raspberry Pi in our office closet.”)

Seen in the Wild: After securing $40 million in funding for their “revolutionary edge computing platform,” startup EdgeNow’s entire infrastructure was revealed to be a collection of Mac Minis hidden in WeWork phone booths across San Francisco, manually connected to public WiFi networks that the founder described as “hyperlocal distributed edge nodes with organic bandwidth allocation.”

E is for Ethereum (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A blockchain platform and cryptocurrency that tech bros credit with the ability to solve every problem from global poverty to getting their laundry done, despite primarily being used to sell procedurally generated pictures of monkeys wearing sunglasses.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m deeply involved in the Ethereum ecosystem, developing decentralized applications that disintermediate traditional power structures.” (Translation: “I lost $14,000 buying NFTs of cartoon rocks.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending months converting the company payroll system to run “on the blockchain,” Head of Innovation Chad couldn’t explain why processing salaries now took three days, cost $400 per transaction in gas fees, and occasionally paid employees in worthless tokens of pixelated cats, which he insisted were “actually more valuable than fiat currency if you really think about it.”

E is for Enterprise (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A magical word that, when added to any product description, increases its price by 500% while decreasing its usability by an equal amount. The business equivalent of adding “wedding” to any service to instantly triple the cost.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our enterprise-grade solution provides scalable infrastructure for mission-critical applications.” (Translation: “It’s the same as our regular version but costs more and requires signing a 40-page contract.”)

Seen in the Wild: After rebranding their simple task management app as “TaskMaster Enterprise,” startup QuickSort changed nothing about the product except adding a mandatory 45-day procurement process, removing the user-friendly interface, requiring Internet Explorer compatibility, and increasing the price from $10/month to $250,000 per year with a minimum three-year commitment.

E is for Endpoint (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: Any device that connects to a network, or in security meetings, a fancy way of saying “all the places we’re vulnerable to attacks but don’t have the IT budget to properly secure.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our comprehensive endpoint protection strategy mitigates advanced persistent threats across the attack surface.” (Translation: “We remind people not to click on suspicious links in emails.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite delivering a 45-minute presentation on their “next-generation endpoint security posture,” CISO Jennifer’s entire security strategy was exposed as installing free antivirus software on some computers while others remained unprotected because, as she explained in a leaked email, “hackers probably aren’t interested in our internal lunch menu spreadsheets anyway.”

E is for Execution (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: The implementation of a plan or idea, which in startup contexts translates to “the part we’ll figure out after we get the funding.” The corporate equivalent of saying “I’ll worry about landing after I jump out of the plane.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re hyper-focused on execution excellence to drive stakeholder value.” (Translation: “We have no idea what we’re doing, but we’re doing it very energetically.”)

Seen in the Wild: After raising $75 million for their “AI-powered toothbrush with blockchain verification,” founder Trevor’s entire execution strategy consisted of a two-slide PowerPoint reading “Step 1: Hire smart people, Step 2: Figure it out,” which he presented to increasingly concerned investors for three consecutive quarters.

E is for Ecosystem (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A collection of products designed to work together but primarily engineered to prevent you from ever leaving for a competitor. The digital equivalent of Hotel California, where you can check out anytime you like, but your data can never leave.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re building a comprehensive ecosystem that creates synergistic value through integrated experiences.” (Translation: “We’re making it impossibly difficult to use just one of our products.”)

Seen in the Wild: During an all-hands meeting, CEO Monica proudly unveiled the company’s “revolutionary ecosystem strategy,” which was revealed to be making their previously compatible products deliberately incompatible with competitors while simultaneously requiring users to create seven different accounts, each with different password requirements that expired at random intervals.

E is for Elon Musk (Tech Factor: Not Applicable)

TechOnion Definition: A tech industry figure who has evolved from “innovative entrepreneur” to “human GPT prompt,” generating unpredictable ideas that tech bros must pretend are genius regardless of their practical merit. The industry’s problematic uncle who keeps getting invited to holiday dinners despite making everyone uncomfortable.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Elon’s first-principles thinking on [literally anything] demonstrates visionary understanding of technological paradigm shifts.” (Translation: “Please notice me, Elon, I will defend any opinion you have no matter how odd.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a routine product planning meeting, engineering manager Kyle suddenly announced, “What would Elon do?” before scrapping six months of user research and pivoting the accounting software to include “rocket ship mode” and the ability to post company financials directly to social media, explaining that “moving fast and breaking things means breaking GAAP principles too.”

E is for Email (Tech Factor: 2)

TechOnion Definition: A digital communication technology from the 1970s that tech companies keep trying to disrupt and replace, only to create new products that are basically email with extra steps and a different user interface (UI.)

How Tech Bros Use It: “Email is dead; we’re leveraging asynchronous communication platforms optimized for distributed team collaboration.” (Translation: “We use Slack, which is just email that interrupts you more frequently.”)

Seen in the Wild: After CTO Brandon mandated a company-wide shift to “a post-email paradigm” and banned email usage internally, employees discovered their new “revolutionary communication platform” featured the ability to send messages to other users with subject lines and attachments, effectively reinventing email but with more bugs and no compatibility with the outside world.

E is for Embedded System (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A specialized computing system designed for dedicated functions within a larger system, which tech bros use to explain why the refrigerator now needs a software update and sometimes crashes when you just want ice.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our IoT solution leverages state-of-the-art embedded systems with over-the-air update capabilities.” (Translation: “We put a $2 microcontroller in a toaster and now it needs firmware updates.”)

Seen in the Wild: After pitching their “revolutionary smart home embedded systems,” IoT startup HomeSmart shipped 10,000 units of their smart light switch that required 17 minutes to boot up, consumed more electricity than the lights they controlled, and occasionally set themselves on fire due to what the CTO described as “thermal management optimization opportunities.”

E is for Early Adopter (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A person who enjoys using unfinished technology, providing free QA testing while paying premium prices for the privilege, and telling everyone at parties about their “smart AI-powered toilet” despite nobody asking.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re targeting discerning early adopters who appreciate cutting-edge innovation.” (Translation: “Our product isn’t ready for real customers, so we’re selling it to people who enjoy suffering.”)

Seen in the Wild: Self-proclaimed “early adopter” and product manager Tyler proudly demonstrated his “fully automated smart home” to dinner guests, spending 45 minutes troubleshooting why voice commands like “lights on” variously operated his sprinkler system, ordered 17 pizzas, or in one memorable instance, filed for divorce on Legal Zoom.

E is for Ergonomic (Tech Factor: 3)

TechOnion Definition: A scientific-sounding term used to justify spending $1,200 on an office chair that still somehow hurts your back, but in a premium way that impresses visitors and HR.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve optimized my workspace with ergonomic peripherals to maximize productivity through proper biomechanical alignment.” (Translation: “I bought an expensive keyboard that looks like it was designed by HR Giger.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite delivering regular lectures on “workplace ergonomics optimization,” senior developer Mason’s $4,000 desk setup included a vertical mouse he couldn’t actually use, a split keyboard that remained permanently disconnected, and a “kneeling chair” that collected laundry while he worked from his couch using his laptop balanced on a pizza box.

E is for Environment Variables (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: Configuration settings external to an application’s code, which developer documentation claims will make deployment “flexible and secure” but actually ensure that every new team member spends their first week figuring out why nothing works on their machine.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We store sensitive configuration in environment variables for enhanced security and deployment flexibility.” (Translation: “No one remembers which variables are needed where, and production is using different names for everything.”)

Seen in the Wild: After implementing what he called “environment variable best practices,” senior developer Chad created a system requiring 74 different environment variables across 5 different files with names so similar they differed only by underscores versus hyphens, then stored the master list of variables exclusively in an encrypted Note on his personal iPhone.

E is for Exit Strategy (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A startup’s plan for founders to become wealthy regardless of whether the company actually succeeds, with options ranging from “acquisition by Google” to “quietly shut down after VCs lose interest.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re building fundamental value while keeping multiple strategic exit options open.” (Translation: “We hope Amazon buys us before anyone realizes our AI is actually 20 people in a WeWork.”)

Seen in the Wild: While pitching investors on a “hundred-year company reshaping the future of work,” founder Jessica maintained a secret Notion document titled “Exit Options” that consisted entirely of a list of potential acquirers, their M&A contact emails, and an increasingly desperate timeline culminating in “Sell office furniture on Craigslist, blame market conditions.”

E is for EC2 (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service that lets you rent virtual servers, or more accurately, a subscription to intermittent panic attacks when you realize you accidentally deployed a test instance that costs $17 per minute.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our infrastructure leverages EC2’s elastic scaling capabilities to optimize compute resources based on demand patterns.” (Translation: “We leave the biggest instance types running 24/7 regardless of traffic because no one knows how to set up auto-scaling.”)

Seen in the Wild: After boasting about his “sophisticated AWS cost optimization strategies,” DevOps engineer Trevor was discovered to have accidentally launched 200 expensive GPU instances for a test nine months earlier and forgotten about them, single-handedly consuming 87% of the company’s cloud budget to run what turned out to be a simple script that checked if the number 7 is prime.

E is for Event-Driven (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A programming paradigm where actions are triggered by events, or when describing architecture to non-technical people, a magical phrase that explains why nothing works consistently while sounding impressively technical.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented an event-driven architecture with asynchronous message passing for decoupled service interaction.” (Translation: “None of our systems can communicate directly, so we hope messages eventually arrive somewhere useful.”)

Seen in the Wild: After redesigning the checkout system to be “fully event-driven,” lead architect Sophia couldn’t explain why customer orders were randomly being processed between 3 minutes and 6 days after submission, occasionally multiple times, or sometimes not at all, eventually blaming it on “eventual consistency trade-offs” and “quantum uncertainty principles in distributed computing.”

E is for Emulator (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: Software that mimics another system, primarily used by developers to confirm that their app works perfectly on their high-powered development machine while still mysteriously failing on actual target devices.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our testing process utilizes hardware-accurate emulators to ensure cross-platform compatibility.” (Translation: “We checked if it works on our MacBook Pros and assume phones are probably similar enough.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite assuring the executive team that their app was “extensively tested across all target devices using sophisticated emulation environments,” mobile development lead Tyler had actually only tested on the iPhone emulator at 2X speed on his M1 Max MacBook Pro, leading to the unfortunate discovery at launch that the app took 47 seconds to open on actual consumer devices and immediately crashed if users had less than 6GB of free storage.

E is for Easter Egg (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: A hidden feature or message in software, typically implementsd by developers who spend more time creating clever inside jokes than fixing critical bugs that have been open in Jira for three years.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We embed subtle easter eggs to enhance user delight and demonstrate our attention to detail.” (Translation: “I spent two weeks coding a Star Wars animation that plays if you click the logo five times instead of fixing the memory leak that crashes our app.”)

Seen in the Wild: While users reported critical issues with their accounting software’s core tax calculation functionality, senior developer Brandon was discovered to have spent 84 hours implementing an elaborate hidden game accessible by entering the Konami code on the login screen, which he defended as “building brand loyalty” despite it only being discovered after he demonstrated it during an all-hands meeting.

E is for Epic (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: In Agile project management, a large body of work broken down into smaller stories, or more accurately, a convenient way to make everyone forget you promised a feature six months ago by hiding it in a hierarchy of tickets so complex it would make Inception seem straightforward.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve organized development into strategic epics aligned with our quarterly OKRs for maximum velocity.” (Translation: “We created an incomprehensible JIRA structure that makes it impossible to determine what we’re actually committed to delivering.”)

Seen in the Wild: After being questioned why the “login feature” promised three months ago wasn’t yet implemented, product manager Dana proudly displayed their JIRA board containing an epic called “User Authentication Experience Journey” that expanded to reveal 247 subtasks including “Philosophical Exploration: What Does It Truly Mean to Be Logged In?” and “Button Hover State Emotional Impact Analysis,” none of which were assigned or had due dates.

E is for Error (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: An unexpected problem in a computer program, which developers never call an error or bug but instead refer to as an “edge case,” “unexpected behavior,” or “product discovery opportunity” depending on how many users it affected.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re investigating an unexpected edge case in our authentication validation logic.” (Translation: “Our app is completely broken and nobody can log in.”)

Seen in the Wild: After the company’s payment processing system accidentally charged some customers thousands of times for the same transaction, CTO Trevor sent an all-hands email describing the incident not as a “catastrophic error” but as a “high-impact learning event” and “accelerated monetary interaction scenario” while the support team dealt with death threats from customers whose bank accounts had been emptied.

E is for Engagement (Tech Factor: 4)

TechOnion Definition: A metric measuring how much users interact with a product, which companies claim reflects “delivering value” but actually measures “how effectively we’ve exploited psychological vulnerabilities to create addiction.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our enhanced engagement metrics demonstrate increased user satisfaction and product-market fit.” (Translation: “We’ve made our app more addictive by adding random rewards and anxiety-inducing notifications.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a product review, growth manager Lisa proudly presented charts showing “record-breaking engagement metrics” after implementing their new notification system, carefully omitting that the 400% increase was achieved by sending users alarming but vague alerts like “Someone you know just viewed your profile” and “Important account action required” that led to non-critical marketing pages.

E is for Engineer (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A job title that once required a degree in engineering but now applies to anyone who can center a div or install WordPress, provided they work at a company with free snacks and bean bag chairs.

How Tech Bros Use It: “As a senior software engineer specializing in distributed systems architecture…” (Translation: “I took a three-month bootcamp and now maintain a legacy PHP application.”)

Seen in the Wild: After insisting on the title “Principal Quantum AI Engineering Architect” on his business cards and LinkedIn profile, new hire Jason’s primary responsibility was revealed to be updating the company WordPress blog and occasionally restarting the office printer, with his only qualification being a weekend course on HTML basics and having once installed Linux on his laptop before immediately reverting to Windows.