Because nothing says “I deserve my inflated salary” like explaining “immutable infrastructure” to relatives who just asked why their printer isn’t working

Welcome to the ninth installment of TechOnion’s “Urban TechBros Dictionary,” where we continue our anthropological expedition into the verbal plumage of Silicon Valley’s most fascinating specimens. Today, we’re exploring terms beginning with “I” – the letter tech bros use most frequently in their LinkedIn profiles, investor pitches, and explanations of why their projects are running six months behind schedule.

I is for IoT (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: Internet of Things, the practice of adding internet connectivity to objects that functioned perfectly fine without it, creating exciting new opportunities for your toaster to be hacked by teenagers in Latvia.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re leveraging IoT-enabled edge devices to create ambient intelligence ecosystems in traditional spaces.” (Translation: “We put a WiFi chip in a lightbulb and now it takes 17 seconds to turn on and requires regular security updates.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending $14,000 to make his home “IoT-optimized,” product manager Bryce found himself locked outside for six hours during a firmware update gone wrong, unable to enter because his smart lock, smart lights, and smart thermostat were all simultaneously bricked, forcing him to explain to responding police officers why he was breaking into his own house while his refrigerator inside was sending him notifications that his milk was expiring.

I is for IDE (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: Integrated Development Environment, a software application that provides comprehensive facilities for software development, which developers spend more time customizing than actually using to write code.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve customized my IDE with a proprietary productivity-optimized configuration that maximizes my coding efficiency.” (Translation: “I spent 40 hours making my text editor dark mode with neon syntax highlighting to look like I’m in a hacker movie.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a critical production outage, senior developer Amanda wasted 45 minutes setting up her IDE on a colleague’s computer because she “couldn’t possibly debug without my custom keyboard shortcuts and Dracula theme,” only to discover the issue was a typo in a configuration file that could have been fixed in Notepad, causing the CTO to implement a new “emergency response with whatever tools are available” policy.

I is for IP (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: Intellectual Property (alternatively, Internet Protocol), a term tech bros use to make their marginally novel ideas sound like revolutionary assets worth protecting with the fervor usually reserved for nuclear launch codes.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our IP portfolio represents significant barriers to entry in the digital wellness optimization vertical.” (Translation: “We have a patent pending on putting a button that says ‘breathe’ on a smartphone app.”)

Seen in the Wild: After raising $5 million to protect their “revolutionary IP,” startup founder Chad was forced to admit during due diligence that their “proprietary technology” was actually a WordPress site with a purchased theme, their “custom algorithm” was an if-statement checking if numbers were positive or negative, and their “patent-pending innovation” was a standard dropdown menu, but “implemented in a mindful, wellness-focused way.”

I is for iOS (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: Apple’s mobile operating system, which developers simultaneously complain about for its restrictions while boasting that their apps run on it because it signals they build products for people with disposable income.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We prioritized iOS for our initial release due to market demographic alignment with our value proposition.” (Translation: “We built for iOS first because the founder has an iPhone and Android users don’t spend as much money.”)

Seen in the Wild: After loudly proclaiming their app would be “platform-agnostic” and “democratize access,” startup CEO Vanessa revealed at launch that the app would be “iOS-exclusive for the foreseeable future,” explaining to confused investors that “we really need to nail the experience for users who matter first” before hastily correcting herself to say “users who match our initial target demographic,” while the Android engineers were quietly reassigned to “future projects.”

I is for Infrastructure as Code (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: The practice of managing IT infrastructure through code instead of manual processes, which DevOps engineers cite to justify why spinning up a new server now requires 14 pull requests, three code reviews, and a solemn blood oath to the continuous deployment gods.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented declarative infrastructure as code with idempotent provisioning for our multi-cloud architecture.” (Translation: “We wrote some Terraform that works on Dave’s laptop but nobody else can run it.”)

Seen in the Wild: After mandating that all infrastructure changes must follow their new “Infrastructure as Code paradigm,” DevOps director Tyler couldn’t explain why provisioning a simple database that previously took 10 minutes now required three days, five different AWS roles, and a 700-line YAML file that somehow created 17 unused load balancers and a VPN connection to Easter Island whenever it ran, eventually admitting that “the YAML is mostly copied from Stack Overflow and we’re afraid to change it.”

I is for Integration (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The process of making different systems work together, which tech companies describe as “seamless” in exactly inverse proportion to how seamless it actually is.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our platform offers turnkey integration capabilities with your existing technology stack.” (Translation: “We have an API that’s documented only in an outdated PDF and you’ll need to hire three consultants to make it work.”)

Seen in the Wild: After selling their enterprise software on the promise of “one-click integrations with all major platforms,” VP of Sales Marcus was forced to admit during an implementation call that the “one-click” process actually required six weeks of custom development work, three dedicated engineers, and would ultimately be accomplished by “having your team manually export data to CSV files and upload them to our proprietary format converter,” which he described as “technically still one click, just with some preparatory steps.”

I is for Interface (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The point where two systems meet and interact, or in user contexts, the digital equivalent of putting a friendly face on an eldritch horror of tangled code that screams silently beneath the surface.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve designed an intuitive interface layer that abstracts underlying complexity while maintaining full functional expressivity.” (Translation: “We put a nicer-looking form in front of the same confusing system.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a product demo, design lead Ethan proudly showcased their “revolutionary new user interface that completely reimagines how people interact with data,” which the attending clients quickly recognized as the exact same functionality as before but with rounded corners on the buttons, a different font, and everything moved just slightly to confuse existing users, prompting Ethan to explain that “true innovation often appears subtle to the untrained eye.”

I is for Iteration (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: The process of repeatedly refining a product based on feedback, which companies use as an excuse for why they shipped something that barely functions with the promise that it will eventually be good if customers just hang in there for a few more years.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We embrace iterative development methodologies to continuously enhance product-market fit through validated learning.” (Translation: “We launched something that doesn’t work and we’re hoping to figure it out as we go.”)

Seen in the Wild: After releasing what CEO Jessica called “a minimum viable product that will rapidly evolve through customer-led iteration,” users discovered an app so fundamentally broken that the login button didn’t work, every action caused crashes, and data was randomly deleted, prompting Jessica to respond to negative reviews by explaining that “true innovators understand that perfection is a journey, not a destination” and charging for “Premium Support” to report basic bugs.

I is for Input/Output (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The basic process of data flowing into and out of a system, which developers unnecessarily complicate to make simple operations sound like they’re orchestrating a space launch.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our architecture implements asynchronous non-blocking I/O patterns for optimized throughput across concurrency boundaries.” (Translation: “We read and write data, just like every other program since the dawn of computing.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a system design review, senior engineer Kyle spent 45 minutes explaining their “revolutionary I/O subsystem” with elaborate diagrams and terminology, until a junior developer pointed out that the entire “breakthrough architecture” was essentially opening a file, reading its contents, and writing to another file—a task accomplishable with three lines of code rather than the 2,700-line framework Kyle had built over six weeks.

I is for Innovation (Tech Factor: 3)

TechOnion Definition: The process of creating something new and valuable, or in Silicon Valley terms, slapping AI, blockchain, or “as a service” onto an existing product and pretending you’ve revolutionized an industry.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our team is driving unprecedented innovation in the digital transformation space.” (Translation: “We added dark mode to our dashboard and now we’re calling it AI-enhanced visual optimization.”)

Seen in the Wild: After securing $40 million in funding for what investors were told was “groundbreaking innovation in urban transportation,” founder Blake revealed his revolutionary product: scooters, but with an app, which he insisted was fundamentally different from the eight other venture-backed scooter companies because theirs had “blockchain-verified ride histories” and “AI-optimized battery swapping,” neither of which actually existed in the product but “were on the roadmap for future innovation cycles.”

I is for Incubator (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A program designed to help early-stage startups develop by providing services, space, and sometimes funding, which entrepreneurs join primarily for the prestige of the branded hoodie and the ability to put it on their LinkedIn profile.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We refined our business model during our time in a prestigious Silicon Valley incubator program.” (Translation: “We spent three months networking and pivoted our entire concept after realizing the original idea wasn’t getting investor interest.”)

Seen in the Wild: After bragging incessantly about being accepted to an “elite, highly-selective startup incubator,” founder Sophia failed to mention that the program had accepted 94% of applicants, provided no actual funding, and consisted entirely of bi-weekly Zoom calls where participants were encouraged to “collaborate and cross-pollinate ideas,” which in practice meant trying to poach each other’s developers while a disinterested mentor checked emails on another screen.

I is for Immutable (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: Unchangeable after creation, a concept developers invoke to explain why simple updates now require destroying and recreating entire systems instead of just changing the thing that needs to be changed.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our architecture leverages immutable infrastructure principles for deterministic deployment outcomes and enhanced security posture.” (Translation: “We’re terrified of making changes to production, so we rebuild everything from scratch for even minor updates.”)

Seen in the Wild: After transitioning to what DevOps lead Trevor called “immutable infrastructure best practices,” the company found that updating a single line in a configuration file now required rebuilding their entire environment, a process that took seven hours, consumed enough cloud resources to power a small city, and still somehow resulted in the same bugs being present in the new “immutable” version, which Trevor explained was actually a benefit because “at least the bugs are now consistent and reproducible.”

I is for Incident (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A service disruption or outage, which companies refer to as an “incident” instead of “our system completely exploded” in the same way that nuclear power plants have “incidents” rather than “meltdowns.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We experienced a brief service incident affecting a subset of non-critical functionality.” (Translation: “Our entire system crashed for 9 hours and we lost some customer data.”)

Seen in the Wild: During what internal communications described as a “minor incident affecting auxiliary systems,” e-commerce platform ShopDirect actually experienced a complete database corruption that erased six months of orders and customer information, which VP of Engineering Melissa reframed in the public post-mortem as “an unexpected opportunity to validate our disaster recovery protocols and enhance our resilience strategies,” without mentioning that their backup system had also failed and the recovery involved interns manually re-entering data from screenshots that an employee had fortunately taken “for an unrelated visualization project.”

I is for Indexing (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The process of organizing data to optimize retrieval operations, which database administrators treat with the religious reverence usually reserved for sacred texts while application developers completely ignore until everything grinds to a halt.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a sophisticated multi-column indexing strategy to optimize query performance across high-cardinality attributes.” (Translation: “We finally added an index after our CEO complained that the dashboard takes 45 seconds to load.”)

Seen in the Wild: After the company’s application became so slow that customers were reporting three-minute page loads, senior developer Jake was forced to admit during an emergency review that he had designed a database with zero indexes because “indexes just slow down writes,” had implemented a search function that scanned every record in the database sequentially, and had repeatedly dismissed previous performance concerns as “caching issues,” leading to what the CTO later described as “the Great Indexing Weekend” where the entire engineering team worked 48 hours straight to implement basic database optimization practices that should have been there from the beginning.

I is for Inheritance (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A fundamental concept in object-oriented programming where a class can inherit properties and methods from another class, which developers use to create taxonomies so complex that understanding a single method requires opening 15 different files and a PhD in genealogy.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve architected an elegant inheritance hierarchy that maximizes code reuse while maintaining proper encapsulation boundaries.” (Translation: “I created a 17-level deep class hierarchy that nobody understands, including me.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending three months building what he described as “the most elegant inheritance model ever designed,” senior engineer Nate had to be gently pulled aside by the CTO when it was discovered that his “revolutionary” system required developers to navigate through 23 levels of inheritance to understand basic functionality, with one method call triggering 147 separate overrides across 42 classes, causing one new hire to quit after drawing the inheritance diagram on a whiteboard and realizing it resembled “a Lovecraftian horror that should not exist in our dimension.”

I is for Influencer (Tech Factor: 4)

TechOnion Definition: A person who has accumulated enough followers on social media to convince companies to give them free products and money in exchange for opinions that nobody asked for but apparently drive purchasing decisions.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re implementing a multi-tier influencer engagement strategy targeting high-conversion-potential audience segments.” (Translation: “We’re giving free stuff to people with lots of followers and hoping they say nice things about us.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending $500,000 on what the marketing team called a “strategic influencer campaign,” tech startup QuantumWare was horrified when their primary influencer with 3.2 million followers created a video that mispronounced the company name throughout, described the product as “like Dropbox but more cloudy,” demonstrated features that didn’t exist, and concluded with “anyway, smash that like button and check out my merch,” resulting in exactly zero attributable conversions but three cease-and-desist letters from companies whose products were unfavorably compared in the video.

I is for IPO (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: Initial Public Offering, the moment when a private company first sells shares to the public, or in startup contexts, the mythical exit strategy that founders promise will make everyone rich while knowing that most employees’ equity will be diluted to homeopathic levels before it happens.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re on a clear trajectory toward IPO within the next 18-24 months based on our current growth metrics.” (Translation: “We have no immediate plans to go public, but saying this makes it easier to convince employees to accept below-market salaries in exchange for stock options.”)

Seen in the Wild: After promising for five consecutive years that the company was “12-18 months away from IPO” during all-hands meetings, CEO Marcus finally admitted to senior executives that there were no actual IPO plans when a board member accidentally replied-all to an email discussing their “exit strategy” which consisted entirely of “find bigger sucker to acquire before runway ends,” causing a mass exodus of employees who had been deferring compensation in exchange for equity that they suddenly realized might never have value.

I is for Injection (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A type of security vulnerability where malicious code is inserted into a system, which security engineers warn about constantly while developers continue to concatenate SQL strings and shrug because “who would actually try that on our system?”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented comprehensive input sanitization protocols to mitigate injection attack vectors across all user-facing interfaces.” (Translation: “We watched a YouTube video about SQL injection and added one regex check that probably doesn’t work.”)

Seen in the Wild: After dismissing the security team’s concerns about potential injection vulnerabilities as “theoretical edge cases” and “security theater,” lead developer Ryan was horrified when a 12-year-old winner of their hackathon demonstrated live on stage how a simple SQL injection in the company’s main product could access admin credentials, customer credit card data, and even drop production tables, leading to what internal emails later called “The Great Database Restoration Weekend” and a new company policy requiring Ryan to attend all security awareness trainings twice.

I is for Instance (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A single occurrence of something, or in cloud computing, a virtual server that developers spin up “temporarily” for testing and then forget about until the finance department has an aneurysm reviewing the cloud bill three months later.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We dynamically provision instances based on real-time demand metrics to optimize infrastructure expenditure.” (Translation: “We have no idea how many servers we’re running or what they all do, but it sounds efficient to say we do.”)

Seen in the Wild: After boasting about their “sophisticated instance management system” during a cost optimization meeting, cloud architect Trevor was forced to admit that 73% of their AWS instances had been running for over a year without anyone knowing what they did, including 16 high-memory instances that were launched “for a quick test” and forgotten, one of which was mining cryptocurrency that was being sent to an anonymous wallet, and a cluster of 8 GPU instances that turned out to be running nothing but a Minecraft server for the summer interns who had long since returned to college.

I is for Interpreter (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A program that directly executes code without requiring compilation, which developers use to explain why their Python application is slow while conveniently ignoring that they wrote an algorithm with O(n³) complexity.

How Tech Bros Use It: “The performance characteristics are inherently constrained by the interpretive execution model of the language runtime.” (Translation: “I wrote terrible code but I’m blaming it on Python being interpreted.”)

Seen in the Wild: After complaining for months that their data processing system was “fundamentally limited by Python’s interpreted nature” and advocating for a complete rewrite in a compiled language, senior engineer Melissa was embarrassed when an intern optimized the existing Python code during a hackathon, improving performance by 9,700% by fixing an algorithm that was unnecessarily recalculating the same values millions of times, leading to awkward questions from the CTO about why this wasn’t identified earlier given Melissa’s insistence that she had “exhaustively profiled the system.”

I is for Idempotent (Tech Factor: 10)

TechOnion Definition: A property where an operation produces the same result regardless of how many times it’s performed, which developers mention primarily to make themselves sound smart in architecture meetings while implementing functions that are about as idempotent as a nuclear chain reaction.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our API endpoints are designed with idempotent semantics to ensure transactional integrity in distributed environments.” (Translation: “Sometimes our system processes the same request twice, but we’re pretending that’s a feature not a bug.”)

Seen in the Wild: After confidently explaining to the entire engineering organization that their new payment processing system was “fully idempotent and therefore impossible to double-charge customers,” senior architect Jordan had to be pulled from a vacation when the system processed 4,379 identical charges for a single customer attempting to make a $25 purchase, which Jordan initially defended as “not technically a breach of idempotency because each transaction had a unique timestamp,” before being gently reminded that “not charging people 4,379 times” was actually the desired business outcome.

I is for Isomorphic (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: Code that can run both on the client and server sides, which developers cite as critical for performance while users just want a website that doesn’t take 25 seconds to load because it’s downloading 17MB of JavaScript.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented an isomorphic architecture for optimal rendering performance and SEO-friendly content delivery.” (Translation: “We added so much complexity that nobody knows how anything works anymore, but at least Google can index our site.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending six months rebuilding their entire application to be “fully isomorphic,” lead architect Cameron proudly deployed the new system only to discover it was now three times slower than before, required twice as much server capacity, broke most existing features, and somehow made the site less searchable, prompting a tense executive meeting where Cameron attempted to explain the benefits of isomorphic JavaScript while the CEO repeatedly asked, “But why can’t users log in anymore?” and “Why are we paying double for servers to make the site slower?”

I is for Imposter Syndrome (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: The persistent feeling that one is not as competent as others perceive them to be, which in tech is experienced by everyone except those who are actually incompetent, who instead possess unshakeable confidence in their exceptional abilities.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I occasionally struggle with imposter syndrome despite my extensive contributions to distributed systems architecture.” (Translation: “Please validate me while I simultaneously humble-brag about my technical prowess.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a team-building exercise focused on vulnerability, CTO Blake shared an emotional story about his “crippling imposter syndrome” and how he sometimes feels “unworthy” of his success despite having “fundamentally revolutionized cloud computing at three different unicorn startups,” while conspicuously failing to mention that he had twice been removed from technical decision-making after catastrophic architecture decisions and currently outsourced all his actual coding responsibilities to a team in Belarus that no one else was allowed to contact directly.

Because nothing says “I deserve my inflated salary” like casually dropping “horizontal scaling” into conversations about the office coffee maker

Welcome to the high-velocity eighth installment of TechOnion’s “Urban TechBros Dictionary,” where we continue our anthropological expedition into the verbal plumage of Silicon Valley‘s most fascinating specimens. Today, we’re exploring terms beginning with “H” – the letter tech bros use to sound thoughtful while explaining why their project needs another nine months of development despite having nothing to show for the previous nine.

H is for Hackathon (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A sleep-deprivation experiment disguised as a productivity contest, where companies get free labor by convincing developers that working 48 hours straight for the chance to win a branded hoodie is “fun” and “collaborative.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our quarterly internal hackathons drive innovation by empowering cross-functional teams to explore transformative concepts.” (Translation: “We need extra features but don’t want to pay overtime or add them to the roadmap.”)

Seen in the Wild: After heavily promoting their “Innovation Unleashed Hackathon” as “a celebration of creativity with no boundaries,” tech company DataSphere clarified during the kickoff that all projects must use their new strategic product that nobody wanted to adopt, must align with the current quarter’s KPIs, and must be “essentially complete” already since the event was now just 12 hours instead of 48, with VP of Engineering Trevor explaining that “true innovation thrives under constraints” while the free food turned out to be a single bowl of rapidly browning bananas.

H is for Hardware (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The physical components of a computer system, primarily used by software developers as a scapegoat for performance issues caused by their inefficient code.

How Tech Bros Use It: “The user experience degradation appears to be hardware-constrained on legacy devices.” (Translation: “Our app works fine on my $4,000 MacBook Pro but is apparently slow on normal people’s computers.”)

Seen in the Wild: After receiving complaints that their web application took over 30 seconds to load on average devices, frontend lead Dylan insisted the problem was “clearly hardware-related and beyond our control,” until a performance audit revealed his team had included 47 JavaScript libraries totaling 23MB (including three different versions of jQuery and a full copy of Tensorflow) to power a simple contact form, which Dylan defended as “future-proofing the interactive paradigm for next-generation engagement.”

H is for Hash (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A function that converts data into a fixed-size value, which security engineers insist is critical for data integrity while most developers implement by copying SHA-256 code from Stack Overflow without understanding how it works.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re implementing advanced cryptographic hashing with salting for enhanced security posture across authentication vectors.” (Translation: “We finally stopped storing passwords as plaintext after the last breach.”)

Seen in the Wild: After boasting about their “military-grade hashing protocols” during a security audit, senior engineer Mason was forced to admit that their “proprietary hashing algorithm” was actually just MD5 (a long-deprecated standard), their “cryptographically secure salt” was literally the string “salt123” appended to every password, and their database still contained a backdoor account with the username “admin” and password “password” because “the CEO kept forgetting his credentials.”

H is for High Availability (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A system design approach promising minimal downtime, which companies advertise as “99.9999999% uptime” while knowing full well their weekend maintenance windows alone exceed the maximum allowable downtime for that commitment.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our high-availability architecture ensures persistent service delivery through redundant failover systems with geographical distribution.” (Translation: “We have two servers instead of one and hope they don’t both crash simultaneously.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a sales presentation to enterprise clients, VP of Engineering Sarah confidently guaranteed their platform’s “99.999% high-availability commitment with five-nines SLA,” only to have their demonstration environment crash during the pitch. When questioned, she explained this didn’t count against their uptime metrics due to their definition of “availability” excluding “scheduled maintenance, network issues, cloud provider outages, database optimizations, deployment windows, full moons, or demonstrations to potential customers,” which legally allowed them to be down for approximately two weeks per month while maintaining “five-nines uptime.”

H is for Heuristic (Tech Factor: 10)

TechOnion Definition: A problem-solving approach using practical methods that are not guaranteed to be optimal but sufficient to reach an immediate goal, or more accurately, an impressive-sounding way to describe educated guesswork.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our recommendation engine leverages advanced heuristic algorithms to personalize content delivery based on behavioral patterns.” (Translation: “We show you things similar to what you’ve clicked before and call it AI.”)

Seen in the Wild: After claiming their “proprietary heuristic technology” could predict customer preferences with “near-perfect accuracy,” data scientist Trevor was forced to reveal during due diligence that their sophisticated system consisted entirely of a series of if-statements like “if user buys dog food, recommend dog toys” and “if user is female, recommend products with pink packaging,” which he defended as “human-interpretable machine learning” before adding that he was “essentially doing AI, just in his brain first.”

H is for HTTP (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: HyperText Transfer Protocol, the foundation of data communication on the web, which seasoned developers treat as mystical ancient knowledge despite it literally being in every web URL normal people use daily.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve optimized our HTTP request patterns for improved latency characteristics across CDN integration points.” (Translation: “I moved some images to a different server.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a technical interview, senior candidate Rachel spent 20 minutes explaining her deep expertise with “advanced HTTP request optimization methodologies” until the interviewer asked her a basic question about HTTP status codes, at which point she froze, whispered “I thought you were just supposed to check if it’s 200 or not,” and then attempted to convince the panel that her expertise was “more conceptual than literal” and “focused on the philosophical implications of request-response patterns rather than arbitrary numerical designations.”

H is for HTML (Tech Factor: 4)

TechOnion Definition: HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the standard language for creating web pages, which frontend developers include on their resumes despite considering actual HTML work beneath them and using seventeen JavaScript frameworks to avoid writing it directly.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m proficient in semantic HTML implementation optimized for accessibility and SEO performance.” (Translation: “I can create a div and style it with 400 lines of CSS instead of using the appropriate HTML element.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite listing “Advanced HTML5” as a top skill on his resume and describing himself as an “HTML semantics evangelist” during interviews, senior frontend developer Connor was discovered during a code review to have created an entire website consisting solely of nested div elements with JavaScript event handlers instead of using buttons, links, or form elements, which he defended as “a more flexible architectural approach” while also asking in a private Slack message if anyone knew “the proper HTML tag for making text bigger besides using CSS.”

H is for Hybrid Cloud (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: An infrastructure environment using a mix of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud services, which companies implement primarily so the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) can tell the board they’re “on the cloud” while still maintaining the server room they’re emotionally attached to.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our hybrid cloud strategy optimizes workload placement based on performance, regulatory, and economic factors across diverse infrastructure environments.” (Translation: “Our old servers aren’t fully depreciated on the balance sheet, so we’re keeping them until the CFO says we can get rid of them.”)

Seen in the Wild: After presenting their “visionary hybrid cloud transformation” at a technology conference, CIO Michael was asked by an audience member to explain the specific workload distribution strategies between their on-premises and cloud environments, causing him to freeze momentarily before admitting that their “hybrid cloud” consisted of using Microsoft Office 365 for email while keeping everything else on the same on-premises servers they’d had since 2003, which he insisted was “still technically a hybrid approach” and “aligned with industry best practices for organizations in transition.”

H is for Headless (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A software architecture where the frontend is separated from the backend, allowing developers to create twice as many repositories, three times as many bugs, and an infinite supply of finger-pointing when something inevitably breaks.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a headless architecture to enable omnichannel content delivery with agnostic frontend implementations.” (Translation: “We’ve made everything more complicated for marginal benefit and now nobody understands the system end-to-end.”)

Seen in the Wild: After championing a migration to a “headless CMS architecture” that took 14 months and cost $1.2 million, Director of Technology Amanda couldn’t explain why their website was now significantly slower, required twice as many developers to maintain, and broke completely whenever either team deployed changes, eventually admitting in a private Slack message that she pushed for headless because it would “look impressive on her resume” despite knowing their use case “didn’t actually benefit from the approach at all.”

H is for Hacker (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: Originally referring to someone who breaks into computer systems, now primarily used by developers with MacBook Pros covered in stickers to describe themselves on LinkedIn despite never having done anything remotely mischievous beyond using dark mode in their code editor.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I consider myself an ethical hacker with a growth mindset focused on security-oriented development practices.” (Translation: “I once forgot to log out of a friend’s Facebook account and posted ‘I’m a poopyhead’ as them.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite describing himself as a “veteran hacker with extensive cybersecurity expertise” during networking events and even giving a conference talk titled “Hacker Mindset: Thinking Like Your Adversary,” software engineer Tyler was utterly baffled when his personal WordPress blog was compromised by a simple SQL injection, later admitting that his “hacking experience” consisted entirely of using inspect element to change prices on e-commerce sites (without actually purchasing anything) and watching “Mr. Robot” three times.

H is for Hotfix (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: An emergency code change to fix a critical bug, which would be unnecessary if proper testing had occurred, but is now being deployed directly to production while the entire engineering team watches in silent terror.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re implementing a targeted hotfix to address an edge case in the production environment.” (Translation: “We broke everything and customers are screaming.”)

Seen in the Wild: During what was supposed to be a routine product demo to the company’s largest customer, the application crashed so spectacularly that it not only displayed sensitive data from other customers but also briefly showed the CEO’s Slack messages complaining about the very client in the meeting. This prompted what engineering lead Sophia later described in her post-mortem as “a surgical hotfix deployment” but was actually a panicked 47-minute screen-sharing session where three developers simultaneously edited code directly on the production server while the sales team desperately tried to distract the client with an impromptu interpretive dance they described as “our company’s traditional success ritual.”

H is for Hadoop (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: An open-source framework for distributed storage and processing of large datasets, primarily installed by companies to say they’re “doing big data” despite most implementations processing less information than a moderately complex Excel spreadsheet.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a Hadoop cluster for scalable data analytics processing across heterogeneous datasets.” (Translation: “We have 20GB of CSV files that could fit on a USB stick but wanted to sound enterprise-grade.”)

Seen in the Wild: After securing $4 million in funding specifically for a “revolutionary Hadoop-based big data initiative,” data engineering director Trevor installed a 12-node Hadoop cluster that consumed 70% of the company’s cloud budget but remained mysteriously idle for six months. When finally questioned by the CFO, Trevor admitted the company’s “big data” was actually 2.3GB of customer records that could easily fit in a single database, explaining that he defined “big data” as “data that feels emotionally significant to the business” rather than by actual volume, velocity, or variety.

H is for Heartbeat (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A periodic signal generated by hardware or software to indicate normal operation, which system administrators obsessively monitor like anxious parents checking if their newborn is still breathing.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our distributed system implements redundant heartbeat mechanisms with configurable failure detection thresholds.” (Translation: “We ping our servers every few minutes to see if they’re still alive because we don’t trust our code not to kill them.”)

Seen in the Wild: After implementing what he called a “state-of-the-art heartbeat monitoring system,” DevOps engineer Kyle couldn’t figure out why their production environment kept automatically restarting every night between 2AM and 4AM, causing data corruption and customer complaints. After three weeks of investigation, a junior engineer discovered that the cleaning staff was unplugging the monitoring server to charge their vacuum cleaner, triggering the heartbeat system to assume all production servers had failed simultaneously and initiate emergency recovery procedures, which Kyle had configured to “fail loud rather than fail quiet” by immediately restarting everything without verification.

H is for Heap (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A memory structure used for dynamic allocation, which developers blame for performance issues instead of admitting they’re creating thousands of unnecessary objects because they don’t understand how memory management works.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re experiencing non-deterministic performance degradation due to suboptimal heap allocation patterns.” (Translation: “Our app keeps crashing because I don’t understand how garbage collection works.”)

Seen in the Wild: After insisting for months that their mobile app’s frequent crashes were due to “fundamental limitations in the platform’s heap management system,” lead developer Aiden was mortified when a performance analysis revealed he was creating new copies of their entire 200MB product catalog every time a user scrolled through the list, effectively filling the device’s memory in seconds. When asked why he implemented it this way, he admitted he “thought the heap was infinite” and had been blaming users for “not having good enough phones” rather than fixing his code.

H is for Hand-Off (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: The process of transferring a project from one team to another, creating the perfect conditions for both teams to blame each other when inevitable problems arise that neither wants to take responsibility for.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve established a streamlined hand-off protocol with comprehensive documentation to ensure knowledge transfer integrity.” (Translation: “We’re dumping this problematic code on another team with a vague README file and changing our Slack status to ‘Do Not Disturb’.”)

Seen in the Wild: After celebrating the “successful hand-off” of their project to the maintenance team, the development group led by senior engineer Jessica blocked calendar for a “strategic planning retreat” that coincidentally made them unavailable when the production system completely collapsed the following day. The “comprehensive documentation” provided during hand-off was later revealed to consist entirely of a single Confluence page containing only the words “It works, mostly” and a hand-drawn diagram of what appeared to be either the system architecture or a particularly ambitious spaghetti recipe.

H is for Hooks (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: In programming, functions that intercept events or messaging between software components, or in the React world, a way for developers to completely rewrite their applications every six months when the recommended pattern changes.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve refactored our component architecture to leverage hooks for improved state management and enhanced composability.” (Translation: “I changed everything based on a Medium article I read yesterday, and now nothing works.”)

Seen in the Wild: After mandating an immediate migration from class components to React hooks across their entire product, lead developer Trevor couldn’t explain why performance had degraded by 300%, memory usage had doubled, and seven critical features had stopped working. When pressed by the CTO during an emergency review, Trevor admitted he didn’t actually understand hooks but “everyone on Twitter said they were better,” and his implementation strategy had consisted entirely of copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow and “adjusting it until the errors went away, mostly.”

H is for Horizontal Scaling (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The practice of adding more machines to a system instead of upgrading existing ones, primarily used by tech companies to solve performance problems the way rich people solve relationship problems—by throwing money at them until they temporarily go away.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We address peak traffic demands through elastic horizontal scaling rather than vertical resource allocation.” (Translation: “Our code is so inefficient that we need 200 servers to handle the load instead of fixing the actual performance issues.”)

Seen in the Wild: After proudly presenting their “innovative horizontal scaling solution” that automatically deployed up to 500 additional servers during traffic spikes, VP of Engineering Marcus was forced to admit during a board review that their monthly cloud bill had increased from $20,000 to $3.7 million because their “auto-scaling algorithm” was triggering based on CPU usage that turned out to be caused by an infinite loop in their analytics code. Marcus defended the approach as “technically working as designed” and suggested the real problem was that “the cloud provider charges too much,” not that they were running hundreds of unnecessary servers.

H is for Hardening (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The process of securing a system by reducing its vulnerability surface, which security teams recommend for months before a breach and then implement in a panic afterward while everyone pretends they just thought of it.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented comprehensive system hardening protocols aligned with industry best practices and regulatory frameworks.” (Translation: “We finally changed our default admin password from ‘admin’ after getting hacked.”)

Seen in the Wild: Following a major data breach that exposed 7 million customer records, CISO Jennifer gave a sober presentation about their new “military-grade system hardening initiative,” detailing dozens of sophisticated security measures being implemented immediately. When questioned why these weren’t in place before the breach, she reluctantly admitted that the security team had proposed identical measures every quarter for three years but had been repeatedly denied budget, with the CEO previously stating in an email (now leaked) that “security doesn’t drive revenue, so it’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have” and suggesting they just “add more captchas instead, those are free.”

H is for Hardware Acceleration (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The use of specialized hardware to perform certain functions faster than software running on a general-purpose CPU, which developers enable to make their inefficient web animations run smoothly while dramatically reducing battery life.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our immersive experience leverages hardware acceleration for fluid visual transitions and optimized render performance.” (Translation: “We added unnecessary parallax effects and 3D animations that make your laptop sound like a jet engine.”)

Seen in the Wild: After implementing what he called “cutting-edge hardware-accelerated experiences” on the company website, senior frontend developer Dylan couldn’t understand why customer complaints had increased, until the support team revealed that the site was causing devices to overheat, draining phone batteries in under an hour, and in two documented cases, actually causing phones to shut down due to thermal protection. When asked why the site needed so many intensive animations for what was essentially an online banking portal, Dylan explained that “banking is boring, so we wanted to add joy to the experience,” apparently defining “joy” as “devices running hot enough to fry an egg.”

H is for Hot Deploy (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The practice of updating applications while they’re running, saving the time and hassle of a system restart at the small cost of introducing subtle, catastrophic bugs that won’t manifest until the worst possible moment.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our continuous delivery pipeline supports hot deployment for zero-downtime service updates.” (Translation: “We push code directly to production and pray it doesn’t explode while users are on the site.”)

Seen in the Wild: During an investor demo highlighting their “innovative zero-downtime hot deployment system,” CTO Rachel proudly pushed a minor UI update live, explaining how their sophisticated system allowed them to update production without any service interruption. Five minutes later, users began reporting that account balances were suddenly displaying in yen instead of dollars, transaction histories were showing other customers’ data, and somehow all user profile pictures had been replaced with an image of a confused-looking hamster, none of which showed up in testing because, as Rachel later admitted, “hot deployment behaves differently in production for reasons we don’t fully understand but have learned to accept.”

H is for Human-Readable (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: Describing code or data that theoretically can be understood by humans, though which humans exactly is never specified, leading developers to write comments like “this function gets the thing” and consider their documentation complete.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our API returns human-readable responses optimized for developer experience and debuggability.” (Translation: “Our error messages say ‘something went wrong’ instead of just returning a 500 status code.”)

Seen in the Wild: After boasting about their commitment to “human-readable code and comprehensive documentation” during the onboarding of a new development team, senior engineer Tyler was embarrassed when the new hires discovered that the codebase contained functions named “doTheThing()” and “makeItWork()”, variables like “temp1” through “temp47”, and documentation consisting entirely of comments like “TODO: document this later” and “Not sure why this works but don’t touch it.” Tyler defended the approach as “human-readable to the humans who wrote it” and suggested the new team “develop intuition about the code by meditating on it deeply.”

H is for Honey Pot (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: In cybersecurity, a trap set to detect or deflect unauthorized access attempts, which security teams implement with great enthusiasm but then forget to monitor, essentially creating a museum of attack techniques that no one ever visits.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve deployed strategically positioned honey pots to gather intelligence on attacker methodologies and attack vectors.” (Translation: “We set up a fake server called ‘DEFINITELY_NOT_A_TRAP’ with default credentials and log how quickly it gets hacked.”)

Seen in the Wild: After implementing what he described as a “sophisticated honey pot architecture to analyze potential threats,” security engineer Brandon excitedly reported to the board that they had gathered “valuable intelligence” from their honey pots. When asked for specific insights, he reluctantly admitted that they had forgotten to enable logging on the honey pot systems for the past seven months, so while they had definitely been compromised numerous times based on system behavior, they had no actual data on the attacks. His presentation instead consisted entirely of generic stock photos of hackers in hoodies and a pie chart labeled “Types of Hackers” divided into sections called “Bad Ones” and “Very Bad Ones.”

H is for Holistic (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: Considering the whole rather than just the parts, or in tech strategy documents, a meaningless adjective added to make incremental improvements sound like visionary thinking.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re taking a holistic approach to digital transformation by synergizing cross-functional capabilities in an integrated ecosystem.” (Translation: “We bought some new laptops and finally upgraded from Windows 7.”)

Seen in the Wild: After six months developing what she repeatedly described as a “holistic enterprise technology strategy,” CIO Jennifer finally presented her vision to the executive team: a 200-slide PowerPoint containing no specific initiatives, timelines, or budgets, but 47 different circles-within-circles diagrams where each circle was labeled with a different buzzword like “synergy” or “digital enablement.” When the CEO asked what they would actually be doing differently, Jennifer appeared confused before explaining that “the holistic nature of the strategy transcends traditional linear implementation paradigms” and suggesting they “marinate in the strategic vision” for another quarter before discussing concrete actions.

H is for Hypervisor (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: Software that creates and manages virtual machines, allowing multiple operating systems to share hardware resources, which IT administrators describe with the reverence usually reserved for religious texts while being unable to explain why half the VMs are randomly crashing.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our hypervisor optimization has significantly enhanced resource utilization efficiency across our virtualized infrastructure.” (Translation: “We rebooted the server and now things are working again, at least temporarily.”)

Seen in the Wild: After presenting a 90-minute technical deep dive on their “next-generation hypervisor architecture” and how it provided “unprecedented reliability” for their mission-critical systems, infrastructure director Tyler was mortified when the production environment crashed in the middle of his presentation. After three hours of emergency troubleshooting, the root cause was discovered to be that the hypervisor server had run out of disk space because Tyler had been storing his personal 4K movie collection on it, which he defended as “an essential performance testing dataset” before quickly deleting files with names like “Fast_Furious_9_UltraHD_TOTALLY_LEGAL_COPY.mkv.”

H is for Hub (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A central connection point in a network or system, which tech companies repurpose as a suffix for any product that does literally anything, believing that adding “Hub” to a name instantly makes it sound enterprise-grade and worth a 300% price premium.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our collaboration solution isn’t just a tool, it’s a comprehensive TeamworkHub™ for cross-functional productivity enhancement.” (Translation: “We made a chat app with emoji reactions and are charging $50 per user per month.”)

Seen in the Wild: After rebranding their simple project management tool as “EnterpriseSolutionHub Pro,” SaaS startup TaskBetter increased their pricing from $10/month to $499/month with no feature changes, which founder Chad justified in an interview as “pricing that reflects our hub-centric value proposition.” When pressed on what made it a “hub” rather than just an application, Chad explained with complete seriousness that “traditional applications connect users to features, while hubs connect users to solutions through features,” before admitting under further questioning that they had simply replaced the word “Dashboard” with “Hub” throughout the interface and somehow tripled their conversion rate.

Because nothing says “I deserve my inflated salary” like casually dropping “garbage collection” into conversations about the office recycling policy

Welcome to the seventh installment of TechOnion’s “Urban TechBros Dictionary,” where we continue our anthropological expedition into the verbal plumage of Silicon Valley’s most fascinating species. Today, we’re exploring terms beginning with “G” – the seventh letter tech bros master after securing a standing desk and developing strong opinions about coffee beans sourced from elevation-specific microclimates somewhere in Latin America.

G is for Git (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A version control system that tracks changes to code, or more accurately, a technological monument to the human capacity for creating problems that didn’t exist until we tried to solve different problems.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our development workflow leverages Git’s distributed architecture for seamless collaborative iteration.” (Translation: “Nobody on the team actually understands rebasing and we’ve all broken the main branch at least twice.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending three hours explaining to the team why his elaborate 27-branch Git strategy with custom hooks and mandatory signed commits was “essential for code quality,” senior developer Marcus was discovered to have a local directory named “project_final_FINAL_USE_THIS_ONE_v3_ACTUALLY_FINAL” containing 15 separate copies of the codebase because he couldn’t figure out how to resolve a merge conflict.

G is for GitHub (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A hosting service for Git repositories that developers primarily use to create the illusion of productivity by making meaningless contributions to public projects while their actual work deadlines whoosh by.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Check out my GitHub profile to see my contributions to the open-source ecosystem.” (Translation: “I forked 50 popular repositories I’ve never actually contributed to and created 17 ‘hello world’ projects with impressive-sounding names.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a job interview, developer Aiden proudly showcased his GitHub profile with its impressive contribution graph showing activity every day for the past year, until the interviewer clicked on a random commit to discover it contained only modifications to the README file’s whitespace or single-character changes to comments, with one commit message simply reading “daily commit so the squares turn green.”

G is for GPU (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: Graphics Processing Unit, a specialized processor originally designed for rendering images but now primarily used by tech bros to explain why they “need” a $3,000 graphics card to run Microsoft Excel more efficiently.

How Tech Bros Use It: “My deep learning research requires substantial GPU resources for parallel tensor operations.” (Translation: “I want to play Cyberpunk 2077 at maximum settings during work hours.”)

Seen in the Wild: After convincing the finance department to approve a $6,500 expense for a “dedicated AI computing workstation with dual high-performance GPUs” that was “absolutely essential for his machine learning research,” data scientist Tyler was discovered using the machine exclusively for gaming, with his only work-related AI activity being occasionally asking ChatGPT to “write my status report for today’s meeting” between Counter-Strike matches.

G is for GUI (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: Graphical User Interface, the visual way users interact with software, which command-line enthusiasts publicly dismiss as “for noobs” while privately using when nobody’s watching.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I prefer programmatic interfaces over GUIs for maximum operational efficiency.” (Translation: “I want to look like a hacker from a 90s movie even though it takes me three times longer to do simple tasks.”)

Seen in the Wild: After publicly ridiculing a junior developer for using a Git GUI instead of command-line, proclaiming “real developers don’t need pretty buttons,” senior engineer Brandon was spotted by an intern frantically closing GitHub Desktop when someone walked into his office, before proudly typing “git status” into his terminal seven times in succession while pretending to understand the output.

G is for Golang (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A programming language developed by Google, primarily chosen by companies who want their developers to feel cutting-edge while still being unable to implement generics properly.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve migrated our backend services to Golang for enhanced performance and concurrency models.” (Translation: “We rewrote everything because our senior developer got bored with Python after watching a YouTube video about Go.”)

Seen in the Wild: After mandating a company-wide migration from a stable Python codebase to Go that took eight months and cost $1.2 million in developer time, CTO Jeremy couldn’t explain why the new system was actually slower, had more bugs, and was harder to maintain, eventually claiming the benefits were “architectural and philosophical rather than immediately measurable in primitive metrics like ‘working correctly’ or ‘speed.'”

G is for Google (Tech Factor: 3)

TechOnion Definition: A search engine that developers use to find StackOverflow answers, which they then copy-paste while claiming they “implemented a custom solution leveraging industry best practices.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “After extensive research and analysis of available methodologies, I architected a solution for the authentication flow.” (Translation: “I Googled ‘how to login form tutorial’ and used the first result.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a technical interview where outside resources were prohibited, candidate Tyler asked to use the bathroom exactly seven times, each visit precisely correlating with a new and suspiciously perfect solution to the interview problems appearing in his code editor moments after his return, with the final solution still containing commented URLs to StackOverflow and the variable ‘googleResultExample’ that he forgot to rename.

G is for Growth Hacking (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: Marketing techniques focused on rapid company growth, or more accurately, ethically questionable tactics that companies use until they’re large enough to pretend they never did those things.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re implementing innovative growth hacking strategies to optimize our user acquisition funnel.” (Translation: “We’re spamming people’s contact lists and making our cancellation button invisible.”)

Seen in the Wild: After being celebrated in TechCrunch for his “revolutionary growth hacking strategies” that grew his social app from 0 to 1 million users in three months, growth marketer Jason carefully omitted that these strategies included automatically accessing users’ contact lists without clear permission, sending messages pretending to be from the user to all their contacts, and requiring users to invite 10 friends before they could access features they had already paid for.

G is for Gamification (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: The practice of adding game elements to non-game contexts, or more accurately, psychological manipulation disguised as fun to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re enhancing user engagement through sophisticated gamification mechanics that drive desired behaviors.” (Translation: “We added meaningless badges and progress bars to make people feel bad if they don’t use our app daily.”)

Seen in the Wild: After implementing what he called a “revolutionary gamification strategy” for a meditation app, product manager Kyle proudly showcased features including competitive leaderboards for who could meditate the most, anxiety-inducing time-limited “meditation challenges,” and push notifications shaming users who missed sessions—all of which directly contradicted the app’s supposed purpose of reducing stress and promoting mindfulness.

G is for Gigabyte (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: A unit of digital information equal to 1,024 megabytes, which tech bros use in everyday conversation to express quantities that normal people would express with actual numbers.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m processing approximately 1.3 gigabytes of caffeine today to optimize my neural functions.” (Translation: “I’m drinking a lot of coffee.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a first date at a restaurant, software engineer Trevor attempted to impress his companion by ordering “500 megabytes of red wine,” asking the waiter if the steak was “fully encrypted and secure,” and later explaining that he needed to “download” 8 hours of “offline processing” instead of simply saying he was tired and wanted to sleep, resulting in his date “terminating the connection” before dessert.

G is for Gig Economy (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A labor market characterized by short-term contracts and freelance work, which tech companies describe as “flexible freedom for workers” but is actually “not having to pay benefits or provide job security.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our platform empowers independent contractors to monetize their excess capacity with schedule flexibility.” (Translation: “We’ve figured out how to have employees without legally having employees.”)

Seen in the Wild: While delivering a conference keynote titled “The Future of Empowered Work,” CEO Jessica passionately described how their gig platform “liberated workers from the constraints of traditional employment,” before returning to her office where she reprimanded her full-time staff for taking too many bathroom breaks and rejected a contractor’s request for payment that was three months overdue, explaining that “true entrepreneurs understand cash flow fluctuations.”

G is for Generative AI (Tech Factor: 10)

TechOnion Definition: Artificial intelligence that can create content resembling what humans might produce, which tech bros claim will “enhance human creativity” while secretly wondering if it can replace enough employees to get them a bonus.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our generative AI augments human creative potential through collaborative intelligence amplification.” (Translation: “We’re using ChatGPT to write all our marketing copy and laying off the content team.”)

Seen in the Wild: After prominently featuring their “proprietary generative AI technology” in investor presentations and securing an additional $50 million in funding, startup NeuralCreative’s CTO was embarrassed when a demo crashed to reveal they were actually just using a hidden Chrome window with ChatGPT, with saved prompts including “make this email sound smarter” and “pretend you’re our proprietary AI if anyone asks.”

G is for Garbage Collection (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: An automatic memory management system that reclaims memory occupied by objects no longer in use, which developers blame for performance issues instead of admitting they wrote inefficient code.

How Tech Bros Use It: “The latency spike was clearly caused by garbage collection cycles in the runtime environment.” (Translation: “My code created 10,000 unnecessary objects, but it’s the language’s fault for not cleaning them up faster.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending three weeks blaming Java’s garbage collector for their application’s poor performance and writing a 17-page technical document proposing a switch to a different programming language, senior engineer Tyler was mortified when an intern identified that his core algorithm was creating a new object for each of the 500,000 items in their database every 200 milliseconds in an infinite loop, which Tyler defended as “an intentional stress test of the garbage collector’s theoretical limits.”

G is for Gateway (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A device that connects two different networks, or in tech presentations, a magical black box that solves all integration problems when drawn on architecture diagrams.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our solution leverages an intelligent API gateway to orchestrate cross-service communication with dynamic routing.” (Translation: “We put nginx in front of everything and hope for the best.”)

Seen in the Wild: During an architecture review, solution architect Derek confidently presented a system diagram featuring 14 different “specialized gateways” connecting various components, but when pressed for details on how they actually worked, gradually admitted that most were aspirational, several were just load balancers with fancy names, and at least three were actually the same instance of nginx configured differently, which he defended as “a microgateway service mesh topology.”

G is for Granular (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: Characterized by a high level of detail, or in tech contexts, a word used to make vague plans sound precise and well-thought-out when they absolutely are not.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We need to take a more granular approach to our analytics implementation.” (Translation: “I have no specific suggestions but want to sound thoughtful.”)

Seen in the Wild: After promising the board a “granular 30-60-90 day plan” for turning around declining metrics, VP of Product Marcus delivered a 57-slide presentation where every slide featured the word “granular” at least twice but contained no actual deliverables, timelines, or specific action items, just increasingly smaller bullet points with phrases like “deeply analyze granular user behaviors” and “implement granular optimizations based on granular insights.”

G is for Graph (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A visual representation of data, which in tech presentations means a chart with an upward trend line regardless of what the actual data shows.

How Tech Bros Use It: “As you can see from this graph, our engagement metrics demonstrate clear product-market fit with exponential growth potential.” (Translation: “I cherry-picked the only positive data point and manipulated the y-axis to make a 0.5% increase look dramatic.”)

Seen in the Wild: During an all-hands meeting, growth manager Sophia presented what she called “irrefutable evidence of product success” with a graph showing an impressive upward trend, until a curious engineer asked about the unlabeled axes, revealing the x-axis represented just three days of data and the y-axis started at 99.97% and ended at 100%, effectively magnifying a negligible 0.03% change into what appeared to be massive growth.

G is for Graceful Degradation (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A design principle where systems continue to function when parts fail, which developers claim their applications implement despite them completely crashing when a single API returns an unexpected value.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our architecture implements graceful degradation patterns to maintain core functionality during component failures.” (Translation: “When our system fails, it displays a cute error message instead of a stack trace.”)

Seen in the Wild: After bragging to clients about their system’s “sophisticated graceful degradation capabilities” during a sales pitch, VP of Engineering Trevor was mortified when his demonstration completely crashed due to the conference Wi-Fi being slightly slower than expected, displaying the error message “CRITICAL_FAILURE: EVERYTHING_IS_BROKEN” followed by 200 lines of stack trace and database credentials, which he tried to pass off as “a transparent debugging feature for our technical users.”

G is for Grid System (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: In web design, a structure of horizontal and vertical lines used for organizing content, which frontend developers treat with the religious reverence usually reserved for deities while still somehow implementing it incorrectly.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a responsive 12-column grid system with nested containers for optimal layout fluidity across device contexts.” (Translation: “Things are mostly aligned except on tablets where everything breaks for some reason.”)

Seen in the Wild: After giving a 45-minute presentation on his “revolutionary” custom grid system that was “far superior to any framework,” senior designer Jordan launched the company’s redesigned website only to have the CEO point out that everything was misaligned, columns were different widths, and the entire layout collapsed on mobile devices, leading Jordan to blame “browser inconsistencies” rather than admit he fundamentally misunderstood how his own grid system worked.

G is for Greenfield (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A project developed from scratch with no constraints from existing systems, which developers fantasize about while maintaining legacy codebases, much like people in unhappy marriages fantasize about running away to start a new life.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I specialize in greenfield development where I can architect optimal solutions without technical debt.” (Translation: “I like to start exciting new projects and leave before having to maintain them long-term.”)

Seen in the Wild: After begging management for months to let him start a “greenfield rewrite” of the company’s core system and promising it would take “just 10 weeks,” senior architect Dylan abandoned the half-completed project after just six weeks to accept a new job, leaving behind no documentation, partially implemented features, and a README file containing only the words “TODO: Write documentation” and a smiley face, forcing the company to continue using the legacy system he had described as “unmaintainable.”

G is for Golden Path (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The ideal workflow through an application that developers optimize for, while treating any user who deviates from this path as if they’re deliberately trying to break things rather than just using the product normally.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve optimized the golden path for our primary user journey to maximize conversion efficiency.” (Translation: “Our app works fine if you do exactly what we expect and never try anything else.”)

Seen in the Wild: During user testing of their “intuitively designed” e-commerce platform, product manager Haley became increasingly agitated as real users consistently failed to follow the “obvious golden path” through the checkout process, eventually shouting “WHY WOULD YOU CLICK THERE?” at a confused participant who tried to edit their shopping cart, later explaining to her team that they needed to “educate users on the correct way to use our interface” rather than adapting the design to match actual user behavior.

G is for Greedy Algorithm (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: An algorithmic paradigm that makes locally optimal choices at each stage with the hope of finding a global optimum, which developers use to demonstrate their theoretical computer science knowledge while implementing solutions that operate on such small datasets that brute force would be faster.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I implemented a modified greedy algorithm with heuristic optimization for our recommendation engine.” (Translation: “I wrote a bunch of if-statements that sort items by popularity.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a technical review, junior engineer Cooper nervously watched as his manager dissected his “sophisticated greedy algorithm” for task scheduling, eventually revealing that not only was it not actually a greedy algorithm, but the entire complex system he had spent three weeks building could be replaced by sorting an array—a fact Cooper tried to dismiss by claiming his approach had “superior architectural extensibility for future quantum computing integration.”

G is for Global Scale (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The capability to handle worldwide operations, which startups claim their applications are built for despite barely being able to handle traffic from their own office.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our platform is engineered for global scale with regionalized deployment architectures.” (Translation: “Our app works on my laptop, and I’ve convinced myself that means it can handle millions of users.”)

Seen in the Wild: After proudly announcing their app was “built from the ground up for global scale” during a major press launch, CTO Jessica watched in horror as their servers crashed within three minutes when exactly 176 users tried to sign up simultaneously, leading to an emergency all-hands meeting where she explained to investors that this was actually “valuable load testing data” and part of their “planned staged rollout strategy” rather than a complete architectural failure.

Because nothing says “I’m worth my inflated salary” like explaining “functional programming” to relatives who just asked if you can fix their printer

Welcome to the sixth installment of TechOnion’s “Urban TechBros Dictionary,” where we continue our anthropological exploration into the linguistic plumage of Silicon Valley’s native species. Today, we’re examining terms beginning with “F” – the sixth letter tech bros master after convincing investors to fund their “revolutionary” idea that’s essentially “Uber but for [mundane millionaire’s household task].”

F is for Frontend (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: The visual part of software that users actually interact with, which backend developers dismiss as “just making things pretty” while simultaneously being unable to center a div without having an existential crisis.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m implementing an optimized frontend architecture leveraging reactive state management paradigms.” (Translation: “I’m using React because everyone else is.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending three meetings belittling frontend work as “digital arts and crafts,” senior backend engineer Trevor was tasked with making a simple UI change during a frontend developer’s vacation, resulting in him staring at CSS for six hours before breaking into tears and writing a rambling Slack message about how “frontend is actually the hardest part of the stack” and “we should double the frontend team’s compensation.”

F is for Framework (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A collection of pre-written code that developers use to avoid solving problems from scratch, or more accurately, a way to replace problems you understand with problems you don’t.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve selected a cutting-edge framework that optimizes developer velocity while maintaining enterprise scalability.” (Translation: “I read a Medium article about this new framework last week and decided to rewrite our entire application.”)

Seen in the Wild: After forcing the engineering team to migrate to their fourth JavaScript framework in 18 months, CTO Blake defended the decision in an all-hands meeting by presenting a single benchmarking chart showing the new framework rendering “Hello World” 0.003 milliseconds faster, while conveniently ignoring that the migration had cost $430,000 in developer time and introduced 37 new critical bugs.

F is for Full-Stack (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A developer who claims to be equally proficient at frontend, backend, DevOps, database administration, user experience (UX) design, and machine learning, but is actually a backend engineer who once centered a div by accident and now thinks they understand CSS.

How Tech Bros Use It: “As a full-stack engineer, I bring holistic architectural perspectives to cross-domain problem solving.” (Translation: “I can write mediocre code in many different languages.”)

Seen in the Wild: Self-proclaimed “full-stack ninja” Chad’s GitHub contribution graph revealed he had committed 1,246 backend changes, 823 database migrations, and exactly 3 frontend updates—all of which were changing the color of a button and then changing it back twice because users complained.

F is for Fintech (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The art of adding an app to traditional banking and calling it innovation, or more accurately, finding increasingly complex ways to separate people from their money while calling it “financial empowerment.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our disruptive fintech solution democratizes access to financial services through blockchain-enabled micro-transactions.” (Translation: “We added astronomical fees to basic banking functions but made the app look nice.”)

Seen in the Wild: After raising $140 million for their “revolutionary fintech platform,” startup CashNow launched an app that offered instant loans at 4,000% APR, charged $9.99 for checking your balance, and included a feature that automatically converted users’ savings to NFTs of cartoon penguins without clear consent, which founder Megan described as “creating unconventional wealth opportunities for the unbanked population.”

F is for Firewall (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A security system designed to prevent unauthorized network access, which companies configure once during installation and then never think about again until after they’ve been hacked.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our multi-layered firewall architecture provides defense-in-depth protection against sophisticated threat vectors.” (Translation: “We have whatever firewall came with the router and hope for the best.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a security audit presentation, CISO Michael passionately described their “military-grade firewall infrastructure with AI-enhanced threat detection,” until penetration testers revealed they had accessed the entire corporate network through an unprotected Wi-Fi network named “PrinterSetup” that was connected directly to the internal systems and had the password “password123” written on a Post-it note in the lobby.

F is for Funding (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: Money given to startups by venture capitalists (VCs) who hope the founder will become the next Mark Zuckerberg, despite overwhelming statistical evidence suggesting they’ll actually become the next person you’ve never heard of because their company quietly folded after 18 months.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We just closed our Series B funding round to accelerate our growth trajectory and scale operations.” (Translation: “We still have no revenue but convinced more people to bet on us anyway.”)

Seen in the Wild: After announcing their “$50 million Series C funding round led by prestigious firms” in TechCrunch, CEO Jessica failed to mention that the company had already burned through their Series A and B without developing a functioning product, had pivoted seven times in two years, and that the term sheet included a clause requiring the immediate implementation of a “significant cost restructuring plan” (layoffs) that began the morning after the press release.

F is for Feature (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: A capability added to software that product managers insist users desperately want, developers insist is technically impossible, and users will ignore completely once implemented.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re prioritizing high-impact feature development based on comprehensive user research and engagement analytics.” (Translation: “Our CEO saw something in a competitor’s app and now we have to build it by Friday.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending six months and $380,000 implementing an “AI-powered personalization engine” that product manager Kyle promised would “revolutionize user engagement,” post-launch metrics revealed that only 0.002% of users had interacted with it, and most of those interactions were people desperately trying to turn it off.

F is for Founder (Tech Factor: 4)

TechOnion Definition: A person who started a company, or more commonly, someone who has elevated themselves to messianic status based on having a single good idea and access to family wealth. The startup equivalent of a child naming themselves King of the Playground.

How Tech Bros Use It: “As a founder, I’m driven by the mission to fundamentally transform how people experience [basic activity that worked fine before].” (Translation: “I dropped out of college, and now my entire personality is based on having started a company.”)

Seen in the Wild: During his keynote speech titled “The Founder’s Journey: Perseverance Against All Odds,” CEO Trevor emotionally recounted “bootstrapping” his startup despite skeptics, strategically omitting that his “bootstrapping” consisted of a $2 million investment from his hedge fund manager father, free office space in his uncle’s building, and his Stanford roommate’s connections that secured their first five enterprise clients.

F is for Functional Programming (Tech Factor: 10)

TechOnion Definition: A programming paradigm that focuses on pure functions and immutable data, or more accurately, a way for developers to feel intellectually superior while writing code that no one else on the team can understand or maintain.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve architected our solution using functional programming principles to enhance compositional reasoning and referential transparency.” (Translation: “I’ve written functions so complex that you’ll never fire me because nobody else can decipher them.”)

Seen in the Wild: After rewriting the company’s checkout system using “pure functional programming paradigms,” senior engineer Trent proudly delivered code that processed orders in 0.02 seconds faster but required new hires to complete a six-week training course to understand it, crashed unpredictably due to stack overflows, and prompted three developers to quit rather than maintain it, with one citing “psychological distress” in their exit interview.

F is for Fork (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: In software development, the act of creating a copy of a source code repository to develop it separately, or more accurately, a passive-aggressive way to tell the original developers “I could do this better” without actually having to deliver on that promise.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I forked the project to implement critical optimizations that the maintainers were overlooking.” (Translation: “I changed one line of code and then abandoned the project after getting the GitHub stars I wanted.”)

Seen in the Wild: After publicly criticizing a popular open-source library for its “amateur implementation” and “obvious performance flaws,” senior developer Kyle ceremoniously announced his fork that would “completely revolutionize” the approach. Three years later, his fork contained a single commit that changed the readme file to add his name, while the original project had merged 1,200 improvements and became an industry standard.

F is for Firebase (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: Google’s development platform that promises to handle all your backend needs, allowing you to focus on your app until you reach enough users that Firebase becomes prohibitively expensive, forcing you to rewrite everything from scratch.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re leveraging Firebase’s serverless architecture to optimize development velocity in our MVP phase.” (Translation: “We don’t want to hire backend developers, so we’re using Firebase until our inevitable rewrite in six months.”)

Seen in the Wild: After boasting about how Firebase had allowed his startup to “move at unprecedented speed and focus on user experience instead of infrastructure,” CTO Jeremy found himself leading a panicked three-month rewrite of their entire backend when their Firebase bill suddenly jumped from $75 to $28,000 per month after their app went viral, forcing the company to raise an emergency funding round described externally as a “strategic growth investment.”

F is for Failover (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A backup system that automatically takes over when the primary system fails, which in theory provides continuity during outages but in practice reveals that you never actually tested whether the backup system works.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our robust failover architecture ensures continuous service availability even during catastrophic infrastructure events.” (Translation: “We have a second server that we think might work if the first one crashes, but we’re not entirely sure.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a major presentation to enterprise clients, VP of Engineering Sandra confidently described their “quadruple-redundant failover system with geographic distribution,” moments before their primary system crashed and the failover sequence triggered a cascading series of previously undiscovered bugs that not only failed to restore service but also accidentally deleted the production database, sent inappropriate error messages to all users, and somehow changed the company website to display only a rotating taco emoji.

F is for Firmware (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: Software that’s permanently stored on a hardware device, named “firmware” because it’s neither fully hardware nor software, similar to how a tech bro is neither fully employed nor unemployed while “ideating” at cafes between startups.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re deploying a critical firmware update to enhance device performance and security posture.” (Translation: “We’re fixing bugs we shipped in the original version that we should have caught before release.”)

Seen in the Wild: After rushing their “revolutionary” smart home device to market, IoT startup HomeSense issued what they called a “minor firmware enhancement” that turned out to be a mandatory 3-hour update process during which devices became completely non-functional, with some never recovering and others developing a peculiar habit of activating at 3 AM to loudly announce the current temperature in Helsinki, regardless of user location or settings.

F is for Float (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: In programming, a data type for decimal numbers, and in CSS, a property for positioning elements, both of which developers pretend to fully understand while actually just trying different values until something works by accident.

How Tech Bros Use It: “The UI inconsistencies were caused by improper float clearance in the responsive grid system.” (Translation: “I have no idea why everything looks wrong, but blaming float sounds technical.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending three days trying to fix a layout issue on the company website, frontend developer Tyler sent a 2,000-word Slack message explaining how the problem stemmed from “complex interactions between floating elements and container boundaries,” only for an intern to point out that he had simply misspelled “width” as “widht” in the CSS, instantly resolving all the layout problems.

F is for Fuzzing (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A software testing technique that feeds random, unexpected, or malformed data into a program to find vulnerabilities, essentially the digital equivalent of letting a toddler play with your application to see what breaks.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our security protocol includes advanced fuzzing methodologies to identify potential attack vectors in input handling.” (Translation: “We mashed the keyboard a few times during testing and nothing crashed immediately.”)

Seen in the Wild: After boasting about their “sophisticated fuzzing infrastructure” during a security certification process, lead engineer Cameron was forced to admit their entire fuzzing strategy consisted of an intern named Tyler who would “try weird stuff” during his lunch break, including naming a user account “Robert’); DROP TABLE Users;–” which had, in fact, successfully deleted their entire user database during a production test.

F is for Freemium (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: A business model where basic services are provided for free with the option to pay for advanced features, or more accurately, a strategy to get users hooked on your product before strategically making it so annoying they’ll pay you to make the annoyances stop.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our freemium conversion funnel optimizes user value realization through strategic feature differentiation.” (Translation: “We show constant pop-ups and deliberately cripple the free version until users pay us to go away.”)

Seen in the Wild: After pivoting to a “user-friendly freemium model,” productivity app TaskMaster implemented what CEO Chloe called a “value-based conversion strategy,” which users discovered meant random 30-second unskippable video ads appeared whenever they tried to mark a task complete, save changes, or exit the application, with the most frequent ad ironically promoting their “distraction-free premium experience.”

F is for Future-Proof (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A marketing term suggesting a product won’t become obsolete, despite overwhelming historical evidence that everything in tech becomes obsolete approximately 14 minutes after purchase.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve architected a future-proof solution leveraging technology standards with long-term industry support.” (Translation: “This will be completely outdated by the time we finish implementing it.”)

Seen in the Wild: During their IPO roadshow, CEO Marcus emphasized their “future-proof architecture built for the next decade,” specifically highlighting their “strategic investment” in Adobe Flash, Silverlight integration, and exclusive support for BlackBerry devices—three months before Adobe announced Flash’s end-of-life, Microsoft deprecated Silverlight, and BlackBerry exited the hardware business.

F is for Fiber (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: High-speed internet that uses fiber optic cables instead of copper wires, which tech bros talk about the way previous generations discussed indoor plumbing—as a basic human right for them personally but a luxury for everyone else.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I couldn’t possibly accept a position at a company headquartered somewhere without gigabit fiber connectivity.” (Translation: “I need to be able to download games on Steam really fast while looking like I’m working.”)

Seen in the Wild: When house-hunting in a new city, software engineer Brandon rejected seventeen properties solely based on internet connectivity, eventually paying $1,200 over market rate for an apartment with fiber internet, which he used primarily to complain on Reddit about video buffering issues that he deemed “literal human rights violations,” while conducting all actual work using his phone’s hotspot after forgetting to set up his fiber account for three months.

F is for Friction (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: In UX design, obstacles that make user interactions more difficult, which companies eliminate to make experiences “seamless,” especially when those friction points might have prevented users from making purchases they’ll later regret.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re optimizing conversion by eliminating unnecessary friction in the customer journey.” (Translation: “We’ve made it nearly impossible to find the cancel button.”)

Seen in the Wild: After implementing what the growth team called a “friction-reduction initiative,” e-commerce startup QuickBuy’s one-click purchase system became so frictionless that users were completing purchases without realizing it, leading to record sales but also a 3,000% increase in returns, hundreds of fraud complaints, and an eventual class-action lawsuit from customers who discovered they had somehow purchased the complete inventory of artisanal ferret vitamins.

F is for Fragmentation (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The state of a market or ecosystem split into many incompatible versions or variations, which tech companies publicly claim is “bad for users” while actively creating more fragmentation to lock customers into their specific ecosystem.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Android fragmentation presents significant development challenges for consistent user experiences.” (Translation: “I only test my app on the latest Pixel and blame ‘fragmentation’ when it doesn’t work on other devices.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a developer conference keynote, mobile platform VP Jennifer delivered an impassioned speech about “fighting ecosystem fragmentation for the benefit of users,” immediately before announcing seven new device categories with different screen sizes, three incompatible developer frameworks, and a new proprietary charging standard, concluding with a straight-faced promise that this would “unify the user experience.”

F is for FizzBuzz (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A simple programming task used in interviews to weed out candidates who can’t actually code, which somehow still eliminates 80% of applicants despite the solution being available on every coding website on the internet.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We use algorithmic challenges like FizzBuzz to assess fundamental programming competencies.” (Translation: “We judge complex engineering skills based on whether someone can remember a coding problem that’s been used in every interview since 2007.”)

Seen in the Wild: After boasting about his rigorous technical interview process centered on “advanced variations of FizzBuzz that reveal true engineering talent,” CTO Marcus failed to solve the standard FizzBuzz problem himself during a live coding demonstration at a recruitment event, blaming his inability on “the pressure of public coding” before hastily pivoting to a slide presentation about company benefits.

F is for Flow State (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: A mental state of complete immersion in an activity, which developers claim to need uninterrupted hours to achieve but primarily use as an excuse for why they didn’t read any of their emails or attend mandatory meetings.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I optimize my productivity by protecting deep work periods for achieving flow state on complex engineering challenges.” (Translation: “I want to be left alone to watch YouTube while occasionally typing something that looks like code when people walk by.”)

Seen in the Wild: After sending a company-wide email announcing his new “flow state protocol” that required colleagues to communicate with him only during two 15-minute windows per day to protect his “deep work cycles,” senior engineer Tyler was discovered to have actually spent his untouchable six-hour “flow state blocks” playing League of Legends with his camera off during mandatory meetings, which he retroactively justified as “gamified problem-solving that enhances cognitive flexibility.”

F is for FAANG (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: An acronym for Facebook (Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet), used by tech workers to humble-brag about job offers or explain why they deserve higher compensation because they “could work at a FAANG company” despite having been rejected by all five multiple times.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m considering multiple competitive offers, including two FAANG opportunities.” (Translation: “I did a phone screen with Amazon two years ago and once applied to Netflix.”)

Seen in the Wild: During salary negotiations, mid-level developer Josh insisted he deserved a 70% raise because he was “fielding multiple FAANG offers,” but when pressed for details by the suspicious HR director, was forced to admit his “Facebook opportunity” was actually a customer service role at a Facebook marketing partner, his “Apple position” was at an Apple Store as a retail associate, and his “Google interview” was just a recruiter viewing his LinkedIn profile.

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.

Because nothing says “I deserve a corner office” like casually dropping “distributed systems” into conversations about the office coffee machine

Welcome to the fourth chapter of TechOnion’s “Urban TechBros Dictionary,” where we continue dissecting the linguistic plumage of the elusive tech bro in his natural habitat. Today, we’re exploring terms beginning with “D” – the fourth letter tech bros master after convincing investors that their “Uber for indoor Houseplants” idea deserves a $1 billion valuation.

D is for Database (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A digital filing cabinet where companies store information they’ll never look at again but are legally required to protect as though it contains the nuclear launch codes. The technological equivalent of your grandmother’s attic, but with more credit card numbers.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our proprietary NoSQL database architecture leverages distributed consensus protocols for horizontal scalability.” (Translation: “We’re using MongoDB because I read a Medium article about it.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending six months migrating from MySQL to a “revolutionary distributed database architecture,” senior engineer Kyle couldn’t explain why simple queries now took 30 seconds instead of milliseconds, eventually blaming it on “eventual consistency trade-offs” while secretly moving critical functions back to SQLite files he manually copied between servers.

D is for DevOps (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The practice of combining development and operations roles so one person can be blamed for everything instead of two separate people. The professional equivalent of being both the chef and food critic of your own restaurant.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m implementing mature DevOps methodologies to streamline our deployment pipeline.” (Translation: “I’ve created a shell script that sometimes works if Mercury isn’t in retrograde.”)

Seen in the Wild: After proudly announcing the company’s “DevOps transformation,” CTO Brandon assigned all operational responsibilities to developers without training, tools, or additional compensation, then expressed genuine surprise when the entire infrastructure collapsed during a demo to investors, later describing it as a “valuable learning opportunity about resilience engineering.”

D is for Docker (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A technology that lets developers package their application with all its problems and incompatibilities into a standardized unit of frustration. The digital equivalent of putting all your household mess into a storage unit and calling yourself organized.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our containerization strategy leverages Docker for consistent deployment across heterogeneous environments.” (Translation: “It works on my laptop, so now it’s your problem.”)

Seen in the Wild: After mandating that all applications must be “Dockerized” for “infrastructure consistency,” DevOps engineer Trevor created a container so large it couldn’t be downloaded over the office WiFi, contained three different operating systems nested inside each other “for compatibility,” and somehow required more resources than the original application while adding seven minutes to the startup time.

D is for Disruption (Tech Factor: 4)

TechOnion Definition: The art of describing your marginally different product as revolutionary to distract from the fact that it’s basically the same thing that already exists but with a chatbot. Silicon Valley’s favorite word for “doing exactly what everyone else is doing but with more venture capital.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re disrupting the traditional paper notebook industry with our revolutionary digital note-taking solution.” (Translation: “We made an app that lets you write things down.”)

Seen in the Wild: After securing $27 million to “disrupt the breakfast industry,” startup founder Chad revealed his revolutionary product: toast, but ordered through an app that used machine learning to predict what time you might want toast, with a subscription model costing $89/month plus “dynamic bread surcharges during peak toasting hours.”

D is for Data Science (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: The practice of applying complicated statistical methods to find patterns in data that confirm what executives already wanted to do anyway. The corporate equivalent of hiring a fortune teller but making them use Python and R instead of tarot cards.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our data science team discovered actionable insights through multi-dimensional feature analysis.” (Translation: “We made some charts in Excel and drew arrows pointing up.”)

Seen in the Wild: After hiring a team of five PhD data scientists at $200K each, e-commerce company ShopFast had them spend six months building a sophisticated machine learning model to predict customer behavior, only to ignore the results completely when it contradicted the CEO’s intuition based on his conversation with “this really smart guy at the gym.”

D is for DNS (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: Domain Name System, the internet’s phonebook that translates human-friendly website names into computer-friendly IP addresses, and the first thing blamed whenever anything goes wrong despite almost never being the actual problem.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re experiencing intermittent availability issues potentially related to DNS propagation delays.” (Translation: “I have no idea why the website is down but blaming DNS buys me time to figure it out.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a major outage that cost the company thousands per minute, senior engineer Tyler spent two hours insisting it was “definitely a DNS issue” before a junior developer pointed out that Tyler had accidentally shut down all the production servers while clearing his browser cache.

D is for Deep Learning (Tech Factor: 10)

TechOnion Definition: A branch of AI that uses neural networks with many layers, or more commonly, a marketing term slapped onto any algorithm more complex than an if-statement to justify charging enterprise prices. The technological equivalent of putting a Ferrari logo on a golf cart.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our proprietary deep learning algorithms analyze multi-modal data streams for anomaly detection.” (Translation: “We check if the number is bigger than the average and send an email if it is.”)

Seen in the Wild: After pitching their “revolutionary deep learning solution” to investors, AI startup DeepThought was forced to admit during due diligence that their “neural network” was actually an intern named Dave who manually classified data while their engineers focused on creating impressive-looking visualizations for demo day.

D is for Digital Transformation (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: The process of spending millions of dollars to replace working systems with digital versions that don’t work as well but generate more data that nobody looks at. The corporate equivalent of replacing all your furniture with “smart furniture” that requires a subscription and regularly locks you out of your own couch.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re implementing an enterprise-wide digital transformation initiative to leverage synergistic data-driven insights.” (Translation: “We’re buying iPads for executives who will use them exclusively for email.”)

Seen in the Wild: After announcing a $50 million “digital transformation” budget, multinational corporation MegaCorp spent 18 months and $47 million migrating their paper form processes to digital forms that were printed out and filed in the same cabinets as the original paper forms, with the CTO declaring the project “a resounding success in modernization.”

D is for Debugging (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The process of removing bugs from code, which is like trying to find a needle in a haystack while the haystack is on fire, it’s midnight, you’re exhausted, and the needle might not actually exist.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m implementing systematic debugging protocols to isolate the anomalous code paths.” (Translation: “I’m adding console.log statements everywhere and praying.”)

Seen in the Wild: After claiming to have “advanced debugging methodologies,” senior developer Jason’s technique was revealed to consist entirely of adding comments like “WHY DOESN’T THIS WORK???” and “FIX LATER” throughout the codebase, followed by rebooting the server until the problem mysteriously disappeared.

D is for DDoS (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: Distributed Denial of Service, an attack where multiple systems flood a target with traffic to overload it, or what companies claim is happening when their server crashes because they tried to host their Super Bowl commercial website on the cheapest AWS tier.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We mitigated a sophisticated DDoS attack through our advanced traffic analysis algorithms.” (Translation: “Our website got mentioned on Reddit and couldn’t handle 200 visitors at once.”)

Seen in the Wild: After their e-commerce site crashed during their big sale, CTO Trevor sent a company-wide email about the “coordinated DDoS attack” they had successfully defended against, carefully omitting that the “attack” was actually just their own marketing email being more successful than expected and that the “defense” consisted of turning the servers off and on again.

D is for Dark Pattern (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: Deceptive user interface designs specifically created to trick users into doing things they didn’t intend to do, which tech companies refer to as “conversion optimization” or “enhanced user journeys” in public while high-fiving about in private.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented intuitive user journey optimization to streamline the subscription confirmation process.” (Translation: “We made the cancel button invisible and the ‘continue’ button look like ‘cancel’.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a design review, product manager Blake proudly presented their “subscription flow improvements” that increased revenue by 40%, which turned out to be a pre-checked annual subscription with the checkbox hidden behind an image, a fake “processing” screen that delayed cancellation attempts, and unsubscribe links that randomly redirected to the company’s homepage.

D is for Data Lake (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A massive repository of unstructured data where companies dump information with the vague hope that someday it might be useful, much like those boxes in your garage labeled “Miscellaneous” that you haven’t opened since 2007.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our enterprise data lake enables holistic analytical insights across disparate business domains.” (Translation: “We have 10 petabytes of logs that nobody has ever looked at.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending $4 million building a “state-of-the-art data lake,” financial services firm CapitolOne discovered that 97% of the stored data had never been accessed, 2% was duplicate information, and the remaining 1% was primarily executives downloading the same quarterly report repeatedly because they kept losing it.

D is for Design Thinking (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: A problem-solving approach that involves lots of colorful sticky notes, standing instead of sitting, and drawing things that could have been explained more clearly in an email. The corporate equivalent of a childhood art class but with more buzzwords and higher consulting fees.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re leveraging design thinking methodologies to reimagine user-centric value propositions.” (Translation: “We spent $50,000 on whiteboards and markers.”)

Seen in the Wild: After a three-day design thinking workshop that cost $180,000 in consultant fees and lost productivity, software company DevSolutions emerged with 47 walls covered in sticky notes, 12 journey maps, and exactly the same product roadmap they had before the workshop, which the CEO described as “validation of our innovative vision.”

D is for Dependency (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: External code your application relies on, creating a digital house of cards where changing one tiny package can bring down your entire company. The software equivalent of those movies where pulling one thread unravels someone’s entire sweater.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re optimizing our dependency management to reduce vulnerability surfaces.” (Translation: “Our app has 14,000 dependencies and we have no idea what most of them do.”)

Seen in the Wild: After mocking a junior developer for adding a new dependency “without proper evaluation,” senior engineer Chad’s own security audit revealed their critical payment processing service relied on 287 external packages, including three that were maintained by a teenager who last updated them in 2017 and one whose entire code was a single comment reading “TODO: implement this for real later.”

D is for Daemon (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A background process that runs without direct user interaction, much like the voice in a developer’s head constantly whispering “you should rewrite this entire system from scratch.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our monitoring infrastructure leverages distributed daemon processes for telemetry aggregation.” (Translation: “We have a script that checks if the server is down and sends us an email after it’s too late.”)

Seen in the Wild: After boasting about their “intelligent daemon architecture” that kept their systems running smoothly, DevOps leader Tyler was embarrassed when a power outage revealed that their mission-critical “daemon” was actually an intern who manually restarted crashed services every few hours while playing Minecraft on a second monitor.

D is for Distributed System (Tech Factor: 10)

TechOnion Definition: A collection of independent computers that appear to users as a single coherent system, or more accurately, multiple points of failure ingeniously connected to ensure that when one thing breaks, everything breaks in unique and fascinating ways.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve architected a fault-tolerant distributed system with consistent hashing and vector clocks.” (Translation: “We have three servers and pray they don’t all crash at once.”)

Seen in the Wild: After architecting what he described as a “revolutionary distributed system with automatic partition tolerance,” lead engineer Mason couldn’t explain why adding a fourth server to their three-server cluster caused all databases to simultaneously corrupt their indexes, eventually blaming it on “sunspot activity affecting the network topology.”

D is for Dashboard (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: A visual display of the most important information needed to achieve objectives, or more commonly, a screen full of meaningless graphs created to make executives feel like they understand what’s happening while providing zero actionable insights.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our real-time analytics dashboard provides 360-degree visibility into key performance indicators.” (Translation: “We made some pretty charts that nobody looks at.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending three months building an “executive intelligence dashboard” with 47 different metrics and real-time updates, data scientist Emma discovered that the only part any executive ever looked at was the single number showing monthly revenue, which they could have obtained from the existing monthly report.

D is for Data Mining (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The process of discovering patterns in large data sets, or more accurately, torturing numbers until they confess to whatever you wanted them to say in the first place. The digital equivalent of finding shapes in clouds.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our advanced data mining algorithms extract actionable business intelligence from unstructured data sources.” (Translation: “We made an Excel pivot table.”)

Seen in the Wild: After promoting their “AI-powered data mining capabilities” in sales pitches, analytics company InsightForge was discovered to be employing 24 recent statistics graduates in a basement office who manually analyzed data and wrote reports, with their only use of technology being a shared Google Doc where they posted their findings.

D is for Deprecated (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The status of a technology feature that is officially scheduled for removal but will actually continue running in production until the heat death of the universe because nobody wants to touch the legacy system it’s part of.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re migrating away from deprecated technology stacks to embrace modern architectural paradigms.” (Translation: “We keep saying we’ll replace it, but that COBOL system from 1983 will outlive us all.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite sending company-wide emails for six consecutive years announcing that the “legacy payment processing system is deprecated and will be decommissioned next quarter,” CTO Jessica recently approved a secret project to hire COBOL developers to add new features to the same system after discovering it was still processing 87% of company transactions.

D is for Downtime (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A period during which a computer system is unavailable, unresponsive, or just having an existential crisis. The only time when DevOps engineers experience genuine human emotions such as fear, rage, and regret.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We experienced brief scheduled downtime for infrastructure optimization procedures.” (Translation: “Everything crashed for six hours and we have no idea why.”)

Seen in the Wild: After their entire production environment was offline for 17 hours, VP of Engineering Marcus sent a post-mortem email characterizing it as “a brief 17-hour period of service optimization opportunity” and claiming it was “part of our planned resilience testing initiative,” despite being caught on a hot mic during a crisis call saying “I have no [expletive] idea what’s happening right now.”

D is for Developer Experience (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: The practice of optimizing tools and processes for engineers’ happiness, which companies care deeply about until the moment it conflicts with any other business priority, at which point developers are expected to “be team players” and “embrace the challenge.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re investing heavily in developer experience to enhance productivity through frictionless workflows.” (Translation: “We bought better office chairs after three people quit.”)

Seen in the Wild: After announcing a “company-wide developer experience initiative” with great fanfare, CTO Trevor’s entire effort consisted of buying one espresso machine for 200 engineers, creating a “DX Committee” that never met, and sending a monthly survey asking “Are you experiencing development?” with yes/no response options.

D is for DevSecOps (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: The practice of integrating security into the development process, or more accurately, adding the word “security” to your job title without changing any actual practices while hoping nobody asks specific questions during security audits.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a comprehensive DevSecOps methodology with shift-left security integration.” (Translation: “We run an npm audit the day before deployment and ignore most of the warnings.”)

Seen in the Wild: After rebranding their team as “DevSecOps Engineers,” security at CloudScale actually decreased, but VP of Engineering Braden pointed to their successful implementation of DevSecOps as evidenced by the prominent display of security books on office shelves (still in shrink wrap), mandatory viewing of a 10-minute YouTube video on security best practices, and requiring developers to include the word “securely” in all commit messages.

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.

Because nothing says “I deserve my corner office” like casually dropping “Byzantine fault tolerance” in conversations about the office printer

Welcome back to TechOnion‘s “Urban TechBros Dictionary,” where we continue our anthropological study of the strange verbal rituals of technology professionals. Today, we’re exploring terms beginning with “B” – the second letter tech bros learn after securing their first funding round based entirely on Google slides featuring the words “disruptive innovation,” and “AI-powered.”

B is for Backend (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The mysterious realm where tech bros claim all the “real engineering” happens, despite it mostly consisting of copying Stack Overflow answers about database queries.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m a backend specialist focused on distributed systems architecture.” (Translation: “I write CRUD APIs and blame the frontend team when things break.”)

Seen in the Wild: After loudly proclaiming at three consecutive happy hours that frontend development is “basically just arts and crafts,” senior backend engineer Trevor spent four hours trying to center a div for his personal website before hiring someone on Fiverr.

B is for Bandwidth (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: Originally a measure of data transmission capacity, now exclusively used as a metaphor by product managers who want to sound technical while explaining why they can’t do their job.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I don’t have the bandwidth to review your code right now.” (Translation: “I’ll be playing Elden Ring until 2 AM and have no intention of reading your pull request.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite claiming “bandwidth constraints” when asked to join the on-call rotation, VP of Engineering Mason somehow found sufficient bandwidth to attend every single Warriors home game and maintain five separate Discord servers dedicated to cryptocurrency speculation.

B is for Beta (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A label tech companies slap on products to excuse catastrophic bugs while simultaneously charging full price. Historically a development phase; now a legal liability shield.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re launching in perpetual beta to iterate based on real-world user feedback.” (Translation: “We’re using paying customers as unpaid QA testers.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite being “in beta” for seven years, collecting $140 million in revenue, and going public on the NYSE, social media platform Chatterly still cited its beta status when congressional investigators asked about its role in three separate geopolitical crises.

B is for Big Data (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: Regular data that put on weight during the holidays. The art of collecting so much information that nobody knows what to do with it, but everyone is terrified to delete it.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our big data lake enables synergistic insight extraction through advanced pattern recognition algorithms.” (Translation: “We have 10,000 CSV files nobody has opened in three years.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending $7 million on a big data infrastructure, analytics startup DataMaxx discovered their most valuable insight was that employees primarily use their dashboard to check if it’s down so they can justify not doing their weekly reports.

B is for Blockchain (Tech Factor: ∞)

TechOnion Definition: A distributed database technology that transforms normally rational investors into cult members and regular words into instant venture capital by adding “on the blockchain” to them.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re leveraging blockchain-enabled trust architectures to revolutionize the pet food supply chain.” (Translation: “Our funding ran out and we’re pivoting to whatever will get us more money.”)

Seen in the Wild: After failing to gain traction with his app that rates public restrooms, founder Skyler rebranded it as “ChainPotty: Decentralized Bathroom Verification Protocol,” raised $24 million, bought a Lamborghini, and still has not shipped a product three years later.

B is for Bootcamp (Tech Factor: 2)

TechOnion Definition: A 12-week program that transforms ex-Starbucks baristas into “full-stack developers” through the magical process of watching YouTube tutorials at 2x speed and implementing a to-do list app six different ways.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m self-taught through an intensive bootcamp educational experience.” (Translation: “I paid $15,000 to learn what’s available for free online and still don’t understand closures.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite constantly belittling bootcamp graduates as “not real engineers,” senior developer Brandon was caught frantically Googling “how to reverse a string” during a live coding interview while a bootcamp grad in the same interview implemented a balanced binary tree from memory.

B is for Bootstrap (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: 1. A CSS framework that makes every website on the internet look identical. 2. The act of building a company without external funding, usually mentioned by founders who received $200K in “friends and family” money from their hedge fund manager parents.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re bootstrapping our venture to maintain our founder vision.” (Translation: “VCs laughed us out of their offices, but my trust fund should cover expenses until my Stanford roommate becomes a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.”)

Seen in the Wild: After loudly proclaiming at TechCrunch Disrupt that he “bootstrapped” his startup “with nothing but grit and determination,” CEO Blake failed to mention the $1.2 million condo his parents bought him to live in rent-free or the family connections that landed him his first five enterprise clients.

B is for Bug (Tech Factor: 4)

TechOnion Definition: An error in software rebranded as a charming quirk of digital life rather than evidence of professional negligence. When created by junior developers, it’s a “critical defect”; when created by senior developers, it’s an “unexpected edge case.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve identified a previously undocumented feature interaction.” (Translation: “I broke production but am linguistically distancing myself from responsibility.”)

Seen in the Wild: After his authentication system accidentally granted admin privileges to anyone who typed their username in all caps, security engineer Xavier sent a company-wide email describing it as an “alternative authorization pathway that emerged from our dynamic security posture” rather than admitting he forgot to use case-insensitive comparison.

B is for Burn Rate (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The speed at which a startup converts venture capital into free lunches, office ping pong tables, and branded hoodies, measured in “months until panic.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re optimizing our burn rate to extend runway while maintaining growth velocity.” (Translation: “The snack wall now only gets restocked once a week and we’ve switched to one-ply toilet paper.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite bragging about their “capital-efficient operation” with “industry-leading burn metrics,” CEO Tristan spent $3 million on a Super Bowl ad featuring dancing CGI gophers that never once mentioned what their product actually does.

B is for Boolean (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A data type with only two possible values that tech bros unnecessarily incorporate into everyday conversation to sound technical when discussing binary choices like “lunch options.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “My boolean analysis of the situation indicates that Thai food is the optimal lunch selection.” (Translation: “I want Thai food.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a first date, software engineer Caleb explained his dating preferences as “a boolean evaluation framework with complex logical operators” before pulling out a whiteboard to draw what was essentially just a list of physical attributes he found attractive.

B is for Brownfield (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: An existing codebase that senior developers refer to with the same tone normally reserved for describing war crimes. The digital equivalent of a haunted house where previous developers buried their technical debt in shallow graves.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re implementing a strategic brownfield transformation initiative.” (Translation: “The last three teams quit rather than touch this code, and now it’s your problem.”)

Seen in the Wild: After discovering their mission-critical system was written in COBOL by a developer who retired in 1997 and left no documentation, CTO Derek reclassified the emergency maintenance project as an “archaeological computing experience” and offered the team “Indiana Jones” hats instead of overtime pay.

B is for Brute Force (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The programming equivalent of solving a problem by hitting it repeatedly with increasingly large hammers. The go-to solution when elegance, efficiency, and basic computer science knowledge have all failed.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I implemented a hybrid brute force algorithm with optimized iteration patterns.” (Translation: “I used nested for-loops and ran it overnight hoping no one would notice.”)

Seen in the Wild: After boasting about his “sophisticated password recovery system,” security engineer Chad was discovered using a script that tried every possible four-digit PIN sequentially, causing the authentication server to catch fire during a demo to investors.

B is for Byte (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: The fundamental unit of digital information that tech bros mention to sound technical in conversations, despite not having thought about individual bytes since their first programming class.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our proprietary compression algorithm reduces storage requirements by optimizing byte allocation across distributed data structures.” (Translation: “We’re using zip files.”)

Seen in the Wild: While explaining why the company website was down, DevOps engineer Trevor delivered a 20-minute presentation on “byte-level optimization challenges” before an intern pointed out that Trevor had simply forgotten to renew the domain name.

B is for Ballmer Peak (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The theoretically optimal blood alcohol level at which programming ability is maximized, named after former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The scientific justification for “debugging beers.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve calibrated my system to maintain optimal Ballmer Peak conditions during critical development phases.” (Translation: “I keep whiskey in my desk drawer.”)

Seen in the Wild: After declaring himself a “Ballmer Peak optimization specialist,” senior developer Marcus arrived at the code review with bloodshot eyes and somehow managed to refactor the authentication system while simultaneously deleting the entire user database and ordering $400 worth of tacos to the office.

B is for Backlog (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: A graveyard of feature requests and bug reports where good ideas go to die a slow death. The digital equivalent of putting something in the freezer and forgetting about it until it’s covered in mysterious ice crystals years later.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve added it to our prioritized backlog for future sprint planning consideration.” (Translation: “We will never do this, but saying no directly might make you sad.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a company archaeological dig into their JIRA backlog, product manager Emily discovered tickets from 2012 still marked as “high priority,” including one requesting compatibility with Internet Explorer 6 and another asking to optimize the website for BlackBerry devices.

B is for Brogrammer (Tech Factor: 3)

TechOnion Definition: A developer who approaches coding with the same enthusiasm usually reserved for discussing protein shakes and upper body workouts. Identifiable by their tendency to high-five after successful code compilation.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’m not a brogrammer; I just happen to code in between CrossFit sessions while drinking protein-infused cold brew from my shaker bottle.” (Translation: “I am the dictionary definition of a brogrammer.”)

Seen in the Wild: After completing a simple bug fix, senior developer Jason performed a choreographed celebration dance with his “code bros,” chugged a Monster Energy drink, and loudly proclaimed that he would “crush leg day harder than I crushed that null pointer exception.”

B is for Buffer Overflow (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A security vulnerability that continues to plague systems worldwide because developers can’t be bothered to check if there’s enough room in the digital bucket before pouring in data. The root cause of security engineers’ stress-induced hair loss.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We experienced an unexpected buffer boundary transgression event.” (Translation: “Our entire customer database was stolen because I didn’t validate input length.”)

Seen in the Wild: After their system was compromised through a buffer overflow attack, security engineer Tyler sent a company-wide email explaining that it wasn’t a coding error but rather “a strategic data capacity exploration initiative that external entities leveraged for unauthorized access.”

B is for Blue Screen of Death (Tech Factor: 4)

TechOnion Definition: Microsoft Windows’ way of saying “I give up” through a calming blue screen with cryptic error codes. Tech support’s version of “have you tried turning it off and on again” but with more panic.

How Tech Bros Use It: “The system experienced an unexpected Windows stop error due to hardware-software interaction anomalies.” (Translation: “My laptop died during the demo because I installed sketchy cryptocurrency mining software.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a critical presentation to the board of directors, CTO Brandon experienced a blue screen, stared at it for ten seconds, then calmly closed his laptop and continued presenting by drawing stick figures on a whiteboard while insisting this was his “analog backup strategy” rather than admitting he had no backup plan.

B is for Black Hat (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A hacker with malicious intent, or more commonly, what ordinary developers claim to have been “in a past life” to sound dangerous and edgy during cybersecurity job interviews.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Before joining the corporate world, I had some experience with black hat methodologies.” (Translation: “I once downloaded a torrented movie and felt very badass about it.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite constantly hinting at his “dark web past” and “black hat skills,” security engineer Marcus’s most rebellious act was using his neighbor’s unsecured WiFi to watch Netflix, and he once called IT in a panic after accidentally enabling dark mode in his code editor.

B is for Botnet (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A network of compromised computers controlled remotely, which security engineers discuss with the same tone normally reserved for horror movies, despite their company’s IoT devices having security weaker than a screen door on a submarine.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve identified potential botnet signatures in our network telemetry.” (Translation: “The office smart fridge is sending suspicious amounts of data to servers in countries I can’t pronounce.”)

Seen in the Wild: After proudly launching their internet-connected smart coffee mug with “zero-day shipping,” IoT startup HydrateAI discovered their entire product line had been incorporated into a botnet that was mining cryptocurrency, causing the mugs to overheat and brewing what customers described as “technically coffee but emotionally disappointing.”

B is for Bikeshedding (Tech Factor: 10)

TechOnion Definition: The art of spending six hours in a meeting debating the color of a button while ignoring the fact that the entire authentication system doesn’t work. Named after Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, but tech bros don’t know that because they skimmed the Wikipedia article.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Let’s not waste time bikeshedding these minor UI details.” (Translation: “I don’t care about your opinion on this, even though I’ll spend three hours tomorrow arguing about semicolon placement in code reviews.”)

Seen in the Wild: During a critical architecture meeting to address system failures that were costing $40,000 per minute, the entire engineering leadership spent 45 minutes debating whether their error logging should use the term “failure” or “exception” because CTO Jason felt “failure” had “negative energy,” while the production environment continued to actively burn.

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.