The Opulent O-Vocabulary Revolution: 18 Overwhelming Terms That Will Transform Your Tech Status Overnight

Because nothing says “I deserve my inflated salary” like casually dropping “object-oriented paradigm” into conversations about the office coffee machine

Welcome to the fifteenth 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 “O” – the letter tech bros use to sound strategic and forward-thinking while explaining why their project is both “optimized” and three months behind schedule.

O is for Object-Oriented Programming (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A programming paradigm based on the concept of “objects” containing data and code, which developers use to create class hierarchies so complex they resemble medieval European royal family trees—complete with problematic inheritance and incestuous dependencies.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I leverage pure object-oriented design principles to craft elegant class hierarchies with robust polymorphic interfaces.” (Translation: “I created 27 abstract classes for what should have been a simple function, and now nobody, including me, understands how anything works.”)

Seen in the Wild: After being hired as a “design pattern specialist,” Senior Engineer Trevor spent three months refactoring the company’s payment processing system into what he called a “textbook implementation of object-oriented principles.” The resulting architecture featured 147 classes, including such esoteric creations as AbstractPaymentMethodStrategyFactoryProvider and TransactionalInstrumentDecoratorBridgeAdapter. When the system failed during its first production run, processing the same credit card 17 times for one purchase, Trevor explained the redundant charges as “an edge case in the polymorphic visitor pattern implementation” rather than admitting his design was incomprehensible. The company ultimately reverted to the original 200-line procedural script while Trevor published a Medium article titled “Embracing Enterprise OOP: My Journey Transforming Legacy Systems” that conveniently omitted the project’s outcome.

O is for OAuth (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: An open standard for access delegation, which allows users to grant websites access to their information without sharing passwords, and allows developers to create authentication systems so convoluted that even they don’t understand why users are randomly being logged out every 17 minutes.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a comprehensive OAuth 2.0 authentication flow with PKCE extension and rotating refresh tokens for enhanced security posture.” (Translation: “I copied code from Stack Overflow and now users get mysteriously logged out during important operations for reasons I can’t debug.”)

Seen in the Wild: After boasting about their “military-grade authentication system” built on OAuth, security engineer Rachel couldn’t explain why users were experiencing bizarre login issues, including: being logged in as other users, requiring re-authentication every time they clicked a button, and in one particularly impressive case, a user who somehow ended up authenticated as all 147 administrators simultaneously. When the CEO demanded answers during an emergency meeting following a customer data breach, Rachel delivered a 47-slide presentation on “OAuth flow complexity” with increasingly incomprehensible diagrams, ultimately admitting they had integrated three different and incompatible OAuth implementations that were fighting each other in production. Her proposed solution? “Add a fourth authentication system to mediate between the existing three,” which she described as “the OAuth equivalent of adding another spider to catch the previous spiders” while using her personal laptop to update her resume under the table.

O is for Observability (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The ability to understand a system’s internal state based on its outputs, which companies implement by creating thousands of dashboards that no one looks at until something breaks, at which point they discover the monitoring system itself broke six months ago.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a comprehensive observability stack with distributed tracing, high-cardinality metrics, and structured log aggregation.” (Translation: “We get so many alerts that we’ve muted all the Slack channels, and now find out about outages from angry tweets from customers.”)

Seen in the Wild: After spending $400,000 on what he called a “next-generation observability platform,” DevOps Director Marcus proudly showcased their new operations center featuring 16 massive screens displaying colorful real-time dashboards with hundreds of metrics. Three months later, when the company’s payment system went down for 9 hours, an investigation revealed that nobody had noticed the cascade of red alerts across every dashboard because: (1) the team had become completely desensitized to alerts after receiving an average of 247 false positives daily, (2) the dashboards had been reconfigured to show stock prices and sports scores on half the screens, and (3) the observability platform itself had actually been down for 57 days without anyone noticing. Marcus defended the situation as an “iterative learning opportunity in alert fatigue management” while quietly removing “implemented industry-leading observability solution” from the “Achievements” section of his LinkedIn profile.

O is for On-Prem (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: Short for “on-premises,” referring to software or hardware run on the company’s physical infrastructure rather than in the cloud, primarily used by IT directors to justify maintaining server rooms that they can dramatically walk into during meetings to check blinking lights and look important.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We maintain a hybrid infrastructure strategy with strategic workloads remaining on-prem for latency-sensitive operations and compliance requirements.” (Translation: “Our CIO is afraid of the cloud, and we haven’t fully depreciated these servers on our balance sheet yet.”)

Seen in the Wild: After vigorously defending their on-prem infrastructure as “essential for performance and security” in board meetings for three years, CIO Richard was caught in an awkward position when a burst pipe flooded the primary data center, taking all systems offline for 72 hours. As employees resorted to using personal Gmail accounts and tracking orders in Excel spreadsheets, the board called an emergency meeting where Richard had prepared a 60-slide presentation on “The Unpredictable Nature of Physical Infrastructure Challenges.” Before he could present, a junior engineer mentioned they had restored critical services by quickly spinning up cloud instances using the company credit card and following online tutorials. Richard quickly pivoted to presenting what he now called their “planned hybrid cloud strategy,” claiming the flood had simply “accelerated the existing cloud transition timeline” while immediately taking credit for the junior engineer’s weekend heroics. The company was fully migrated to the cloud within three months, with Richard later accepting an industry award for “Visionary Cloud Transformation Leadership.”

O is for Onboarding (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: The process of integrating new employees into an organization, which HR reimagines as a “journey” consisting of 47 disconnected tools with separate logins, 19 hours of compliance videos, and absolutely no information about how to actually do the job.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve designed a comprehensive digital onboarding experience to streamline organizational integration and accelerate time-to-productivity.” (Translation: “We’ll send you 74 emails with conflicting instructions during your first week and expect you to figure everything out yourself.”)

Seen in the Wild: After announcing their “revolutionary onboarding reimagination” that would “set a new industry standard for employee experience,” Head of People Operations Jessica couldn’t understand why new hires were taking months to become productive and quitting at unprecedented rates. Exit interviews revealed that their celebrated onboarding process required navigating 13 different systems with separate credentials, completing 24 hours of training videos before receiving computer access, and solving a series of what Jessica had called “fun cultural puzzles” but employees described as “frustrating scavenger hunts” to locate basic information like the employee handbook and benefits details. The breaking point came when a new engineering director resigned after spending his entire first week trying to get his laptop to connect to WiFi because the required network credentials were stored in a system that could only be accessed while on the company network. Jessica responded by adding a “onboarding satisfaction pulse survey” to the process—another new system requiring separate login credentials—while insisting the problem was “inadequate expectation setting” rather than the process itself.

O is for One-Pager (Tech Factor: 4)

TechOnion Definition: A document summarizing a complex idea in a single page, which inevitably expands to 7-12 pages after executives request “just a bit more detail” and designers insist on adding 14 pages of “context-setting visuals.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve distilled our platform strategy into a comprehensive one-pager for executive alignment and rapid decision enablement.” (Translation: “I’ve created a 17-page ‘one-pager’ that no one will read, using buzzwords no one understands, to describe a strategy no one has agreed to.”)

Seen in the Wild: After being asked to create a “simple one-pager” explaining their product roadmap for board review, VP of Product Sebastian delivered what he termed a “concise strategic summary” that somehow expanded to 34 pages, including 7 pages of competitive landscape analysis, 5 pages of user journey maps, 9 pages of market sizing diagrams, and a 3-page personal biography highlighting his “product visionary journey.” When the CEO requested something actually fitting on one page before the board meeting in two hours, Sebastian locked himself in a conference room for emergency editing, emerging 90 minutes later with a triumphant “true one-pager”—which he had accomplished by reducing the font to 4pt, converting the document to landscape format with 0.1” margins, and removing every third word to create what he called “executive telegram style” but was essentially incomprehensible. The board meeting proceeded with directors squinting and holding the document inches from their faces, ultimately approving what they thought was a data security initiative but was actually a complete product pivot to blockchain-enabled virtual pet NFTs.

O is for Open Source (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: Software with code that anyone can view, modify, and distribute, which companies proudly use while ignoring security updates, violating licenses, and never contributing back despite built entirely on the free labor of others.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re committed to the open source ecosystem and leverage community-maintained libraries to accelerate our development velocity.” (Translation: “We use thousands of open source packages but would never allocate engineering time to fix bugs we find because that doesn’t help our quarterly numbers.”)

Seen in the Wild: While delivering a conference keynote titled “How We Embrace Open Source,” CTO Marcus passionately described his company as “committed open source citizens” and “contributors to the ecosystem we depend on” despite having never submitted a single pull request to any of the 3,742 open source libraries they used in production. When an audience member asked about contributions, Marcus vaguely mentioned “significant contributions planned for next quarter” before quickly changing the subject. The situation became more awkward when a security researcher in the audience pointed out that their product appeared to be violating the licensing terms of several key components, with portions of GPL-licensed code directly incorporated into their proprietary software. Marcus responded by insisting he needed to “double-check with legal” while hastily instructing his team via text to “scrub the GitHub repo NOW” and cancel the planned office tour for conference attendees. The company later quietly rewrote critical sections of their codebase and published a blog post about their “open source compliance journey” that positioned their license violations as a “learning opportunity for the community.”

O is for Optimization (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The process of making a system more efficient, which engineers use to justify spending six weeks shaving 7 milliseconds off a process that runs once a month while ignoring the glaring performance issue that causes the homepage to take 30 seconds to load.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve implemented advanced optimization techniques to enhance computational efficiency across critical execution paths.” (Translation: “I spent three days making a function run 0.02% faster while ignoring the database query that takes 15 seconds to run and is called on every page load.”)

Seen in the Wild: After users complained about the company’s web application being frustratingly slow, Performance Engineer Tyler embarked on what he called a “comprehensive optimization initiative,” spending five weeks creating elaborate benchmarking tools, custom profilers, and performance dashboards. He proudly presented his results to leadership: a 3% speed improvement achieved by optimizing an internal utility function through a complex rewrite using bitwise operations instead of standard math functions. When a junior developer mentioned that perhaps the 12MB of uncompressed JavaScript loading on every page and the 200 API calls made during initialization might be more significant factors, Tyler dismissed these as “standard industry practices” and explained that “true optimization happens at the algorithmic level.” The issue was ultimately resolved when the product manager, without consulting engineering, removed three unused third-party analytics scripts that had been running on the site, immediately improving load times by 70% and rendering Tyler’s five weeks of optimization work statistically irrelevant.

O is for Orchestration (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: The automated arrangement, coordination, and management of complex systems, which tech companies implement by creating systems so intricate that deploying a simple bug fix requires alignment of the planets and sacrificing a mechanical keyboard to the demo gods.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a sophisticated service orchestration layer to coordinate workload execution across our distributed infrastructure.” (Translation: “We’ve made deploying code so complicated that it requires 14 different systems to successfully push a one-line change.”)

Seen in the Wild: After implementing what he described as “next-generation container orchestration” for their relatively simple web application, DevOps Engineer Brandon couldn’t understand why deployments that formerly took 10 minutes now required 4 hours and failed 60% of the time. Further investigation revealed his “elegant orchestration solution” had expanded to include: 5 different configuration management systems with conflicting settings, 7 layers of approval workflows that often deadlocked each other, 3 competing CI/CD pipelines that triggered simultaneously, and most impressively, a custom-built “deployment health verification system” that itself crashed so frequently it became the primary cause of deployment failures. When the CEO demanded a simplified solution after a critical patch took three days to deploy, Brandon insisted the problems were just “growing pains in the orchestration maturity journey” and proposed solving the issues by adding yet another orchestration layer to “harmonize the existing orchestration components.” The company eventually reverted to their original deployment method—a bash script maintained by an intern—which immediately restored their ability to deploy code reliably.

O is for ORM (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: Object-Relational Mapping, a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems, which developers adopt to avoid learning SQL and then spend twice as long troubleshooting inexplicably slow queries and bizarre edge cases.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We leverage a sophisticated ORM layer to abstract database interactions and maintain a clean domain model separation.” (Translation: “I don’t understand SQL and now our database is running 147 queries to load a single user profile.”)

Seen in the Wild: After migrating their application to “a more modern architecture” featuring a popular ORM, Lead Developer Emma couldn’t explain why page load times had increased from 100ms to 7 seconds. When the performance issues escalated to the point where customers were abandoning transactions, an external consultant identified the problem: their ORM was generating a separate database query for each property of each related object, resulting in their user profile page executing over 2,500 individual SQL queries where the original code had used a single optimized query. When asked why she hadn’t identified this issue during testing, Emma explained that ORM best practices recommended “letting the framework handle database optimization” and admitted she had configured the system to hide SQL queries from logs because they were “implementation details that would only confuse the team.” The solution? Adding a dozen hand-written SQL queries that bypassed the ORM entirely, which Emma described in documentation as “performance-critical ORM extensions” rather than acknowledging the ORM itself was the problem.

O is for Outage (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A period when a service is unavailable, which companies describe in status updates as “intermittent service degradation affecting a small subset of users” when their entire platform has actually been completely down globally for six hours.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We experienced a brief service interruption due to an unexpected infrastructure anomaly that has been fully resolved.” (Translation: “Someone dropped a production database, we have no backups, and we’ve been frantically reconstructing customer data from log files for the past 37 hours.”)

Seen in the Wild: After their e-commerce platform went completely offline during Black Friday, causing an estimated $3.7 million in lost revenue, VP of Infrastructure Jason sent an all-hands email describing the incident as a “minor service disruption affecting non-critical pathways” despite the fact that not a single order could be processed for 14 hours. The post-incident communication to customers referred to the catastrophic failure as an “abbreviated performance optimization event” and claimed it had impacted “approximately 0.003% of total annual system uptime” (mathematically accurate but deliberately misleading). When pressed during the executive review, Jason finally admitted that the outage had occurred because his team had scheduled major database maintenance during Black Friday, explaining they had forgotten about the sales event because “as engineers, we don’t participate in capitalist constructions like Black Friday.” His proposed solution to prevent future incidents? “Customer expectations management training” rather than fixing the actual technical and scheduling problems that had caused the outage.

O is for Overengineering (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: The act of designing a product with more features or complexity than necessary, which engineers staunchly defend as “future-proofing” and “building for scale” when it’s actually just “making things complicated because simple solutions aren’t intellectually stimulating.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “I design systems with appropriate architectural extensibility to accommodate future business requirements and scale projections.” (Translation: “I built a nuclear reactor to power a light bulb because someday we might need to power a city, and I was bored.”)

Seen in the Wild: After being tasked with creating a simple company blog, Senior Engineer Trevor spent three months building what he called a “scalable content platform” featuring: a microservice architecture with 14 separate services, a custom-built CMS with role-based workflow management for content approval, an elaborate caching layer with invalidation protocols, and infrastructure provisioned to handle “millions of concurrent users.” When the marketing team finally received access, they discovered they needed to interact with five different systems just to publish a simple text post with an image, and each post took approximately 7 minutes to appear live due to the complex processing pipeline. When the CTO questioned the complexity, Trevor defended his approach as “enterprise-grade” and “built for the company’s future needs” despite the blog receiving an average of 40 visitors per month and requiring more cloud resources than their actual product. The solution? A marketing intern installed WordPress over a weekend while Trevor was on vacation, seamlessly migrated all content, and reduced hosting costs by 97%.

O is for Overscaling (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The practice of provisioning far more computing resources than necessary, which engineers justify as “ensuring headroom for traffic spikes” but is actually “padding capacity metrics so we never get blamed for an outage, regardless of cloud costs.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We implement predictive capacity management with generous overhead allocation to ensure seamless scalability during demand fluctuations.” (Translation: “I’ve configured our system to use 10x more servers than we need because I’m terrified of the system crashing on my watch.”)

Seen in the Wild: After experiencing a brief outage during a product launch, Infrastructure Lead David implemented what he called a “proactive scaling strategy” that automatically provisioned additional cloud resources at the slightest hint of increased traffic. Three months later, the CFO called an emergency meeting after discovering their cloud bill had increased from $20,000 to $380,000 monthly despite user traffic remaining relatively constant. Investigation revealed David’s system was spinning up hundreds of high-capacity instances in response to normal daily traffic fluctuations and never shutting them down, resulting in the company running 347 large instances that were operating at less than 3% capacity. When asked why monitoring hadn’t caught this obvious inefficiency, David admitted he had reconfigured the utilization dashboards to show “aggregate capacity utilization” (averaging usage across all instances), which conveniently masked the problem by making 347 nearly empty servers look like a reasonably loaded system. His defense? “You can’t put a price on reliability,” which the CFO countered by noting that they literally had—and it was precisely $360,000 per month.

O is for Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A goal-setting framework that helps organizations define and track objectives and outcomes, which executives enthusiastically implement before forgetting about completely until the end of the quarter, when everyone scrambles to retroactively create achievements that match the original objectives.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We align our execution strategy through cascading OKRs with measurable success indicators that drive organizational focus.” (Translation: “We spend three weeks each quarter setting elaborate goals that no one looks at for three months until it’s time to pretend we accomplished them.”)

Seen in the Wild: After returning from a Silicon Valley executive retreat, CEO Jennifer mandated immediate company-wide adoption of OKRs, requiring every team to develop objectives that were simultaneously “ambitious yet achievable” and “realistic but uncomfortable.” Teams dutifully created thousands of OKRs, entered them into a new dedicated OKR software platform, and promptly forgot about them entirely. Three months later, Jennifer called for the first “OKR Review,” triggering a two-week panic during which employees worked overtime not to achieve their forgotten objectives but to rewrite them to match what they’d actually done, creatively reinterpret metrics to show success, or frantically complete token efforts to claim partial progress. During the review itself, every team somehow reported 70-85% achievement rates despite no actual alignment with original goals. Jennifer declared the framework a “transformative success” and immediately initiated a new OKR cycle with the addition of mid-quarter reviews, which teams later admitted they preemptively falsified two weeks after setting the OKRs “to save time when the panic hits later.”

O is for Omnichannel (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A cross-channel content strategy that provides a seamless user experience across all platforms and devices, which marketing teams use to justify having 17 different disconnected systems that independently message customers with conflicting information and promotions.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a unified omnichannel strategy to deliver cohesive customer experiences across digital and physical touchpoints.” (Translation: “Our marketing, sales, and support teams all use different systems to message customers, often simultaneously, and no one knows what the others are doing.”)

Seen in the Wild: After investing $2 million in what she described as an “omnichannel transformation initiative,” Chief Marketing Officer Rachel proudly announced that customers could now engage with the brand through seven different channels, each promising a “seamless experience.” The reality quickly became apparent when customers began posting screenshots of receiving four contradictory messages within minutes: an email offering 30% off, an SMS offering 40% off with a different code, a push notification announcing a members-only sale (despite being sent to non-members), and an in-app message stating “final day” of a sale that had been announced as “just starting” in the email. When the customer support team was overwhelmed with confused customers, investigation revealed the “omnichannel platform” actually consisted of five separate systems with no integration, each managed by different teams working in isolation with independent content calendars and promotion strategies. Rachel defended the chaos as an “abundance of customer choice” and suggested they solve the problem by adding two more channels to provide “clarifying communications about our primary communications.”

O is for Opex (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: Short for “operating expenditure,” the ongoing costs for running a business, which engineering managers magically transform into “innovation investment” when defending why their cloud bill increased 400% after migrating a simple application to a “more efficient architecture.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re strategically shifting from capex to opex models to enhance financial flexibility and technological agility.” (Translation: “I’ve moved everything to the cloud where we pay 5x more monthly but I don’t have to justify hardware purchases up front.”)

Seen in the Wild: After championing a migration from on-premises infrastructure to cloud services as a way to “reduce costs and increase agility,” CTO Michael was summoned to an emergency meeting with the CFO when the first cloud bill arrived—coming in at roughly six times their previous monthly infrastructure costs. Rather than acknowledging the miscalculation, Michael delivered an impromptu 45-minute lecture on “the outdated nature of simplistic cost comparisons” and the “strategic value of opex-oriented technology investments,” complete with hastily drawn graphs showing projected “agility returns” and “innovation velocity improvements” that he claimed would offset the additional $2.3 million in annual costs. When the CFO asked for specific metrics supporting these projections, Michael explained that “transformative benefits resist traditional quantification methodologies” before proposing they solve the budget issue by moving even more services to the cloud to “achieve economies of scale.” Three months later, Michael accepted a new position at another company, conveniently departing one week before the quarterly financial review that would have highlighted that none of his projected benefits had materialized while costs had continued to increase.

O is for Off-the-Shelf (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: Pre-existing software that can be purchased and implemented without custom development, which tech leads initially dismiss as “unable to meet our unique requirements” before eventually purchasing after their custom-built alternative fails spectacularly.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We evaluated off-the-shelf solutions but determined our specific business requirements necessitate a custom-engineered approach.” (Translation: “I’d rather spend two years building something that already exists because custom development is more interesting and looks better on my resume.”)

Seen in the Wild: After rejecting multiple off-the-shelf CRM solutions as “fundamentally inadequate for our unique sales process,” VP of Engineering Trevor secured a $1.2 million budget to build a custom “Sales Enablement Platform” in-house. Fourteen months later, with costs exceeding $1.7 million and core functionality still incomplete, Trevor presented what he called a “minimum viable version” that lacked basic features like email integration, contact management, and reliable data storage—all standard components in the commercial solutions they had rejected. When the head of sales pointed out they could purchase an enterprise CRM with all needed functionality for 1/10th of what they’d already spent, Trevor defended the custom approach as “strategically aligned with our long-term technology roadmap” and requested an additional nine months and $800,000 to add features that exactly matched what the off-the-shelf product already provided. The situation resolved itself when Trevor left to start his own CRM company (which failed within six months), and his replacement immediately purchased the commercial solution they had originally rejected, successfully implementing it in three weeks at a total cost of $75,000.

O is for Ownership (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: The concept of taking responsibility for products, features, or systems, which companies enthusiastically promote until something breaks, at which point “ownership” mysteriously transforms into “shared accountability within a blameless culture.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We foster a culture of clear ownership with empowered teams taking full responsibility for their domains and outcomes.” (Translation: “We assign blame when things go wrong but distribute credit when things go right.”)

Seen in the Wild: During an all-hands meeting focused on “building a culture of ownership,” CEO Jennifer passionately described the company’s new organizational philosophy where teams would have “full ownership of their products, including both success and failure outcomes.” Six weeks later, when the flagship product experienced a catastrophic outage costing an estimated $2 million in lost revenue, Jennifer called an emergency meeting that quickly devolved into what employees later described as “the Hunger Games of blame deflection.” Despite the previous emphasis on ownership, Jennifer opened with: “We need to understand which team is responsible for this failure,” as department heads scrambled to distance themselves from the incident. The engineering team pointed to product requirements, product blamed marketing’s launch timeline, marketing cited executive pressure, and executives suggested “technical execution issues.” The meeting concluded with Jennifer announcing a new “shared accountability framework” and “blameless postmortem culture,” effectively abandoning the ownership model the instant it might have resulted in actual consequences for identifiable decisions and actions.

O is for On-Call (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A rotation where engineers are responsible for responding to off-hours incidents, which companies describe as “occasional emergency response” during hiring but actually means “your phone will wake you at 3 AM four times a week to fix problems caused by the VP who pushed directly to production before leaving for vacation.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We maintain a distributed on-call rotation to ensure 24/7 system reliability with minimal individual burden.” (Translation: “You’ll be on-call every third week, which we don’t consider part of your working hours despite expecting immediate responses at any hour of the day or night.”)

Seen in the Wild: After describing their on-call rotation as “light-touch with rare escalations” during recruitment, new Site Reliability Engineer Marcus was horrified to discover that being on-call actually meant receiving an average of 37 alerts per day, including 3-5 midnight emergencies requiring immediate action. Investigation revealed the company had never implemented basic reliability practices, instead relying on the on-call engineer to manually “jiggle the handles” of failing systems throughout the day and night. When Marcus presented a plan to reduce alerts by 90% through simple automation and setting appropriate thresholds, the VP of Engineering rejected it as “too resource-intensive” compared to the “current cost-effective system” that was effectively using on-call engineers as human monitoring tools. The true breaking point came during an executive review of technical challenges, where the same VP proudly highlighted their “robust 24/7 operations coverage with near-zero downtime” as a key competitive advantage—conveniently omitting that this was achieved through what the engineering team had started calling “sleep deprivation as a service.” The company’s on-call practices only changed after four engineers quit in the same week, all citing the rotation as their primary reason for leaving.

O is for Output (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: The quantity or volume of work produced, which managers obsessively measure through meaningless metrics like lines of code or tickets closed, while ignoring whether anything of actual value was created.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We focus on maximizing team output through streamlined processes and optimized workflows.” (Translation: “We care about how many tickets you close rather than whether you’re solving actual problems or creating any value.”)

Seen in the Wild: After implementing what he called “output-oriented management principles,” Engineering Director Alex created dashboards showcasing metrics like “stories completed,” “code commits per developer,” and “tickets resolved per day.” Engineers quickly adapted to the new measurement system, breaking large tasks into dozens of tiny tickets that could be rapidly closed, making numerous small commits instead of meaningful changes, and prioritizing simple bugs over complex problems. Three months later, Alex proudly presented these meteoric productivity increases to executives, highlighting a 700% rise in closed tickets and 500% more code commits. When the CEO asked why feature delivery hadn’t increased and customer-reported issues were at an all-time high despite the apparent productivity surge, Alex appeared confused, explaining that “all output indicators show exceptional performance” while seemingly unable to connect these metrics to actual business outcomes. The situation reached peak absurdity when the team with the highest “productivity score” was discovered to be repeatedly fixing and breaking the same minor issues to inflate their numbers, while critical architectural problems remained untouched because they couldn’t be resolved in a single sprint and would therefore hurt the team’s “velocity metrics.”