The Spectacular S-Vocabulary Revolution: 21 Stellar Terms That Will Transform Your Tech Status Overnight

Because nothing says “I deserve my inflated salary” like casually dropping “serverless microservice architecture” into conversations about the office coffee machine

Welcome to the nineteenth 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 “S” – the letter tech bros use to sound sophisticated while explaining why their project is simultaneously “scalable” and six months behind schedule.

S is for Scalability (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The capability of a system to handle growth, which engineers design for by creating infrastructure that could theoretically support Facebook-level traffic despite their application currently having seven users, four of whom are the development team testing in production.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve architected our platform for horizontal scalability with seamless node expansion to accommodate exponential user growth.” (Translation: “We’ve drastically overengineered a system to handle millions of concurrent users, but haven’t optimized the basic database query that takes 30 seconds to load the login page.”)

Seen in the Wild: After declaring their startup’s infrastructure “woefully inadequate for our growth trajectory,” CTO Brandon secured a $1.2 million budget to build what he called a “hyperscale-ready architecture” capable of handling “millions of concurrent users.” Four months later, he proudly unveiled a complex system featuring 14 microservices, multiple database sharding strategies, elaborate load balancers, and a custom-built “predictive auto-scaling engine.” When the monitoring dashboard finally went live, it revealed their actual peak traffic was 12 simultaneous users, with their elaborate infrastructure sitting at approximately 0.02% capacity utilization. Rather than acknowledging the overengineering, Brandon presented this as proof of “successful capacity planning” and “runway for exponential growth” in his status report. The company continued paying $37,000 monthly in cloud costs for the oversized infrastructure until they ran out of funding nine months later, having never exceeded 50 concurrent users but with an architecture that Brandon’s LinkedIn profile still describes as “battle-tested at scale” despite the only battle being with their burn rate.

S is for Serverless (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A cloud computing execution model where you still absolutely use servers but pretend they don’t exist until your function times out for reasons no one can debug.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve embraced a serverless architecture to optimize resource utilization and reduce operational overhead.” (Translation: “I’ve replaced our predictable, debuggable server with hundreds of ephemeral functions that fail in exciting new ways and generate thousands in surprise cloud charges.”)

Seen in the Wild: After reading a Medium article titled “Serverless: The Only Future of Computing,” Chief Architect Sophia mandated an immediate migration of their monolithic application to a “fully serverless paradigm.” Six months and $300,000 later, their once-stable system had been transformed into 147 separate Lambda functions, each with different timeout settings, memory configurations, and runtime versions. The first major crisis occurred during a marketing promotion, when sudden traffic caused cascading failures as functions timed out waiting for other functions, creating a “serverless traffic jam” that took down the entire platform. When the finance team questioned why their AWS bill had increased 500% despite the promised “cost optimizations,” Sophia delivered a passionate explanation about “paying only for what you use” while conveniently ignoring that their functions were now constantly retriggering due to failures and poor design. The situation reached peak absurdity during a critical outage when the debugging process involved manually checking logs across dozens of functions, prompting Sophia to build what she called a “serverless observability layer”—essentially recreating the monitoring capabilities they had automatically with their previous server-based approach. She ultimately left to become a “Serverless Transformation Consultant,” while her replacement quietly rebuilt the most critical components as traditional services, describing this in planning documents as “implementing a hybrid serverless strategy” to avoid admitting they were reversing the entire migration.

S is for Scrum (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: An agile framework for managing complex work that companies implement by keeping all their dysfunctional waterfall practices but adding daily meetings where everyone stands uncomfortably in a circle reciting what they did yesterday.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve embraced Scrum methodology with two-week sprints and rigorous ceremony adherence to maximize team velocity.” (Translation: “We force engineers to give daily updates in public while still maintaining fixed deadlines, detailed specifications, and a complete inability to say no to last-minute executive requests.”)

Seen in the Wild: After hiring a “Certified Scrum Transformation Coach” at $5,000 per day, VP of Engineering Michael proudly announced the company’s “complete adoption of Scrum principles.” Six months later, team members were spending approximately 40% of their work hours in Scrum ceremonies including: 45-minute daily standups (meant to be 15), three-hour sprint planning sessions that still somehow never resulted in clear requirements, bi-weekly retrospectives where the same issues were raised and ignored repeatedly, and the much-dreaded “Backlog Refinement Power Hour” that routinely stretched to four hours. When metrics showed development velocity had actually decreased by 60% since the Scrum implementation, Michael commissioned another $50,000 consultant engagement to investigate, resulting in a 72-page report concluding they needed “more rigorous Scrum implementation” and “additional certification training.” The situation reached peak absurdity when a junior developer suggested they could improve productivity by having fewer, shorter meetings, only to be reprimanded for “not embracing agile values.” The company ultimately claimed “successful Scrum transformation” in their annual report despite internal surveys showing 94% of engineers considered the methodology “the worst part of their daily work experience,” with one anonymous comment describing their implementation as “weaponized inefficiency disguised as process.”

S is for Stack (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: The combination of technologies used to create a software solution, which engineers bloat with the trendiest frameworks until the simplest application requires 17GB of dependencies to display “Hello World.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve crafted a cutting-edge technology stack leveraging best-of-breed frameworks for optimal developer velocity and performance.” (Translation: “I’ve chosen whatever technologies have the most GitHub stars this month, regardless of whether they’re appropriate for our actual needs.”)

Seen in the Wild: After declaring their existing technology stack “legacy and unsuitable for modern development,” CTO Jason mandated a complete rebuild using what he called “the BANANA stack” (an acronym he created combining Blockchain, AI, Next.js, AWS, Node.js, and Angular—despite the obvious redundancies and incompatibilities). Three months and $400,000 into development, the team had produced a barely-functional prototype that took 47 seconds to load, required 23MB of JavaScript to render a login form, and crashed if users had less than 8GB of RAM. When questioned about the actual benefits of the new stack, Jason presented a complex diagram showing how data flowed through seventeen different technologies to accomplish what the previous system had done with three, explaining this was “necessary architecture for scalability” despite performance metrics showing the new system was 2000% slower. The situation reached peak absurdity when a security audit revealed that 94% of their dependencies had known vulnerabilities, but fixing them would break the application entirely because “everything is interdependent.” The company ultimately reverted to a simplified version of their original “legacy” stack, which Jason rebranded as their “Core Performance Stack” in external communications while his LinkedIn profile still lists “Pioneered implementation of the revolutionary BANANA stack” as a key accomplishment.

S is for Stakeholder (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: Anyone with an interest in a project, which project managers interpret as “anyone who might conceivably have an opinion that could derail the project at the worst possible moment if we don’t include them in 47 unnecessary meetings.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We ensure alignment through comprehensive stakeholder engagement and transparent communication channels.” (Translation: “I’ve invited 27 people to every meeting to cover myself politically, ensuring nothing actually gets decided while maximizing the number of conflicting opinions.”)

Seen in the Wild: After a project failed due to “insufficient stakeholder involvement,” Project Manager Emily implemented what she called a “Total Stakeholder Integration Model,” identifying 54 stakeholders for a relatively simple website update. The resulting communication matrix required sending 217 emails per decision, while the kickoff meeting had so many participants that they exceeded their Zoom license limits and had to break into three separate calls. By week three, the daily stakeholder update meeting had expanded to two hours to accommodate a “voice of the stakeholder” segment where opinions were shared about everything from button colors to the philosophical implications of the menu structure. The project timeline, originally estimated at four weeks, extended to six months as each decision required approval from individuals with increasingly tangential connections to the actual work, including at one point, the CEO’s executive assistant’s intern who had once mentioned using “a website similar to this one.” When the project finally launched three months late and 400% over budget, Emily presented it as a “stakeholder management success story” because “everyone felt heard,” conveniently omitting that the primary user group had abandoned the product entirely after their core requirements were diluted to accommodate the opinions of people who would never actually use the system.

S is for Sprints (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: Fixed time periods for completing specific work, which project managers present as “focused delivery intervals” but actually implement as “unrealistic deadlines combined with mid-sprint stakeholder requests that render all planning meaningless.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We operate in two-week sprints with velocity tracking to ensure predictable delivery cadence and continuous improvement.” (Translation: “We pretend we can accurately predict exactly what we’ll accomplish in arbitrary two-week blocks while constantly interrupting engineers with ‘quick requests’ that somehow don’t count against sprint commitments.”)

Seen in the Wild: After declaring their development process “insufficiently agile,” Director of Engineering Tyler implemented mandatory two-week sprints with elaborate planning ceremonies, velocity metrics, and burn-down charts displayed on giant monitors throughout the office. Despite the rigorous process, every sprint followed the same pattern: Week 1 would begin with optimistic planning, followed by multiple “critical” requests from executives that somehow bypassed the sprint planning process; by mid-sprint, the original goals would be largely abandoned to accommodate these new priorities; sprint reviews would focus exclusively on the completed “emergency” items while ignoring the planned work that was postponed; and retrospectives would identify “poor estimation” as the primary issue rather than the constant interruptions. When presented with data showing the team had completed less than 20% of planned sprint work over six months, Tyler declared this proof that they needed “more disciplined sprint planning” rather than addressing the real problem of mid-sprint interruptions. The situation reached peak absurdity when Tyler implemented what he called “dynamic priority injection protocols” to “streamline the integration of emerging business requirements into active sprints”—essentially formalizing and renaming the very interruptions that were undermining the sprint model in the first place, all while continuing to hold teams accountable for completing their original sprint commitments.

S is for SQL (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: Structured Query Language, a programming language for managing relational databases, which developers either write so poorly that it brings entire systems to a halt or treat with such mystical reverence that they build elaborate ORM abstractions to avoid writing it directly.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I optimize database interactions through sophisticated SQL query construction with appropriate indexing strategies.” (Translation: “I write SELECT * FROM TABLE and then blame the database when it’s slow, or I build a 30,000-line ORM framework to generate SQL because writing a simple JOIN statement is beneath me.”)

Seen in the Wild: After users complained about the company’s dashboard taking up to two minutes to load, Principal Engineer Marcus insisted the problem couldn’t be his SQL queries, instead blaming “database engine limitations” and “network latency.” When finally forced to investigate, the team discovered a query that joined 14 tables, returned every column from each, and processed the entire 200-million-row dataset in memory for what ultimately displayed as five numbers on a dashboard. Most impressively, the query included a nested subquery that ran 47 times per execution, despite returning identical results each time. When confronted with this catastrophic inefficiency, Marcus defended his approach as “comprehensive data retrieval for maximum flexibility” and suggested solving the performance problem by “upgrading to an enterprise database tier” rather than fixing his query that was essentially the database equivalent of using a fire hose to fill a teacup. The problem was ultimately solved by a junior database administrator who rewrote the query to return only needed data with proper indexing, improving load times from 120 seconds to 250 milliseconds while Marcus was on vacation. Upon his return, Marcus claimed credit for “mentoring the team on query optimization strategies” while simultaneously requesting budget for his original database upgrade plan “to address anticipated future performance needs.”

S is for Security (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The state of being protected against threats, which companies claim is their “top priority” while systematically ignoring security recommendations until after they’ve been breached and featured on the front page of The New York Times.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We implement defense-in-depth security protocols with comprehensive threat modeling and continuous vulnerability assessment.” (Translation: “We require 8-character passwords and run an automated scan once a year, then ignore all findings because fixing them would delay our release.”)

Seen in the Wild: After marketing their platform as having “bank-grade security” and “military-level encryption,” FinTech startup SecurePay suffered a catastrophic data breach exposing 2.7 million customer records. Investigation revealed their security practices included: storing passwords in plaintext, connecting to their production database with credentials hardcoded in public GitHub repositories, running critical services on unpatched servers, and most impressively, having an admin portal accessible from the public internet with the username/password combination of “admin/admin” that hadn’t been changed since their initial launch three years earlier. What made the situation particularly damning was the discovery of three separate security audit reports from the previous year, each identifying these exact vulnerabilities with “Critical” ratings, all of which had been marked as “Accepted Risk” by the CTO who explained during congressional testimony that implementing the recommendations would have “slowed the pace of innovation.” The company’s response to the breach reached peak absurdity when they issued a press release describing the incident as “a sophisticated nation-state attack using advanced persistent threat methodologies” rather than acknowledging it resulted from security basics so fundamentally neglected that the breach was eventually attributed to a 16-year-old who had simply guessed the admin credentials. Their post-breach security transformation initiative was marketed as “raising the industry standard” rather than “implementing the bare minimum practices we should have had from day one.”

S is for Synergy (Tech Factor: 4)

TechOnion Definition: The interaction of multiple elements producing a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects, which executives use to describe any forced corporate collaboration that will inevitably waste everyone’s time while producing nothing of value.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re leveraging cross-functional synergies to accelerate innovation and maximize organizational value creation.” (Translation: “I’m forcing two teams that hate each other to pretend to work together on a vague initiative that will be abandoned as soon as I find a new buzzword to fixate on.”)

Seen in the Wild: After attending a leadership retreat featuring a speaker who used “synergy” 147 times in a single presentation, CEO Richard returned with what he called a “Synergistic Transformation Initiative” mandating that every department find “synergy partners” across the organization. What followed was organizational chaos as completely unrelated teams—like Accounting and Product Design—were forced to hold weekly “synergy sessions” to identify “collaborative innovation opportunities” despite having no actual business reason to work together. The initiative reached peak absurdity when the Customer Support and Data Science teams proudly presented their “synergy deliverable”: a machine learning algorithm that predicted when customers would be most emotionally vulnerable to upselling based on the frustration level detected in their support tickets, which the Ethics team immediately shut down as “literally the most psychologically manipulative thing we’ve ever seen.” After six months, 247 “synergy sessions,” and approximately $1.4 million in lost productivity, the program had produced exactly zero useful outcomes but generated endless documentation, including a 347-page “Synergy Opportunity Catalog” that was never read by anyone, including Richard himself. The initiative was quietly abandoned when Richard discovered the term “holistic cross-pollination” at another executive retreat, though employees noticed “demonstrated exceptional synergistic collaboration” had mysteriously become a required criterion on their annual performance reviews.

S is for Startup (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: A company in its early stages of operation, or more accurately, any business with free snacks, bean bag chairs, and a ping pong table, regardless of how long they’ve existed or how many rounds of financing they’ve consumed while failing to build a sustainable business model.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We maintain a dynamic startup culture emphasizing agility, innovation, and disruptive thinking even as we scale.” (Translation: “We’re a ten-year-old company with 500 employees and $200 million in funding, but we still expect people to work 80-hour weeks for below-market salaries because we have a ‘mission’ and might go public someday.”)

Seen in the Wild: Despite being founded eight years ago, having 350 employees, and raising $267 million across six funding rounds, CEO Jennifer still referred to TechDynamo exclusively as “a scrappy startup disrupting the industry.” This “startup” identity was used to justify a multitude of sins: paying 40% below market rate (“we offer equity instead!”), having no HR department (“too corporate”), keeping critical infrastructure running on the original developer’s laptop (“startup hustle!”), and maintaining a culture of perpetual crisis where weekend work was celebrated as “commitment to the mission.” The cognitive dissonance reached its peak when Jennifer, while conducting interviews in her corner office in their 30,000 square foot downtown headquarters, told candidates with a straight face that they “needed to be comfortable with startup chaos” and “wearing multiple hats” despite hiring for a specialized role with seven layers of management above it. When the board finally suggested it might be time to “mature some business processes” after the company’s third consecutive year of missing revenue targets by 70%, Jennifer responded with a passionate email about “preserving our startup DNA” and warned that “becoming too structured would kill their innovative edge”—conveniently ignoring that they hadn’t actually released a new product in four years and their main innovation was finding new metaphors for describing massive quarterly losses as “investing in growth.”

S is for SDK (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: Software Development Kit, a collection of tools for creating applications, which companies release with such poor documentation that developers spend more time figuring out how to use the SDK than they would have spent building the functionality from scratch.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our comprehensive SDK provides seamless platform integration capabilities with extensive customization options.” (Translation: “We’ve wrapped our poorly documented API in an even more poorly documented library that will mysteriously break every time you update it.”)

Seen in the Wild: After years of complaints about their difficult-to-use API, software company DataFlow proudly announced their “Revolutionary Developer Experience SDK” that would “transform integration from weeks to minutes.” Six months and thousands of developer hours later, the SDK had achieved legendary status in programming forums—but not for the reasons DataFlow intended. Developers discovered the 340MB package included dependencies on 17 different open-source libraries (all pinned to specific versions with known vulnerabilities), required Java 11 (but failed silently on Java 12+), and generated error messages exclusively in Portuguese despite the company being based in Minnesota. The documentation consisted of a single readme file containing only the cryptic instruction “Initialize with valid parameters for optimal functionality” and a link to a YouTube tutorial that had been taken down for copyright infringement. Most impressively, the error handling was implemented such that all exceptions were caught and logged to a file location hardcoded to a specific path on the developer’s machine—which happened to be the home directory of the SDK’s creator. The situation reached peak absurdity when DataFlow’s own integration team admitted in a support forum that they had abandoned the SDK and were directly using the original API, prompting one customer to ask, “Then why does the SDK exist at all?” The question went unanswered as the support forum was deprecated the following day and replaced with a Discord server where the only response to any question was an automated message suggesting users “check the comprehensive documentation” that still didn’t exist.

S is for SaaS (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: Software as a Service, a delivery model where applications are centrally hosted and licensed on subscription, allowing vendors to transform what was once a one-time $200 purchase into $49.99 monthly forever while adding features nobody asked for.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our SaaS platform delivers continuous value through regular feature enhancements and seamless updates aligned with evolving user needs.” (Translation: “We’ll redesign the interface every six months to justify the subscription price, moving all the buttons you’ve memorized while telling you it’s an ‘improvement.'”)

Seen in the Wild: After converting their previously successful desktop application to a SaaS model, software company ProductPro watched their user reviews plummet from 4.8 stars to 1.7 overnight. Customer complaints centered around paying $599 annually for software that had previously cost $349 once, losing access to files when internet connectivity failed, and most infuriatingly, the removal of popular features that were now only available in the “Enterprise Plus Premium” tier at $1,299 per year. When confronted with this backlash at an all-hands meeting, CEO Michael explained this was actually “successful business model transformation” and shared slides showing 47% higher revenue projections, conveniently omitting the 64% customer churn rate. The situation reached peak absurdity when the product team began implementing what they called “engagement-driven feature evolution,” which customers quickly realized meant removing any feature that wasn’t used daily, regardless of its importance to their workflows. After eliminating a specialized function used only occasionally but critical for certain industries, ProductPro lost their five largest enterprise customers in a single week. Michael’s response was to announce a new “Customer Success Initiative” that consisted entirely of sending increasingly desperate emails offering 10%, then 30%, then eventually 90% discounts to former customers, all while maintaining in industry panel discussions that their SaaS transformation had been “an unqualified success story” and publishing a Medium article titled “Why Your Customers Actually Want You To Remove Features They Depend On.”

S is for Standup (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: A daily meeting where team members briefly share progress, originally designed to be quick and efficient but now implemented as a 45-minute session where everyone recites their JIRA tickets while checking emails and hoping no one asks them any actual questions.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our daily standup facilitates real-time information exchange and cross-functional alignment to remove development blockers.” (Translation: “We force everyone to listen to detailed status reports that could have been an email, ensuring developers can’t get into flow state before lunch.”)

Seen in the Wild: After reading about standup meetings in an agile methodology book, Engineering Manager David implemented mandatory 9:15 AM standups for his team. What was intended to be a brief 15-minute sync quickly evolved into a daily ordeal lasting at least 45 minutes, featuring: developers reading their entire previous day’s activity directly from JIRA, David interrupting with detailed technical questions that derailed the entire meeting, project managers using standup to give impromptu presentations about roadmap changes, and the ritual concluding with an awkward “anyone have anything else?” that invariably surfaced contentious issues with no time to resolve them. The situation reached peak dysfunction when team members began arriving late specifically to miss standup, prompting David to implement a “standup accountability system” where latecomers had to put $5 in a jar and those dialing in remotely had to send gift cards to the team. After developers began logging in from the parking lot to claim they were “remote” while sitting in their cars until standup ended, David extended standup to include a mandatory “team building component” that pushed the meeting to a full hour. The problem resolved itself only when a new CTO joined, attended one standup, and immediately sent a company-wide email limiting all standups to 15 minutes with a strict “three-sentence maximum” rule per update, which David later claimed had been his original vision all along.

S is for Scalability (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The capability of a system to handle growth, which engineers design for by creating infrastructure that could theoretically support Facebook-level traffic despite their application currently having seven users, four of whom are the development team testing in production.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve architected our platform for horizontal scalability with seamless node expansion to accommodate exponential user growth.” (Translation: “We’ve drastically overengineered a system to handle millions of concurrent users, but haven’t optimized the basic database query that takes 30 seconds to load the login page.”)

Seen in the Wild: After declaring their startup’s infrastructure “woefully inadequate for our growth trajectory,” CTO Brandon secured a $1.2 million budget to build what he called a “hyperscale-ready architecture” capable of handling “millions of concurrent users.” Four months later, he proudly unveiled a complex system featuring 14 microservices, multiple database sharding strategies, elaborate load balancers, and a custom-built “predictive auto-scaling engine.” When the monitoring dashboard finally went live, it revealed their actual peak traffic was 12 simultaneous users, with their elaborate infrastructure sitting at approximately 0.02% capacity utilization. Rather than acknowledging the overengineering, Brandon presented this as proof of “successful capacity planning” and “runway for exponential growth” in his status report. The company continued paying $37,000 monthly in cloud costs for the oversized infrastructure until they ran out of funding nine months later, having never exceeded 50 concurrent users but with an architecture that Brandon’s LinkedIn profile still describes as “battle-tested at scale” despite the only battle being with their burn rate.

S is for SLA (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: Service Level Agreement, a contract defining expected performance metrics, which companies craft with more loopholes than a crochet convention to ensure that no matter how badly their service performs, it technically hasn’t violated the agreement.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We provide industry-leading SLAs with 99.99% guaranteed uptime and comprehensive remediation protocols.” (Translation: “Our service will be down for hours regularly, but since we don’t count ‘planned maintenance,’ ‘third-party issues,’ or ‘Fridays’ as downtime, we’re still meeting our SLA.”)

Seen in the Wild: After losing several enterprise customers due to reliability issues, Cloud Provider UltraStack marketed their new “Diamond-Tier SLA” promising “99.99% uptime with financial guarantees.” Customers were initially impressed until they read the 47-page SLA document defining “downtime” so narrowly that virtually no actual outage would qualify. The agreement excluded: scheduled maintenance (which could be declared retroactively), “regional internet degradation” (defined as any issue affecting more than one customer), any outage less than 30 consecutive minutes (even if it happened every 29 minutes), and most impressively, “customer-precipitated incidents” (which included using any feature of the platform that wasn’t explicitly listed in documentation). The true genius of the SLA emerged during a catastrophic 9-hour outage that affected every customer. UltraStack’s official determination: no SLA violation had occurred because the incident began during their newly-designated “maintenance window” (declared 15 minutes after the outage started) and was technically caused by “excessive legitimate use” (customers trying to log in), which triggered their “abuse protection systems” (which failed spectacularly). When an enterprise customer with thousands of affected users demanded the promised SLA credits, UltraStack’s legal team explained with a straight face that according to their calculations, availability remained at 99.994% because they only counted 23 seconds of the 9-hour outage as “qualified downtime.” The company eventually revised their SLA marketing from “99.99% uptime” to “designed for high availability,” but kept all the same exclusions and conditions, proving that in cloud computing, the “S” in SLA might as well stand for “Surprise! You’re still paying full price.”

S is for Singleton (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: A design pattern restricting a class to a single instance, which developers implement either accidentally, creating mysterious bugs that take weeks to trace, or deliberately, creating global state that makes the application impossible to test or maintain.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve implemented an optimized singleton pattern for our configuration manager to ensure consistency across the application domain.” (Translation: “I’ve created global mutable state that will cause random failures in production that no one will be able to reproduce or debug.”)

Seen in the Wild: After reading a design patterns book over a weekend, Senior Developer Tyler decided to refactor the company’s e-commerce platform to use what he called “strategic singleton implementation” for “enhanced architectural purity.” Two weeks after deployment, the system began exhibiting bizarre behavior: order details would mysteriously mix between users, shopping carts would spontaneously empty or fill with other customers’ items, and most alarmingly, some users reported seeing other users’ personal information displayed in their account profiles. Investigation revealed Tyler had converted nearly every service class to singletons, effectively sharing state across all user sessions in their multi-threaded environment. Most impressively, he had implemented the database connection as a singleton with a single transaction context, meaning every user on the site was effectively using the same database connection and transaction, creating a bizarre situation where one user submitting an order could inadvertently commit another user’s cart changes. When confronted with evidence that his “architectural improvements” had created a transactional nightmare and potential data privacy disaster, Tyler insisted the issues must be related to “thread contention at the infrastructure layer” rather than his design choices. The company ultimately rolled back to the previous “architecturally impure” version while Tyler gave a meetup talk titled “Leveraging Advanced Design Patterns for E-commerce Scalability” based entirely on the anti-patterns they had just removed from production.

S is for Sunset (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: The process of phasing out a product or service, which companies describe in marketing emails as “an exciting evolution of our product strategy” rather than “we’re killing the thing you depend on and you have 30 days to figure out an alternative.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’re strategically sunsetting legacy solutions to focus resources on next-generation platform innovation.” (Translation: “We’re shutting down a profitable product used by thousands of customers because the executive team got bored with it and wants to chase a shiny new market instead.”)

Seen in the Wild: After acquiring productivity software LegacyTask with its loyal user base of 2 million, tech giant MegaCorp announced they would be “elevating the productivity experience through strategic product consolidation”—corporate speak for shutting down LegacyTask and forcing users to migrate to MegaCorp’s inferior alternative. The notification email, titled “Exciting News About Your Productivity Journey!” buried the shutdown announcement in the seventh paragraph after extensive marketing copy about MegaCorp’s “vision for the future.” Users discovered the “seamless migration tool” promised in the email was actually a PDF document explaining how to manually recreate their data in the new system, with most advanced features marked as “coming soon” (internal documents later revealed “soon” meant “if enough customers complain”). When thousands of business customers protested that they relied on LegacyTask for critical workflows, MegaCorp responded with a blog post explaining that “change can feel uncomfortable but is ultimately rewarding,” paired with a 30-day extension that customers had to apply for individually through a form that ironically used LegacyTask on the backend. The situation reached peak absurdity when MegaCorp’s CEO published a LinkedIn article titled “Why Removing Features Users Love Is Actually Good For Them,” two days before the company’s stock dropped 7% due to the exodus of enterprise customers. Three years later, MegaCorp quietly launched a “brand new innovation” that was essentially LegacyTask rebuilt from scratch after losing the original customer base entirely.

S is for Stream (Tech Factor: 7)

TechOnion Definition: A sequence of data elements made available over time, which engineers unnecessarily implement for static data sets because “batch processing is for dinosaurs,” creating systems that are simultaneously real-time and real slow.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve implemented a streaming architecture for real-time data processing with event-driven pipeline orchestration.” (Translation: “I added Kafka to process 10KB of data that changes once per day, increasing our infrastructure costs by 2000% while adding three new points of failure.”)

Seen in the Wild: After attending a conference featuring streaming technologies, Chief Architect Rebecca declared all batch processing “fundamentally obsolete” and mandated an immediate migration to a “fully streaming data architecture.” Six months and $1.7 million later, the company’s once-simple data pipeline—which previously ran a nightly job processing a few gigabytes—had been transformed into a byzantine system featuring five different streaming technologies, 17 microservices, and real-time dashboards displaying metrics that updated approximately once per day (the same frequency as the original batch system). The first major incident occurred when the streaming pipeline fell behind, creating a backlog of millions of unprocessed messages that none of the provisioned infrastructure could handle, effectively DDoSing their own systems. When the finance team questioned why their cloud bill had increased from $5,000 to $95,000 monthly, Rebecca delivered a passionate presentation about “the value of real-time insights” while conveniently ignoring that their business had no actual use case requiring data fresher than 24 hours. The situation reached peak absurdity during a board review when Rebecca proudly demonstrated their “real-time analytics dashboard” which showed metrics updating live—until a board member pointed out the numbers weren’t changing, prompting a painful admission that the streaming system had been down for three days, but no one had noticed because, as Rebecca reluctantly admitted, “no business decisions require real-time data in our current workflows.” The company eventually implemented a hybrid approach that processed 95% of data through efficient batch jobs while maintaining the streaming infrastructure only for the few genuinely real-time needs, though Rebecca’s conference talk “How We Transformed to a 100% Streaming Organization” conveniently omitted this practical compromise.

S is for Serverless (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: A cloud computing execution model where you still absolutely use servers but pretend they don’t exist until your function times out for reasons no one can debug.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve embraced a serverless architecture to optimize resource utilization and reduce operational overhead.” (Translation: “I’ve replaced our predictable, debuggable server with hundreds of ephemeral functions that fail in exciting new ways and generate thousands in surprise cloud charges.”)

Seen in the Wild: After reading a Medium article titled “Serverless: The Only Future of Computing,” Chief Architect Sophia mandated an immediate migration of their monolithic application to a “fully serverless paradigm.” Six months and $300,000 later, their once-stable system had been transformed into 147 separate Lambda functions, each with different timeout settings, memory configurations, and runtime versions. The first major crisis occurred during a marketing promotion, when sudden traffic caused cascading failures as functions timed out waiting for other functions, creating a “serverless traffic jam” that took down the entire platform. When the finance team questioned why their AWS bill had increased 500% despite the promised “cost optimizations,” Sophia delivered a passionate explanation about “paying only for what you use” while conveniently ignoring that their functions were now constantly retriggering due to failures and poor design. The situation reached peak absurdity during a critical outage when the debugging process involved manually checking logs across dozens of functions, prompting Sophia to build what she called a “serverless observability layer”—essentially recreating the monitoring capabilities they had automatically with their previous server-based approach. She ultimately left to become a “Serverless Transformation Consultant,” while her replacement quietly rebuilt the most critical components as traditional services, describing this in planning documents as “implementing a hybrid serverless strategy” to avoid admitting they were reversing the entire migration.

S is for State (Tech Factor: 8)

TechOnion Definition: The condition of a system at a specific time, which developers manage with such complexity that a simple toggle button requires 347 lines of code, three reducers, and a custom middleware just to remember if it’s on or off.

How Tech Bros Use It: “Our application implements sophisticated state management with unidirectional data flow and immutable store patterns.” (Translation: “I’ve used Redux to manage a single boolean value, creating a state structure so complex that changing a checkbox requires dispatching five actions and tracking changes across three different files.”)

Seen in the Wild: After declaring their application’s state management “insufficiently architected,” Senior Frontend Developer Tyler spent six weeks implementing what he called a “next-generation state orchestration system” for their relatively simple dashboard application. The resulting architecture featured a custom-built combination of three different state management libraries, each handling different “domains” of state with elaborate communication protocols between them. Team members discovered that updating a simple form field now required modifying code in seven different files across four directories, with data flowing through so many transformations that debugging became virtually impossible. The situation reached peak absurdity during a critical bug fix when Tyler spent three days trying to determine why a dropdown menu wasn’t reflecting updated values, eventually discovering that his state architecture required manually triggering 12 different actions in precise sequence to propagate a single value change. When a junior developer suggested they could replace the entire system with 20 lines of code using built-in React state hooks, Tyler dismissed this as “architecturally naive” and instead added another layer of middleware that he claimed would “streamline state transitions” but actually made the system even more convoluted. The company finally simplified the entire state management approach while Tyler was on vacation, though his LinkedIn profile still features “Architected enterprise-grade state management solution with industry-leading best practices” as a key achievement, without mentioning that the solution was completely replaced due to its unmaintainable complexity.

S is for Story Points (Tech Factor: 6)

TechOnion Definition: A unit of measure for expressing the overall effort required to fully implement a product backlog item, which agile teams use to create the illusion of predictability while still missing every deadline by the exact same margin they would have without spending hours arguing about whether something is a 3 or a 5.

How Tech Bros Use It: “We’ve refined our estimation process using relative story points to enhance sprint predictability and team velocity tracking.” (Translation: “We spend three hours every sprint arguing about arbitrary numbers that have no relation to actual time, then act surprised when our estimates are completely wrong.”)

Seen in the Wild: After struggling with missed deadlines, Agile Coach Jessica implemented what she called a “revolutionary story point calibration framework” featuring a 17-point modified Fibonacci sequence and mandatory bi-weekly “estimation normalization sessions.” Teams soon found themselves spending up to 40% of their sprint planning meetings debating whether tasks were a 5 or an 8, with heated arguments about what exactly constituted a “13-point story.” The situation reached peak absurdity during a planning session where developers spent 47 minutes debating whether adding a single button to a form was a 2 or a 3, ultimately deciding on 2.5 (which wasn’t even an option in their Fibonacci scale). Despite this excruciating precision in estimation, the team’s ability to predict actual delivery dates showed no improvement whatsoever. When presented with data showing no correlation between their elaborate point system and actual completion times, Jessica insisted this meant they needed “more granular story breakdowns” and “enhanced velocity baselining,” introducing another layer of complexity with “confidence factors” and “complexity multipliers” that somehow made estimates even less accurate. The company eventually abandoned the entire approach after calculating they had spent approximately 3,200 person-hours over six months arguing about story points without delivering a single additional feature, though Jessica’s portfolio continued to showcase her “proven story point methodology that increased estimation accuracy by 60%” without explaining how this figure was calculated or why none of the development teams could actually meet their sprint commitments.

S is for Swimlane (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: A visual representation used in process diagrams to separate responsibilities, which project managers use to create charts so complex they require special wide-format printers and still explain nothing about how work actually gets done.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve created comprehensive process swimlanes to visualize cross-functional workflows and clarify ownership boundaries.” (Translation: “I’ve spent 40 hours in Visio creating a diagram so convoluted that it requires a magnifying glass to read and still doesn’t capture what anyone actually does.”)

Seen in the Wild: After identifying “process confusion” as a key team challenge, Project Manager Eric spent three weeks creating what he described as “the definitive workflow visualization” for their product development process. The resulting swimlane diagram featured 17 different participants (including three roles that didn’t exist), 43 decision points, 87 distinct activities, and was so large it had to be printed on special paper and mounted across an entire conference room wall. When team members were invited to review the diagram, they discovered it bore virtually no relationship to how work was actually accomplished, featuring elaborate process paths that no one followed and omitting all the unofficial but critical interactions that actually got things done. Most notably, the “streamlined” process Eric had documented required 27 separate approvals and nine different meetings to ship even the smallest feature. When a senior developer pointed out that following the documented process would increase delivery times from weeks to months, Eric responded by adding another swimlane for “expedited workflow exceptions” that essentially acknowledged none of the normal processes applied in reality. The diagram ultimately ended its life covered in sticky notes representing the actual process before being removed during office renovations, though Eric’s performance review still highlighted his “transformative process visualization work” as a key achievement, despite no one ever using it as a reference for anything beyond an example of what not to do.

S is for Stakeholder (Tech Factor: 5)

TechOnion Definition: Anyone with an interest in a project, which project managers interpret as “anyone who might conceivably have an opinion that could derail the project at the worst possible moment if we don’t include them in 47 unnecessary meetings.”

How Tech Bros Use It: “We ensure alignment through comprehensive stakeholder engagement and transparent communication channels.” (Translation: “I’ve invited 27 people to every meeting to cover myself politically, ensuring nothing actually gets decided while maximizing the number of conflicting opinions.”)

Seen in the Wild: After a project failed due to “insufficient stakeholder involvement,” Project Manager Emily implemented what she called a “Total Stakeholder Integration Model,” identifying 54 stakeholders for a relatively simple website update. The resulting communication matrix required sending 217 emails per decision, while the kickoff meeting had so many participants that they exceeded their Zoom license limits and had to break into three separate calls. By week three, the daily stakeholder update meeting had expanded to two hours to accommodate a “voice of the stakeholder” segment where opinions were shared about everything from button colors to the philosophical implications of the menu structure. The project timeline, originally estimated at four weeks, extended to six months as each decision required approval from individuals with increasingly tangential connections to the actual work, including at one point, the CEO’s executive assistant’s intern who had once mentioned using “a website similar to this one.” When the project finally launched three months late and 400% over budget, Emily presented it as a “stakeholder management success story” because “everyone felt heard,” conveniently omitting that the primary user group had abandoned the product entirely after their core requirements were diluted to accommodate the opinions of people who would never actually use the system.

S is for System Design (Tech Factor: 9)

TechOnion Definition: The process of defining architecture, interfaces, and data for a system, which engineers use to create diagrams so complex they require 14 different arrow types and a dedicated legend, yet still fail to explain how anything actually works.

How Tech Bros Use It: “I’ve created a comprehensive system design with service boundaries and interaction patterns aligned with domain contexts.” (Translation: “I’ve spent two weeks in Lucidchart making beautiful diagrams that will bear no relation to what we actually build.”)

Seen in the Wild: After being tasked with designing a relatively simple inventory management system, Principal Architect Derek spent six weeks creating what he called “definitive architectural documentation” for the solution. The resulting design package contained 147 pages of diagrams featuring 23 microservices, 12 different database technologies, multiple message queues, and a bespoke “event harmonization layer” that Derek had invented specifically for this project. When engineering teams began implementation, they quickly discovered the design was simultaneously over-engineered and under-specified: elaborate diagrams showed arrows connecting every component to every other component with vague labels like “synergistic data exchange,” while actual critical details about data structures and business logic were completely absent. Most impressively, Derek had specified 17 different deployment environments for “progressive quality assurance” but hadn’t included a single user interface mockup or concrete API definition. When pressed about how the system would actually work in practice, Derek responded with increasingly abstract diagrams featuring more colors and arrow types rather than practical implementation guidance. The project was ultimately saved when the team quietly set aside Derek’s architectural vision and built a straightforward solution with three services and a single database, though they cleverly named their components to match Derek’s diagram so he could claim his design had been implemented. Derek later presented the project at an architecture conference as an example of “innovative design thinking translated to successful implementation,” showing only his original diagrams and not the dramatically simplified system that was actually built.