• "action item" = "need to do"
• "offline" = "later"

Those cover the meanings exactly or at least exactly enough that the alternatives don't change the intended meaning. By contrast, "starboard" and "port" are used because "right" and "left" are ambiguous, are they "my X", "your X" or "ship's X"? "dorsal" and "ventral" come from Latin terms used in science, there are equivalent terms in ordinary English but using the Latin allows distinguishing between casual references and technical ones ("dorsal" means different directions depending on the organism's neural tube).

A good rule of thumb is that if you use terminology when speaking to someone not in that terminology's field and expect them to understand it, it's not jargon.

Neither, really. They didn't eliminate jobs so much as make new rules that mostly eliminated the "Tech Lead / Manager" (TLM) role.

There used to be a lot of software engineers (people on the software engineer job ladder, as opposed to the engineering manager job ladder) who had 2-3 people reporting to them and were considered TLMs. These people divided their time between engineering work and management. Google made a new rule that every manager has to have at least 5 direct reports. This rule has flattened the hierarchy by mostly eliminating TLMs, who all had to decide whether to lose the "TL" part and be a pure manager or lose the "M" part and be a pure SWE. Well, "pure" is too strong. Some SWE managers still keep their hands in the code but they generally don't have time for significant projects.

Is this an improvement? Dunno. There are pros and cons. The TLM role has some significant benefits to a company. It enables the existence of small, close-knit teams where the team's manager is also the pre-eminent expert in the area. Being managed by the expert has a lot of advantages for the reports, especially when it comes time for the manager to defend the team's performance ratings or promotions, because the manager deeply understands their work. It has advantages for the company, too, because in a small team led by the project expert it's impossible for low-performing employees to hide their low performance or blame it on others.

On the other hand, TLMs can end up overwhelmed by the administrative overhead. This can cause them to be less effective as managers because they don't navigate the system on behalf of their employees as effectively. Some of them may not be very good at defending their reports' ratings and promotions because they don't have the skills to do that, even though they deeply understand the team's contributions. It can also definitely make them less effective as SWEs, and these people were generally top-performing ICs (individual contributors) before taking a manager role. Some might argue that any time they spend on management rather than engineering is a waste of their talents.

Pure engineering managers can be and often are better managers. Better at helping their reports develop important non-technical skills and knowledge and better at working the system for their reports. And some top-performing SWEs are such excellent managers that even as good as they are at building stuff, their positive impact as managers is larger yet.

From the upper management perspective, there's another advantage: Fewer managers to train and manage. Managing managers is harder in many ways than managing engineers, because the output of managers is harder to measure and evaluate. Also, managers are officers of the company which attaches greater legal and PR risk to their actions. Having fewer of them to manage is beneficial.

(Saving money isn't really a benefit, at least not the way Google does it. SWEs who also manage people don't get paid any more than SWEs who don't, holding all else constant.)

On balance, I don't think either approach is ideal, and the best strategy is probably a dynamic balance between them that mostly favors managers being managers (though with the rule that all managers must have been highly competent SWEs) and SWEs being SWEs, but with plenty of scope for exceptions where a project needs a small team of 3-4 people and there's a clear leader with deep technical ability and good people skills.

Anyway, Google has pushed the pendulum away from TLMs and as a result there are many fewer managers, and each manager tends to have a larger team.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I used to be a TLM but opted to switch back to an IC role years ago, before the rule change.)

Through most of my life that has been true. Examples include: the right tends to be religious where the left tends to be secular, and the climate deniers are mostly on the right. We started to see some cracks in that with anti-vax stuff because the original anti-vax people were mostly upper-middle class liberal women in the Seattle area... kind of modern hippies. Then with COVID that switched sides and everyone liberal was suddenly pro-vax and conservatives were anti-vax (reality still on the side of liberals at that point). But the masking was weird. I dug into a lot of the supposed "follow the science" studies showing that masks were effective, and I can tell you that these claims, particularly when it comes to cloth masks, were overstated. N95 masks? Absolutely. Surgical masks? Probably. Cloth masks? Not so much. But pointing this out got you branded anti-masker by the left. But it's not like the right had gained a handle on reality at this point.

But now the left has gone to absolute crazy town. A liberal will support equality for women (excellent, I'm on board) and will actively criticize Christian religions for oppression of women (that's fair, even though there's been a lot of progress there) but here's the thing... the left is politically aligned with Muslim groups so they won't publicly criticize the Muslim religion for their abhorrent treatment of women. In fact a prominent women's rights campaigner from Iran was protested when she went to speak at a university in the UK, not just by the Iranian students' association, but by the LGBTQ group on campus (in solidarity). And then there's the assertion by the left that it's fair to have biological males who went through male puberty competing in women's sports. That's as anti-science and anti-reality as you can get. Finally, just look at the 1619 project, which is almost completely a work of fiction. Even black historians have said it's simply not true. We have documentary evidence in the form of personal letters and such which contradicts that narrative.

So no, liberals can no longer claim that reality has a liberal bias. The left has gone so far left that the rest of us can't see them anymore. Which makes them pretty similar to the right in my opinion. Reality doesn't want anything to do with crazy.

I don't very often wish I had mod points, but this is an exceptional case.

94 billion is a lot. It's still in the top 10 of US exports by category and check out the other top exports by category. With the exception of the top category (crude oil, etc.) all of it is stuff that falls into the description I gave above. And the reason for oil exports to be so high is a quirk of geology. The US is the main producer of "light/sweet" crude which has the benefit of being very easy to refine, so it gets sold on the world market at high profit. The US imports "heavy/sour" crude, from the middle east, Canada and Venezuela and refines that stuff because it's cheap and because the US petroleum industry is one of the few in the world with the expertise required to refine it, and because much of the existing infrastructure was already built to refine that stuff.

Yes, but that won't happen until we get everyone on the same page moving forward in a fault-tolerant and robust expectations paradigm. In order to action that, we need to empower and enstrengthen key team players and integrate a results-forward meritocracy with our strategic core competencies; and if we could count on you to be on board, that would be great.

It isn't just buzzwords, it's jargon with specific meaning... but your comment highlights the problem, because you didn't understand it.

One part you didn't understand was "bandwidth", which in the management context means "available work capacity". This means it's a discussion about resource staffing and constraints. Also, "align" means there's going to be some two-way negotiation, in this case to figure out whose employees are going to take on what part of the work based on their availability. (Well, probably. "Align" could have been used out of politeness, implying a fictional intention to negotiate when in reality the speaker does plan to dictate.) In addition, the use of "workflow" implies that the plan to be developed isn't just for one project, but for an ongoing effort.

Try translating all of that nuance to standard English, and you'll convert a ten-word sentence into a paragraph or two. Like all jargon, its purpose is to increase communication by compressing a lot of detailed information into a few words that have context-specific meaning that goes beyond their normal English definitions.

Of course, the downside of the jargon is that it prevents those who don't understand the contextual definitions from understanding, causing them to come away with interpretations like "Let's meet after this and make sure you understand how I want that to work."

In fairness to you, I have to point out that often the users of business jargon don't know what it means either, and are just using it to make themselves sound "businessy". That's less a jargon problem than evidence that the company isn't hiring the best people.

Polyp used to be my least favorite word. I would read or hear it, and it would make me feel just gross.

I think monetize, however, is now my least favorite word.

You're exactly right. This also has to do with tech in general. Since the late 90's it has relied on cheap capital. Think Google, Amazon, Uber, etc. These companies funded growth by borrowing money with very low (nearly zero) interest rates for decades. Around the time of the pandemic the interest rates started to rise. There was a temporary bump in demand for tech during the first couple years of the pandemic, but then demand fell back down. Tech companies were left with bloated staff counts and increasingly expensive borrowing costs. Every tech company realized it needed to switch from a growth mindset into a profitable mindset. Monetization tactics increased, and staff counts were cut. A major component of the reason Twitter got sold to Musk was because of these very facts. The owners knew Twitter had to start being profitable, but they didn't have the stomach to do it themselves, so they sold it and let Musk do it. But it had to happen either way. That cheap capital isn't returning. It was a demographic blip caused by such a large generation (the boomers) in the peak of their retirement savings years flooding the capital market with money and hunting for any reasonable return. That reality is gone now.

I've been on here a long time, and the slashdot crowd is full of people from across the political spectrum, and even people who don't fit neatly into any of the boxes. Any given story might only attract a particular segment of that population who actually cares about it, which gives the impression of it leaning one way or the other, and some stories attract the bots and extra-national troll farms, but the long-time users are quite varied in their opinions.

For anyone who thinks the US doesn't manufacture anything... the largest US export segment is actually aerospace parts, which are expensive and high quality. In fact that's what the US generally manufactures for export: things that require a high degree of skill, education, and importantly stuff that relies on a trusted supply chain. Think pharmaceuticals, where you very much care about the pedigree of the ingredients that go into them. The same with aircraft parts... you want to make sure they're not made out of recycled pop cans. In our rush to bash the US for "not making anything" we should keep in mind what the US actually does make, and why the world likes to buy those things from the US in particular.

"Let's touch base offline to align our bandwidth on this workflow." isn't jargon, it's buzzwords. It just translates to "Let's meet after this and make sure you understand how I want that to work.". Just use the ordinary English instead of the buzzwords. A lot of the "confusion" is probably the employees thinking "Just speak English, dumbass.".

Jargon has specific meanings that can't be quickly expressed in plain English. "hack" vs. "kludge" for example. Both have implications beyond the basic "solution to a problem" that take several sentences in English to state clearly but represent things you need to identify often enough that you can't readily spell it out in full every single time. Others, like "mis-bug" (as in "This is a mis-bug, clarify the code and docs so someone doesn't accidentally fix it.") are jargon but the plain English terms are simple enough you ought to use them most of the time.

the $5000 dollar bread that's $10000 by the time you get to the store

1990s me is very surprised that somebody would have to go out of their way to make sure a word processor ran on their computer without automatically connecting to a network, and without needing a network for full functionality.

Every so often I put myself in the mindset of 1990s me looking at technology today, and what I mostly hear is, "Wow, you have a lot of capability, but WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???"

That's interesting. For as long as I've been in the industry, programmers and IT people have tended to be libertarian, not socialist, though the GPL group has always had that scent of communism.