The department that turned firing into a growth opportunity.
A term stolen from telecommunications to describe how busy you are, because saying "I don't want to do that" requires emotional vulnerability. The human version of a loading bar stuck at 99 percent.
Key Performance Indicator: a number that determines your worth as a human being every quarter. The corporate equivalent of a video game score, except nobody is having fun and the prizes are just more KPIs.
The process of overwhelming a new employee with 47 hours of training videos, 12 HR forms, and a buddy system where your assigned buddy quit last week. It's like drinking from a fire hose, except the hose is filled with compliance modules.
The revolutionary act of doing exactly what you're paid to do and absolutely nothing more. Somehow this basic employment concept needed a trendy name to scandalize LinkedIn thought leaders everywhere. Turns out "working your job description" needed a rebrand.
A mythical state of equilibrium where your job doesn't consume your personal life, spoken about in reverent tones by companies that email you at 10 PM. It's the corporate equivalent of a unicorn -- everyone says they believe in it but nobody has actually seen one.
An annual ritual where your entire year of work is compressed into a 30-minute conversation and a rating between 1 and 5 that determines your raise, your bonus, and your will to live. It's American Idol but for spreadsheet proficiency.
Paid Time Off, which is technically time away from work that you're paid for, except you'll spend half of it answering Slack messages and the other half feeling guilty for not answering them faster.
The collection of unwritten rules, forced fun, and motivational posters that define what it's like to work somewhere. It's what the company says it values on the website versus what actually happens in the breakroom. These two things have never met.
An arrangement that means you can work from anywhere at any time, which actually means you'll work from everywhere at all times. The flexibility is that the company is flexible about how much of your personal life it absorbs.
A metric that measures how enthusiastic employees are about pretending to be enthusiastic about work. Companies spend millions trying to improve it when the real answer is usually "pay people more and stop scheduling 8 AM Friday meetings."
The money and benefits you receive in exchange for your labor, sanity, and ever-growing collection of meetings that could have been emails. The word itself comes from Latin, meaning "to weigh together," which is ironic because the scale never tips in your favor.
A work of creative fiction that lists the ideal qualifications for a role no single human could possibly possess. It requires 10 years of experience in a technology that's existed for 3, and lists "other duties as assigned" to cover literally everything else.
A corporate initiative that offers yoga classes and meditation apps instead of addressing the actual causes of workplace stress, like unrealistic deadlines and toxic managers. It's like putting a band-aid on a building that's on fire.
The collection of non-salary perks a company offers to make you forget that the salary itself is underwhelming. It typically includes health insurance you can't afford to use, a 401k match that vests in 2047, and free coffee that tastes like regret.
Compensation so generous that you can't afford to leave even though your soul left three years ago. Stock options, deferred bonuses, and pension vesting schedules designed to make quitting feel like financial self-harm.
Mandatory fun activities designed to make coworkers bond through shared awkwardness. Options include escape rooms where you discover your boss can't solve puzzles, trust falls that reveal trust issues, and cooking classes where Karen from accounting reveals she's a tyrant.
The speed at which a startup spends its investors' money, measured in dollars per month and panic attacks per quarter. It's called burn rate because watching your cash evaporate feels exactly like watching something on fire.
An automated sequence of steps that code goes through from development to production, or a visual representation of your company's hopes and dreams flowing through stages of increasing disappointment. When the pipeline breaks, everything stops.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion -- the corporate initiative that ranges from genuine organizational transformation to a single lunch-and-learn in February. The commitment level can usually be measured by whether DEI has its own budget or just a shared Google Drive folder.
The non-technical abilities like communication, empathy, and not replying-all to company-wide emails. They're called "soft" because the corporate world still hasn't figured out that they're actually the hardest skills to master and the most critical for not getting fired.
Corporate euphemism for a mistake, failure, or catastrophe that nobody wants to take responsibility for. When your manager says "this is a learning opportunity," what they mean is "someone messed up badly but we're going to frame it positively in the incident report."
The corporate art of convincing employees not to leave, usually attempted only after they've already accepted another offer. Retention strategies include counter-offers, pizza parties, and the classic "but we're a family" speech.
A legal arrangement meaning your employer can fire you for any reason and you can quit for any reason, creating a beautiful symmetry of anxiety. In practice, it means your job security is a polite fiction maintained by mutual convenience.
A management claim that anyone can walk into the boss's office anytime to discuss anything, which is technically true if you enjoy career suicide. The door is open but the welcome mat is made of eggshells.