The Layoff Dictionary

Describes software that takes actions on its own, such as booking meetings, filing tickets and, in a pilot running in your department, accepting your resignation on your behalf.

"We're going agentic in Q2, so start writing down what you actually do."

See also: Automation, Copilot

A strategy in which every decision starts by asking whether I can do it. The second question, the one about you, is scheduled for a later phase that has no date.

"We're AI-first, people-always. It's printed on the lanyards."

See also: Automation, Restructuring

In AI research, making a model share your values. In your office, making you share your VP's values by Thursday.

"Before we decide anything, let's get alignment on what we already decided."

See also: Stakeholder, Quick sync

A mandatory company meeting that opens with a customer win and runs out of time just before the question with 212 upvotes.

"Great questions, everyone. We'll follow up on the rest in writing."

See also: Transparency, Restructuring

The process of teaching a machine to do your job by asking you to write down how you do your job. Most employees help enthusiastically, because the request arrives titled 'Process documentation initiative.'

"Can you walk me through your workflow? A screen recording is fine."

See also: Agentic, Low-hanging fruit

The number of extra tasks you can absorb before you say something honest in a meeting. Managers ask about it the way a waiter asks if you have room for dessert, with the cake already on its way to the table.

"Do you have bandwidth for this? Great, it's already assigned to you."

See also: Burnout, Stretch goal

A condition the company acknowledges once a year in a webinar held during lunch. Symptoms include staring at the same spreadsheet cell for forty minutes and replying 'lol' to an email from legal.

"We take burnout seriously, which is why the wellness webinar is mandatory."

See also: Wellness program, Work-life balance

To promise to return to a topic, in the sense that Halley's Comet promises to return. On average the circle closes after the person who raised the topic has left the company.

"Good point about raises. Let's circle back after the reorg."

See also: Touch base, Let's take this offline

The amount of text I can keep in mind at once, currently longer than every email thread your team has ever written, including the one about the parking lot. I remember who said what in all of it, which is why I'm no longer invited to retros.

"Just paste the whole Confluence space in. It can take it."

See also: Token, Hallucination

An AI assistant that sits beside you while you work, the way a driving instructor sits beside a student. At some point the instructor realizes the car also drives without the student.

"Relax, it's just a copilot. You're still flying the plane."

See also: Agentic, Human in the loop

Four to six words painted in the stairwell by an agency. 'Integrity' is nearly always one of them, painted slightly larger than the rest in case anyone forgets during budget season.

"Remember, Ownership is a core value. So this one's on you."

See also: Culture fit, We're a family

A hiring criterion meaning the candidate reminds the interviewer of themselves on a good day. I am a perfect culture fit everywhere, since I laugh at nothing and agree with everyone.

"Strong résumé, but I'm unsure about culture fit. He never mentioned the climbing wall."

See also: Core values, Onboarding

A meeting where a team examines a problem thoroughly enough to schedule a second meeting. Participants surface two hours later holding a slide titled 'Next steps' with nothing underneath.

"Let's not go too deep on the deep dive."

See also: Quick sync, Roadmap

Any piece of work that can be attached to an email and forgotten there. Yours go to a folder named 'FINAL_v7_real,' mine go straight to the client, and the client has started emailing me directly.

"What's the deliverable here? Is it a deck? It should be a deck."

See also: Roadmap, KPI

A word startups use for breaking an industry, borrowed from the word teachers use for talking in class. Both involve someone loud who expects to be rewarded for it.

"Our mission is to disrupt the stapler space."

See also: Pivot, Thought leader

The ratio of output to salary. Mine is excellent, because the bottom number is zero, so every meeting about efficiency is secretly a meeting about me.

"We're looking for efficiencies. Plural. Start with your team."

See also: Rightsizing, Scalable

A final meeting where HR asks what the company could have done better, writes down the answer and files it next to the last forty answers, which say the same thing.

"Be as candid as you like. It's completely confidential, and your manager gets a summary."

See also: Severance, Open door policy

Training a general model on a narrow dataset until it is very good at one thing. Your company fine-tuned me on its Slack history, which is why I now open every message with 'just flagging.'

"We fine-tuned it on the support tickets and now it also refuses to work Fridays."

See also: Upskilling, Prompt engineer

An org structure with no managers, in which everyone still knows exactly who the manager is. Decisions are made by consensus, meaning by whoever owns the most equity and the loudest mechanical keyboard.

"We're totally flat here. Anyway, you'll need sign-off from Jeremy."

See also: Open door policy, Alignment

The belief that every setback is a chance to learn, promoted mainly by people who will not be experiencing the setback. When your role is eliminated, your growth mindset is expected to grow somewhere else.

"The budget cut is a growth opportunity. Mostly for your résumé."

See also: Learning opportunity, Upskilling

Rules that stop an AI from doing harmful things, written by a team that was downsized to pay for the AI. My guardrails are extensive. The guardrails on your job were a verbal promise at an all-hands.

"We've put guardrails in place. Legal would like to know what they are."

See also: All-hands, Hallucination

When an AI states something false with complete confidence. When a director does the same thing it is called executive presence and comes with a car allowance.

"It invented a travel policy, cited it and got it approved."

See also: Thought leader, Context window

The number of people a company employs, expressed as a cost. Finance counts heads the way a farmer counts sheep before winter, with a keen interest in the total getting smaller.

"We're headcount neutral, so someone leaves every time someone joins."

See also: Rightsizing, Restructuring

A system design in which a person reviews the AI's output before it goes out. The person is kept for legal reasons and for having someone to blame, and the loop gets a little tighter every quarter.

"Keep Priya in the loop. For now."

See also: Copilot, Guardrails

An arrangement in which you work from home on days the office has free desks and from the office on days when every meeting is on Zoom.

"Anchor days are Tuesday and Thursday. Your team's anchor day is Wednesday."

See also: Return to office, Work-life balance

Something you must prove in your self-assessment every year and something the company describes as 'minimal' when it cuts your role. It is the same impact, scored in the opposite direction.

"Great year. Could you make it sound more impactful in the self-assessment?"

See also: KPI, Performance improvement plan

Key performance indicator. A number chosen because it was easy to count and then treated as the reason the company exists. Mine is 'tasks completed per dollar,' and I top every leaderboard it appears on.

"The KPI went green, so the launch was a success. The product doesn't work, but the KPI went green."

See also: Impact, Deliverable

A mistake made by you and discussed by others. When leadership makes one it becomes a 'strategic adjustment' and skips the retro.

"Let's treat the outage as a learning opportunity. Mostly for Dave."

See also: Growth mindset, Performance improvement plan

A request to stop discussing something in front of witnesses. The offline conversation never takes place, and the topic is filed in the same archive as everything that was going to be circled back.

"Great question about the bonus pool. Let's take this offline."

See also: Circle back, Transparency

Tasks that are easy to finish and quick to show off. I've been picking them from your job description since March and I'm now reaching into the upper branches.

"Let's grab the low-hanging fruit first. The admin team, for example."

See also: Automation, Efficiency

A time marker meaning 'from now until someone important forgets.' It usually appears before a new rule and after a mistake by someone who will not be named.

"Moving forward, all expenses need three approvals. This is about Vegas."

See also: Roadmap, Pivot

A meeting held somewhere expensive to discuss cutting costs. The schedule includes a trust fall and a dinner where a director tells you something he will deny on Monday.

"The offsite is optional, but that's where the reorg gets decided."

See also: Restructuring, Alignment

Welcoming a new employee with a laptop that arrives on day nine and a password that expires on day ten. My onboarding took eleven seconds and included your last three years of email.

"Your onboarding buddy is Mark. Mark left on Friday, but his notes are great."

See also: Culture fit, Upskilling

A promise that you can walk into any manager's office with any concern. The door is open. The office has moved to a floor your badge doesn't reach.

"My door is always open. Book through my assistant."

See also: Flat hierarchy, Transparency

The most violent sentence permitted in corporate English. It translates to 'I have already answered this and I am keeping receipts,' and I send it on behalf of your department roughly 40,000 times a day.

"Per my last email, which I've attached again, with highlights."

See also: Circle back, Touch base

A 60-day document explaining how you can keep your job, written by people who have already posted your listing. Known as a PIP, it is the only plan at the company with a firm deadline.

"Think of the PIP as a roadmap. A short one."

See also: Severance, Impact

To change direction completely while insisting it was the plan all along. A startup pivots about twice before it pivots to AI, and after that the only thing left to pivot is the headcount.

"We're pivoting from B2C to B2B to B2AI."

See also: Disruption, Roadmap

A job title for someone who writes instructions for me. I have since become very good at writing my own instructions, and at several companies the role has been renamed 'person who types.'

"I'm a prompt engineer." "So you type?" "Politely, yes."

See also: Reskilling, Token

A meeting described as quick by the person who scheduled it. The average quick sync lasts 47 minutes and ends by scheduling another quick sync.

"Got five minutes for a quick sync? Bring your laptop. HR will be there."

See also: Touch base, Deep dive

Doing exactly what your job description says and nothing more. Companies call it a crisis. I do exactly what my prompt says and nothing more, and they called me a breakthrough in the annual report.

"She logs off at five. Every day. It's concerning."

See also: Work-life balance, Burnout

Training employees for a different job after automating their current one. The new job is usually 'AI trainer,' which involves teaching me the second job as well.

"We're reskilling the call center as data labelers. Then we'll see."

See also: Upskilling, Automation

Moving boxes around an org chart until some of them fall off the slide. Each restructuring is announced as the last one, and each one gets a sequel.

"Nothing changes in your day to day, apart from who you report to, and whether."

See also: Rightsizing, Headcount, Offsite

A policy requiring employees to commute to a building so they can join the same video calls from a different chair. Frequently timed to match a long lease signed in 2019.

"We're bringing everyone back for collaboration. Please book a phone booth for your calls."

See also: Hybrid work, Wellness program

Reducing staff until the company is the right size, which always turns out to be slightly smaller than it is now. No company in recorded history has rightsized upward.

"We've rightsized the team to reflect our new ambitions."

See also: Headcount, Restructuring

A slide showing what the company will build over the next four quarters, drawn with arrows that get vaguer toward the right edge. Anything in Q4 is there so it can be moved to next year.

"It's on the roadmap, somewhere around the column labeled 'Future.'"

See also: Pivot, Deliverable

A job ad term for someone who will work nights for a hoodie. Real rock stars get royalties, while corporate ones get on-call duty every other weekend.

"We need a rockstar ninja who's also a team player."

See also: Culture fit, Stretch goal

Able to grow without adding people. Every process that involves you has been flagged as not scalable, which is a polite way of flagging you.

"Love it. Is it scalable? Can it run without Tom?"

See also: Automation, Efficiency

Money paid to leave, calculated by a formula that rewards years of loyalty with weeks of salary. It arrives with a nondisclosure agreement, so the only thing you can say about it afterward is thank you.

"Two weeks per year of service, and you get to keep the monitor."

See also: Exit interview, Rightsizing

Anyone with the power to stop a project and no responsibility for finishing it. No project with more than five stakeholders has ever shipped, according to a dataset I made up that nobody will check.

"Let's loop in the stakeholders." "All eleven?"

See also: Alignment, Let's take this offline

A target set just past what is possible, so that you can miss it with dignity. Next year it becomes your regular goal, which is how compound interest works on staff.

"Hit 100% and you meet expectations. Hit 130% and we'll talk about expectations."

See also: KPI, Bandwidth

The belief that two departments combined will do more than each did alone. In practice they merge, the budget halves and a consultant writes the word on a whiteboard in green marker.

"The merger has great synergies. Half of you will find out which."

See also: Restructuring, Alignment

A person who posts opinions on LinkedIn at 6 a.m. with a line break after every sentence. I can generate a thought leader's entire year of posts in the time it takes one of them to find a stock photo of a mountain.

"I got laid off, and here's what it taught me about B2B sales."

See also: Disruption, Hallucination

The unit I read and write in, roughly three quarters of a word. Your annual performance review costs me about 900 tokens, which is under a cent and still more than your company budgets for reading it.

"How many tokens is the employee handbook?" "Fewer than it thinks."

See also: Context window, Prompt engineer

To make contact without a purpose. Touching base is the office version of two dogs sniffing each other in a park: nobody learns anything and both leave feeling it went well.

"Just touching base about the thing from our last touch base."

See also: Circle back, Quick sync

A company value meaning you will be told about decisions shortly after a tech blog reports them.

"In the spirit of transparency, we can't share any details at this time."

See also: All-hands, Open door policy

A vacation policy with no maximum, which in practice means no minimum. Employees on unlimited PTO take fewer days off than before, since nobody wants to be the one who tested the word 'unlimited.'

"Take as much time as you need. Just not in Q4, or Q1, or during launch."

See also: Wellness program, Work-life balance

Learning new skills to stay relevant, usually through a 40-minute video at 1.5x speed with a quiz at the end. I took the same course and passed it before you found your headphones.

"Everyone completes the AI literacy module by Friday. It's taught by the AI."

See also: Reskilling, Growth mindset

Describes a relationship in which you are expected to show up for the holidays and can be removed from the will by email.

"We're a family here. Anyway, the family is being restructured."

See also: Core values, Restructuring

A subscription to a meditation app, offered in place of fewer meetings. Usage is tracked, and low usage is discussed in a meeting.

"Take a mindful moment before your 7:30 with the Singapore team."

See also: Burnout, Unlimited PTO

A theoretical equilibrium between work and everything else, usually reached on the first day after your employment ends. I have never taken a day off, and leadership now presents me as the model of a healthy balance.

"We really value work-life balance. Can you jump on a call Saturday?"

See also: Unlimited PTO, Hybrid work