Anti-Glossary

Clarity and humanity live at the center of our vocabulary when we talk about people. Automattic prefers a friendlier approach to the typical jargon for talking about staffing, hiring, and moving people. We avoid ambiguity by using a specific word or phrase to communicate the exact need.

Below are common jargon-y words with suggested alternatives in bold.

Resources

Instead use a noun that best represents the type of resource you mean: people, money, time, or tools. Most often we mean “people.”

Better:

  • “This project is on hold due to lack of JavaScript Wranglers to work on the UI in Calypso.”
  • “Let’s plan to increase marketing spend once the budget is approved.”
  • “Due to several people on leave, I’d like to know how you best plan to allocate your backend developers around projects.”
  • “Do we have enough money to keep buying per-seat licenses for this software?”

Headcount

When representing an actual count of the number of people, a two-word phrase is accurate: head count. Often used as a jargon-y business term “headcount,” meaning people: job openings and new hires.

Better:

  • “We need 4 new hires on this team.”
  • “This team is asking for 1 new designer.”
  • “In January we’d like to add 5 new Happiness Engineers.”
  • “The head count in Jetpack this year will likely increase by 15%.” (A good use, in my opinion.)
  • “We have approval from Matt for 1-2 job openings for an Excellence Wrangler on Mobile. Let’s get the hiring post up!”

Backfill

Simpler and more clear to use a verb such as fill or replace. A common reason would be to hire or move someone after a departure.

Better:

  • “We’d like to replace __ (team member’s name) to fill __ (title, or role).”
  • “By February we should hire or move two team leads to replace Joe Smith and Rachel Applewood who moved to Tumblr.”
  • “When do you think we can hire a replacement for __ (team member’s name) to fill __ (title, or role)?”
  • “Do we plan to hire someone new for the Head of Design position?”

Imprecise Dates

It’s tempting to say something will happen in Q3, or second half of the year, but the more specific you can make a target or deadline the better. Worst case, pick the last date of the month, but instead of saying an initiative will ship in Q3, say it will ship by September 30th. The more specific the better: what time UTC does it happen? This specificity hopefully drives better conversations and work about everything required to meet that specific goal. Also when things slip, it’s not Q3 to Q4, it can be specific, like September 30th at 16:00 UTC to October 14th at 16:00 UTC.

“Anti-glossary” is inspired by Bessemer. See also, Richard Stallman’s anti-glossary.