“Wired, Tired, Expired” was a fun feature of Wired Magazine back in the day. It would take a general concept and give you three variations – one that was ‘of the moment,’ one that was recently popular but long in the tooth, and one which needed to have a stake put through its heart.
Well, I don’t have any of the first two categories for you but here are three EXPIRED concepts
Non-Technical [as in, ‘He’s a non-technical product manager’]. Online resources, code school, and the ‘no code’ movement all started taking chips off this monument, but AI has felled it completely. Non-technical is now merely a choice, and a very bad one. Sure there may still be gaps in proficiency, experience, and training – I’m not making the case that engineering as a discipline is disappearing any time soon – but the idea that anyone is your company is ‘non-technical’ is on them and on you, not part of a job spec. And some of the best startups aren’t just looking for technically inclined hires, they’re helping their entire org chart use AI tooling [like Ambrook – financial tools for farming and the real world – here’s a post describing the effort and the curriculum developed].
Unicorn. A sharp concept when it was originally coined to represent the rarity of startups with a $1b+ valuation, it now poisons our entire way of thinking about success. A paper mark that incentivizes some founders to strive for a near-meaningless financial benchmark given to you by an investor who has equal motivation to be ‘in Unicorns.’ Media that whether it’s the pace of the job, or the will of their editors, or their own lack of experience in the tech world, uses the threshold as proxy for quality and relevancy. And the attempts to assign names to $10b, $100b, etc companies MegaDecaDragons, is just so square. Back to focus on the product and the company and the business model. Not the interim valuation.
Oversubscribed. The tiny hill I continue to die upon until style guides and LLMs begin to advise against the description (of a funding round or VC fund raise). As I’ve written previously, it’s meaningless and manufactured (will let you click through for the full rant).
Ok, what jargon do you hate?
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Most recent savings from my friends
My total to date
