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Let's talk about terminology

Dec 30, 2022

In the process of writing several other posts I hope to have out in the next few days, I’ve been collecting a long list of terminology that comes up and we should just list out somewhere. I’ll keep adding to the list as new terms come up.

People terminology

(The) Talent: people companies want to hire or target for a hire. In other words, you.
Hiring manager: the person hiring for a job, most likely the person who will become the direct manager of the new hire.
Directs / direct reports: the team members who report to some manager
IC = individual contributor: a full-time employee who is not a manager
FTE = full-time employee: someone employed directly by a company, in contrast to contractors, who may also work the same hours but aren’t considered FTEs. FTEs are paid directly by the company. Compensation often includes other benefits like stock or bonuses. Contractors are paid by their vendor companies. Note, confusingly, that none of this actually refer to how many hours you work. Contractors will often work a similar number of hours to FTEs, sometimes even on the same teams.

Job content terminology

Cross-functional collaboration: being able to work with individuals who hold different kinds of functions. For example, working with people from other university departments or who have a different theoretical focus. Or, working with engineers, designers, product managers, and finance.
Deliverables: the tangible product of your work, often the things you’ll quantify and plan ahead for. Papers, for example.
Insights: what we would usually just call the main findings of our research, preferably phrased in an actionable way so someone can implement improvements based on them.
Stakeholders: the people who drive decisions or otherwise have a vested interest in what you do.
Resources: material and financial but also the actual people who work with/for you.
Value (or, delivering value): the financial worth of your company; in the academic setting you’d increase the value of your university by bringing in grants and awards or by teaching courses.
End-to-End (E2E): describes a process from beginning to end through all stages. You probably do this all the time for your projects.
Scope (v): Scope/scope out a project - make a plan before a project is implemented to estimate what needs to happen: how many hours it would take, what expertise is needed, what resources are needed, what dependencies exist, all of which eventually translates into how many individuals need to be staffed on the project and what other resources need to be dedicated and for how long.
KPIs = Key Performance Indicators: usually broader and a bit more abstract than OKRs. Used for strategic long-term planning.
OKR = Objectives and Key Results: usually measurable and on a lower scale than KPIs, quarterly or yearly.
Other terms you can probably guess from the name itself: Fast-paced work environment, build business/customer relationships, leverage resources, identify metrics
QA = quality assurance, the process whereby someone makes sure the products you produce are correct and the process you use is efficient

Getting hired and evaluated

Comp = compensation, including base salary, RSUs or stock options, bonuses, etc.
Target bonus: a percent of your base salary that you will receive as a bonus if you meet some criteria in your yearly performance review.
Sign on bonus: a one-time sum you receive when you start your job or some set time after you start.
RSUs = Restricted Stock Units: these vest over a fixed schedule, e.g. twice per year over four years.
Perf = performance: could refer to an individual (e.g. during your yearly performance evaluation) or to a system (e.g. referring to how fast a system is or how large it is in memory).

Language-specific

Low-resource languages: languages with fewer available data and support
Synthetic data: manually crafted by humans according to some criteria; think: constructed vs naturalistic example sentences in syntax.
Locale = a language+country pair, e.g. Canadian French, Singapore English, etc. Often nuance is missing and these may be correlated with flags or nations, so you will often see “American English” but you’ll rarely see dialects of American English represented beyond that.

Acronyms (both general and language specific)

PM = project manager
EPM = engineering project manager
HCOMP = human computation
HCI = human computer interaction
UX = user research
UI = user interface
AI\ML = Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, often used together as AIML
ASR = automatic speech recognition
TTS = text to speech
MT = machine translation
NL = natural language
NLP, NLU, NLG = natural language {processing, understanding, generation}

Have I left out other important terminology? Please drop a note.