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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

The one piece of jargon in tech that I loathe is not listed here: "Ask". Not as a verb, but as a noun.

"We have a few asks for your team". - ie: we need something from you.

From what I have heard, this came out of Microsoft at some point. As engineers and managers drifted between companies, it became pretty common across Lake Washington over at Amazon. I can only hope appropriate quarantine procedures are followed to keep it contained in the Seattle region, but I suspect there are cases spreading globally at this point.

I don't even know what it is that I hate about it. It's perfectly reasonable as a word, and usually I'm a linguistic descriptivist. But ugh, that word.

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>"We have a few asks for your team".

Almost as poor a choice as "What learnings did we get from this experience"? that has emerged as corporate speak.

There is something unsettling about the word "lessons" missing from a persons vocabulary.

I'd use "What did we learn [...]"

"that was a miss"

The usage as a noun is quite well established outside tech. For example, in finance, market prices are called Asks and Bids. In the game of cricket, the target score for the team batting second is also called Ask.

That's a really fair point- it's usage in other industries and contexts may be where the term came from.

Specifically, I'm talking about the "ask" noun meaning "request for work". "My team has 10 outstanding asks from the billing team, but we don't report to their VP so we can deprioritize 8 of them".

I would hope that in that context, you don't presume that I mean one of the two definitions you've posted :)

Yeah - I thought it came from the east coast? DC specifically is where I first heard it.

Can't stand 'actionable'. Grew up with it meaning "grounds for a legal action or lawsuit" (I guess I knew to many lawyers) and its still jarring to end meetings with actionable next steps.

Ask as a noun in that sense goes back to Old English. The OED has a 13th century cite with the alternate spelling axe:

c1275 (▸?a1200) Laȝamon Brut (Calig.) (1963) l. 529 Eouer axe ich eow leue.

Oh thanks for this comment. A little over a year ago I started working for a Seattle based company (remotely), and this is done constantly. I had never heard it before and couldn't figure out if it was a really common thing that I missed somehow or what.

The company does have a lot of ex-amazons as well.

It's funny to see how these new phrases/keywords are born. I've been in the software industry for ~15 years now (longer than some, shorter than others), I always get amused when I see new phrases gaining traction and spreading. It's like a verbal pandemic, from a certain point of view.

> a lot of ex-amazons

Not gonna lie, seeing “ex-amazons” instead of “ex-amazonians” definitely gave me a light chuckle and a mental image of incredibly tall giant women who somehow decided to quit being amazons and ended up becoming of a rather average height.

If you want to live a long and happy life, embrace neologism. Language is fluid, and when you decide to stop learning, you become an irrelevant fossil. Corpspeak is easy to hate, but is it actually the neologism that you hate, or the suits that use them?

It’s far too late for containment; “ask” as a noun was in use in the Bay Area in the early 2000s. At this point it’s endemic :(

Hasn't yet made it over to the UK, thankfully. Let's hope the Atlantic is a sufficient barrier...

Does “that's a big ask” count?

Yes, it's a slippery slope

Then I'm afraid to say, it reached the UK several years ago. (Perhaps decades.) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ask#Noun definition #2. (Definition #1 is the directly problematic one.)

Sadly this sort of thing caught on in the UK too where the tidal wave of US corporate speak was impossible to hold back. It's rife in the tech sector and beyond.

I find all of this sort of thing; "blue sky thinking", "touch base", "leverage", "reach out" "deliverables" and so on, to be substitutes for clarity and real meaning. Just speak clearly and like a normal person please! Quite apart from murdering the language you often find that, whilst this sort of speech sounds clever on the surface, it's often hiding vagueness and half-baked thoughts. It gives the illusion of substance.

"Lets touch base offline on those key deliverables when we have enough bandwidth and ensure our thinking is joined up". Makes me think of David Brent from The Office!

> ensure our thinking is joined up

"ensure we're in alignment"

Sigh.

I think it originated in the older phrase, "that's a big ask."

Can anyone explain "loop" as in "interview loop"? It doesn't make sense to me but a lot of people use it as a normal phrase. Is it an Amazon thing?

It's definitely big at Amazon. And I can tell you why.

Typically, recruiters try to setup 4 interviewees with 4 interviewers. You 'loop' through them, like speed dating. It's "an interview loop".

At least, that's my interpretation.

The first place I ever encountered it was at Microsoft. You'd start the interview day with the recruiter, have a series of interviews and conclude back at the recruiter at the end of the "loop."

(A single "no hire" and you'd not get hired.)

Well, it's a euphemism. It's being used a sugar-coated variety instead of the perfectly good words "request", "requirement", "demand" etc (whichever is appropriate).

The one I dislike is "issue" as in "we have some issues". No, you mean "we have some problems". But "issue" just sounds nicer than "problem", I guess. That one is thoroughly lost.

Issue is a euphemism for problem? Those two words are completely equivalent to me, relaying identical information, neither sounding nicer than the other.

What's the difference between an ask and a request?

Pithy statement of the principle (more often ignored than followed) of:

Don't invent a new word when there's a perfectly good one already available.

"What's the difference between a learning and a lesson?" would be another good question.

No difference

> What's the difference between an ask and a request?

An "ask" is part of a business negotiation, a "request" is usually interpersonal. An "ask" invites a conversation about what it will take to make it happen (money, etc.) while a "request" invites acceptance or rejection.

In the original sense "that's a big ask" has implications that the ask is not practical and is received with a raised eyebrow.

A bit like the quote from yes minister

"That's very brave of you, minister. An extremely courageous decision,"

followed up by the explanation

"Oh, yes! "Controversial" only means "this will lose you votes". "Courageous" means "this will lose you the election"!"

Yeah, this one bugs me too. I try to use 'requests' instead.

I think the vast majority of corporate/industry speak is self-important gate-keeping, but you kind of lost me on this one to be honest!

I heard it in Philadelphia a decade ago.

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