Eight IT terms that pros want to see go

There are some words an IT pro never wants to hear, and, no, we’re not talking about, “I left my laptop in an Uber.” Some terms are unique to IT and uniquely irritating to industry practitioners.

We asked tech pros some of the IT words they dislike the most. (We received many submissions via email and chose 8 favorites. Some responses have been edited for length.)

Here’s some of the low-hanging fruit.

Low-hanging fruit. “Every time someone says, ‘Let’s go for the low-hanging fruit,’ I imagine a bunch of engineers awkwardly reaching for imaginary bananas. It’s meant to sound practical, but most of the time, those ‘easy wins’ turn out to be anything but.”—Kunal Kushwaha, field CTO, Civo

Single pane of glass. “The infamous ‘single pane of glass’ is an overused marketing term that some vendors throw around to sell unrealistic expectations, promising a mythical dashboard where everything is visible and manageable from one place…What is better than the single pane of glass? Effective integrations and interoperability across tools. In other words, ask vendors for an extensive and effective API catalog to support your own custom workflows.”—Ismael Valenzuela, SANS author and senior instructor, VP of threat research and intelligence, BlackBerry

The cloud. “It’s referred to as some magical place where all your data exists, just floating around in a carefree nirvana, instead of what it really is—a bunch of servers someone manages.”—Amit Patel, SVP, Consulting Solutions

Eating our own dog food. “‘Dogfooding’...refers to a situation in which an IT company uses its own early-stage products and services internally to find bugs and improve the user experience. Not only do I think it cheapens the practice, but I especially dislike this term because one of my chores as a kid was to feed our pet German Shepherd a bowl full of kibbles mixed with wet dog food, and the phrase takes me right back to the smell of Alpo in 1983. Yuck!”—Kevin Kline, technical evangelist for databases, SolarWinds

AI. “Artificial Intelligence encompasses a vast and intricate field, making it challenging to define and contextualize accurately. However, its frequent and often indiscriminate use in media and marketing has diluted its meaning to the point of near irrelevance. Established concepts such as machine learning, rule-based processing, and neural networks—some of which have existed for decades—are increasingly overshadowed by the all-encompassing label of ‘AI.’”—Jon Marler, manager and cybersecurity evangelist, Viking Cloud

Vulnerability. “...is often used narrowly to refer to patchable software defects, rather than weaknesses in security posture in a broader sense. Vulnerability, as in weakness, should also encompass defects or gaps in defenses, processes, response preparedness, or any other aspect of a comprehensive security and resilience program. As it is most commonly understood, the term diverts attention toward patchable software issues and away from programmatic weaknesses.”—David White, co-founder and president, Axio

Endpoint. “It’s a term that’s meant to be all-encompassing, but it’s often unclear when we use it broadly. Is an endpoint a phone, a laptop, a server, a keyboard, or even a network switch? The term can apply to a variety of different types of devices or points of connection within a network, so it ends up meaning everything and nothing at the same time.”—Josh Schofield, director of product management, NinjaOne

Shift-left. “Every company is shifting something left. It often means pushing more capability to an earlier stage of development, but every industry and vendor wants to shift more to the left. But if it’s all to the left, what’s right?”—Tanner Burson, VP of engineering, Prismatic.