STARRED Book Review: IT Dictionary

Reviewed by Andrea Marks-Joseph

This satirical workplace guidebook is a laugh-out-loud group therapy session that offers technical and emotional support by decoding corporate-speak.

Whether you’re sitting down to start a specific chapter or flipping through IT Dictionary randomly as you wait for a software update, this book is an absolute blast. Author Adam Korga hilariously explains the dizzying industry terms you’ve heard in feedback from Finance, Legal, and Human Resources representatives.

This is a book to corrupt any semblance of workplace sanctity and protect your sanity as a result. The author has come up with some pretty genius phrases to describe the sheer stupidity of corporate-speak—delightfully eviscerating modern workplace norms with terms that feel impossible not to adopt into your lexicon, whether you work in IT or not.

Korga’s guide to decoding buzzwords comes with a link to an exceptional, drinking-game-worthy, buzzword bingo-board website to inject fun into your work life. This game has real trend potential and would be fun and quite thrilling for trusted work companions to secretly compete in.

Paired with the advice that “If you hear four of these [buzzwords] in a single meeting, your project is already doomed—but the slide deck will look amazing,” it’s clear that this book is not for the LinkedIn rise and grind, growth mindset crew, but for the people working with and under them, doing the actual work. IT Dictionary translates nonsensical workplace productivity fantasies and tells you how to work around them. “Rename ‘bugs’ to ‘user feedback incidents’… Color everything green by default; don’t show raw numbers. Use emojis instead; call any flat line a ‘plateau before the next phase of growth.’”

IT Dictionary is a genuine guide that offers the reader valuable “battle-tested” insights, tips on phrasing your Slack replies, and tactical responses to prioritize your wellbeing in a way that will make it seem like you care about maximizing your employer’s profit. The diplomatic language table converting what you want to say (“One team member left already… The founders are fighting”) to what you should write in the pitch deck (“Lean, focused founding team… Passionate, committed leadership”) is invaluable.

If you’ve ever spent an entire weekend eating pretzels while bent over a PowerPoint presentation, only for someone higher-up to come over to your desk on Monday morning and say they realized (over Michelin star meals and cocktails at a private beach with friends this weekend) that this brand new, big angle would work better and can we please rush to update the pitch deck in light of this, you’ll appreciate IT Dictionary‘s satirical game packaging for the “Expansion Pack – Executive Disruption Edition” which features “The New Stakeholder Who Knows Everything, Surprise CEO Drop-In, [and] Mandatory Reprioritization with Zero Context.”

So many of the translation tables in this book would be funny to share in group chats, in a lasting “I need to screenshot that for future use” way, and in an immediate “use the office printer and laminator to get this pinned up on my open-plan cubicle wall” way. IT Dictionary is worth reading for the sense of camaraderie alone. Feeling seen and heard by a book eviscerating buzzwords is something that can be so special, so personal, and yet so universal.

I’ve worked with Public Relations agencies and social media teams who would have loved using Korga’s terms to describe their clients—beauty brands and bank executives alike. You could create team-building exercises around this book, helping your staff bond by creating insider jokes to let off steam and feel understood during the worst moments of their workday. If you have IT guys available to you whenever your laptop starts “doing that weird thing again,” you might want to buy them this book. I’m being so serious; you go on your merry way once the IT ticket is resolved, but they’ll need this emotional release to gain the strength to survive until your next call.

As a millennial who has worked at global Public Relations agencies, tech startups, and international nonprofits where “the Founder’s word is both supreme law and fluid reality,” this book was actual laugh-out-loud funny to me. When I read some of the jokes to my dad (whose early career was spent training tech support staff), my mom (who has her IT team’s personal numbers saved in her phone) and my younger brother (whose accounting career has so far been spent at tech startups for whom LinkedIn “corpo-speak” is the Bible), they found it just as entertaining as I did.

IT Dictionary may be written for tech support teams, but anyone who has ever made extensive calls to IT or lost hours of their life making urgent edits to a pitch deck on presentation day will find value in laughing about this unfortunate universal experience.

If you loved and miss British broadcast satire W1A or NBC’s corporate comedy American Auto, this book is for you. If you’re sick of investor pitches, optimization, and over-valued C-suite input, this book is for you. It’s for all who need to be warned (and all who learned the hard way) that in the corporate world, a rockstar developer is really just a “Poor soul expected to do backend, frontend, UX, infra, IT ops—and support tickets in between sprints.”

IT Dictionary directly addresses the soul-crushing minutiae within an enraging experience that most workers of the modern world know intimately. No one has created a way for us to decompress (that isn’t ranting to your coworkers or partner) from this corporate chokehold until Adam Korga, until right now.

This would be a hilarious gift to congratulate someone on their first job in software development or IT support. It’s something they’ll smile politely and thank you for upon receiving it, but cling to like a lifeline of real-talk advice and sanity in a sea of frantic requests after a few weeks on the job.

Readers who, like me, have been praying for the downfall of generative AI will enjoy this book’s honest exploration of the topic (Part V covers AI’s increasingly inescapable positioning in consumer tech and our workplaces). Author Adam Korga provides a rare honest view from someone in the industry, acknowledging the greed-powered willful blindness that executives engage in in favor of a computer that cannot yet but will hopefully-someday replace their human employees who inconveniently require time off for bathroom breaks and sleep. This chapter includes admitting the truth of LLMs hallucinating information and being hilariously worse at its job than a human could ever be.

With his highly entertaining, sharp humor, Adam Korga critiques bureaucracy, stakeholder control, the hell of HR’s tactically-worded performance reviews, corporate-enforced remote work protocols that slow down your computer and make you doubt the quality of your home wifi (which works perfectly on every other device), and the many hours of your precious life lost to fulfilling your millionaire founder’s whims. IT Dictionary is a gift to all who have suffered through corporate systems and a guide to making it through your workday without truly going insane.

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