5 exercises — idioms you'll hear daily in IT teams: the figurative vocabulary of developers, PMs, and tech leads everywhere.
Quick reference: Tech culture idioms covered here
bandwidth — available time/capacity: "I don't have the bandwidth right now"
bikeshedding — over-discussing trivial details while ignoring important ones
yak shaving — doing many unrelated tasks to accomplish the original one
dogfooding — using your own product internally to test it
boil the ocean — trying to do everything at once when focus is needed
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
A team lead says in Slack: "I don't have the bandwidth for another project this sprint." What does bandwidth mean here?
Bandwidth is originally a networking term (the rate at which data can be transferred). In IT workplace talk, it is used metaphorically to mean available time, energy, or mental capacity. "I don't have the bandwidth" = "I'm already at full capacity — I can't take on anything more right now." It's extremely common in tech team conversations. Similar expressions: "I'm at capacity", "I'm slammed", "I'm full", "I'm stretched thin." Origin: networking, where bandwidth determines how much data a connection can handle at once.
2 / 5
During a code review, a reviewer writes: "This is a bit of bikeshedding, but the function name could be more descriptive." What is the reviewer communicating?
Bikeshedding (also "bike-shedding") comes from Parkinson's Law of Triviality: the observation that people spend disproportionate time discussing minor, easy-to-understand issues (like what color to paint a bike shed) while ignoring complex, important ones (like the nuclear reactor next door). In IT: "We bikeshedded for 30 minutes over the variable name while the architecture is completely wrong." The reviewer here is flagging their own comment as low-stakes: "I know this is nitpicking, but here's a suggestion." It's often used as self-deprecating acknowledgment: "total bikeshedding on my part, feel free to ignore."
3 / 5
A developer explains his afternoon: "I wanted to upgrade one dependency but ended up yak shaving for three hours." What happened?
Yak shaving describes a chain of prerequisite tasks that leads you further and further from your original goal. The term comes from a Ren & Stimpy episode, popularized in tech by MIT. The classic example: "I wanted to write a test → but first I need to update my local environment → but that requires upgrading Node → which broke my package manager → which needs a dependency fix → …" You end up metaphorically shaving a yak, having completely lost sight of what you started to do. It differs from bikeshedding (wasting time on triviality) — yak shaving is well-intentioned but leads to unproductive detours.
4 / 5
A CTO announces: "We've been dogfooding the new release internally for two weeks — the team reports a significant improvement in load times." What does dogfooding mean?
Dogfooding (or "eating your own dog food") means using your own product or service in your daily work. The phrase comes from a 1980s Alpo dog food TV commercial, and was popularized at Microsoft in a 1988 internal memo. The idea: if your own team uses the product, you'll find bugs and UX problems fast — before customers do. "We dogfood all our tools before launch." Companies that famously dogfooded: Microsoft ran Windows internally before release; Google uses all its products internally. The opposite — building something you'd never use yourself — is sometimes called "astroturfing" or just a sign of a misaligned product strategy.
5 / 5
In a planning meeting, a product manager says: "We can't boil the ocean — let's pick the three highest-impact items and do those well." What is the PM saying?
Boil the ocean = to attempt an impossibly large or comprehensive task when a focused approach would be more practical. "You can't boil the ocean" is a warning against over-scoping. In sprint planning or roadmap discussions: "We don't need to boil the ocean — pick the top 3 improvements and ship them." The idiom is used to push back on scope creep, overly ambitious plans, or anyone who wants to redesign everything at once. Related expressions: "Don't try to eat the elephant in one bite" (same idea), "scope creep" (technical term for goals that keep expanding), "MVP" (Minimum Viable Product — the antidote to boiling the ocean).