I'm a junior SWE at a small company which does not have a lot of standardized culture or process. A lot of inaccurate / non-standard terms get thrown around (for example, we call the entirety of one of our older apps the "backend" because of the way our repo is structured) and I've found that this has caused confusion in meetings, especially with new engineers being onboarded. Even though something like this usually only causes a 10-second confusion which is cleared up with follow-up questions, it feels like such an unnecessary inefficiency that could be easily resolved. Also, in general, I believe this can leak into situation where repercussions are worse like client-facing or investor-facing meetings, where for example a manager might call the old app the "backend" to a client, leaving them confused and thus unaligned on what's going on.
I typically wouldn't care about something of this scope as a junior, but it seems to me that the entire org would benefit from something like this, and that nobody else has addressed it nor will address it. So I've drafted a proposal for standardized terminology, with suggestions for specific terms to use and specific terms to deprecate in our company vernacular.
My question is whether it's appropriate to submit this proposal to my managers. It feels necessary but also not be my place / come across as aggressive. Of course it is hard to answer this question without knowing the specific company culture, but nonetheless, I would like to hear thoughts from seniors about how something like this would come across when coming from a junior.
I love this idea! Here's how I would take it forward:
The questions you should be ready to answer:
As a junior without too much history on the team, you'll look much more impressive if you do the work and have answers to the above concerns.