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Appropriate to share standardized terminology proposal?

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Junior Engineer at Startups4 months ago

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.

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    Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
    4 months ago

    I love this idea! Here's how I would take it forward:

    • Start a wiki/doc with your best effort of the terminology you've heard, and what they should mean. Don't share this broadly yet.
    • Once you have a draft document, ask for feedback from tech leads/tenured engineers on the team. Feedback should be about both (1) the idea of having a canonical doc for company vocabulary and (2) the definition of each term.
      • If you're worried about this coming across as too aggressive, frame the conversation more as "I've found myself feeling confused so I wrote this down for myself."
    • Assuming they don't have fundamental objections with the idea, follow up with them once you've addressed all their feedback.
    • Now that you've done all this legwork, you're ready to share more broadly with the team. Since you've already socialized this with so many people, they'll be bought in.

    The questions you should be ready to answer:

    • Who will keep this up to date as things change?
    • How do we make this easily accessible for new people on the team?

    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.