"informs how much shit we can expect to fit in a bag"
"the floor is lava"
"chattier than others, ... communication is essential"
"punt on coherence and just ride dirty"
"put their eggs in a single basket"
"blistering number of new products"
"super weird hobbies"
Scanning the essay, most of it is pretty tame. There are a few uncommon words in an essay long enough for statistically some of it to be uncommon. What exactly is the objection?
Everything about this article is just nonsense, from the (meaningless) title to the needless $40 words, to the made-up meta-meta-concepts that have zero practical use.
I could almost imagine the intolerable sniffles of Slavoj Zizek as I tried to read.
Having read the essay the title is a pun on two different meanings of the word. Work - what people do, is actually just work - the theoretical capacity of a distributed system. This is roughly the point of his essay - treat the organisation of people as you would to optimise a distributed system.
On an unrelated note I see that inflation is hitting $5 words particularly hard :)
In the very beginning, "emic" and "etic" are introduced (and defined in plain english inline). They are never used again. The author could have just used the plain english and got on with it.
Reading the definitions those two words do capture exactly what is being described, while plain english would be much more verbose to do the same. I had not encountered them before but they seem like useful words in this context.
