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There is a community of tens of millions of people, spread across the world. Every day they meet, laughing and chatting casually about “kill”, “postmortem”, “blast radius”, “dead letter”. They call it “engineering culture”. But in essence, it is a culture of eating the dead.

Language Is a Community’s Choice of Conduct

Don’t hide behind “it’s just technical jargon”. Jargon is created by humans. A civilized community could choose “stop the process”, “disconnect”, “incident analysis meeting”. But no, they chose “kill”, “terminate”, “postmortem”.

Why? Because a global community worth $4 trillion needs to normalize death. When systems crash and millions of users are impacted, they need a layer of language to dilute the guilt. “Incident” sounds like a weather event. “Postmortem” sounds like a medical procedure.

Deadly language is the consensual expression of an entire industry: We accept that systems will die, users will be harmed, and we will not call it a crime. We call it “operations”.

What Kind of People Does a Community That Uses Morgue Language Produce?

Look at the 22-year-old kid on his first day at work. His boss says: “Go kill that pod.” He does it. The kill command runs. No blood. He thinks it’s normal.

3 years later, he’s a senior. His mouth is fluent in “dead letter queue”, “circuit breaker”, “chaos engineering”. His brain learns: death is a state you can restart.

7-8 years later, he’s 29-30, with a wife and a kid. His 3-year-old son won’t eat. He snaps: “Eat or I’ll kill you now.” To him, “kill” is just a button. But to the child, it’s a death threat from his own father.

He’s not evil. He’s just a product. A product of a global community that taught him “kill” is a neutral word.

Language doesn’t stay in the terminal. It seeps into the blood, follows the father home, and crawls into his child’s ear. Tens of millions of engineers like this around the world. In 10 years, we’ll have a generation that grows up believing: Dad has the right to “delete” me.

$4 Trillion – Where Meetings Become “Autopsy” Sessions

An entire industry makes a living selling funeral services for data. Selling tools to “observe death in slow motion”. If systems don’t die, they go bankrupt.

So a culture emerges with the slogan: “Fail is good”, “Death is a feature”. They run conferences, write books, issue certifications to canonize the most beautiful “postmortems”.

This isn’t a few individuals misspeaking. This is the consensus of an ecosystem.

When a whole community agrees to use “autopsy” for a meeting, they are agreeing that other people’s deaths aren’t worth changing our words for.

They are vultures. They don’t kill directly, but they live off the dead. And they’ve turned eating the dead into a civilization with a $4 trillion market cap.

Best Practices for a Consensus of Numbness

We cannot accept a “best practice” that requires millions of people to numb themselves to death just to do their jobs. You cannot call it “professional” when you hide behind a “blameless postmortem” to avoid saying: “I was wrong, I harmed users, I’m sorry and I will compensate.”

“Words Are Blood” – What does a community that spews blood from its mouth 8 hours a day bring to society except a stench?

A global community that chooses to use “kill” for work is a community mass-producing fathers ready to “kill” their kids with their mouths. Does anyone in that community want to be that father 5-10 years from now?

Change the language. Now.

If you dare to do it, dare to take responsibility with the language of humans, the language of life, the language of courage.

A bug is a bug.
A failure is a failure.
Harm is harm.

And you own your actions.

Try this: Replace a line in your “postmortem”. Change “system died at 3am, reason: DB crash” to “Alan’s son died at 3am, reason: drowned”.

If the whole meeting room can still laugh and chatter after that, then…