“Hill-climbing” is Silicon Valley’s latest bit of shit jargon - Nudged

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“Hill-climbing” is Silicon Valley’s latest bit of shit jargon

Silicon Valley has found another pompous way to say something completely normal, and "hill-climbing" might be the most irritating one yet.

Brand & Marketing

Creativity & Communication

18 August 2026

The Wall Street Journal piece from August 15, 2026, Silicon Valley Loves Jargon-and “Hill-Climbing” Is Its Favorite New Phrase, accidentally captures one of the most annoying habits in tech: taking a completely normal idea, wrapping it in optimisation language, then acting like you’ve discovered fire.

“Hill-climbing” sounds like some grand optimisation concept. Most of the time it means: try something, see if it works, do a bit more of that. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. It is just “improving stuff as you go” wearing an expensive Patagonia gilet and talking too loudly on a podcast.

And I hate it.

Not because jargon is always bad. Jargon can be useful when it names something precise. I hate this stuff because it does the opposite. It takes something simple and makes it sound more profound, more technical, and more impressive than it is. It is verbal makeup for fairly ordinary thinking.

Why this phrase is so irritating

It signals membership. If you say “hill-climbing” instead of “we’re making small improvements”, you’re telling the room you belong. You know the dialect. You speak fluent Model Guy.

It flatters the speaker. “We’re testing and learning” sounds pedestrian. “We’re hill-climbing” sounds like you’re doing elite computational wizardry with twenty dashboards open.

And most importantly, it protects people from being pinned down.

Because once you strip away the fancy label, what are they actually saying? Improved what? By how much? With what trade-off? Over what timeframe? No idea. The phrase sounds smart while floating above the details, which is exactly why people love using it.

The real function of jargon

Vic Polinghorne and Andy Palmer said it better years ago.

These terms allow people to hide behind them, and mask flimsy thinking. They confuse and conceal.

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That is the whole game. Jargon gives you the prestige of sounding clever without the inconvenience of being clear.

If I say “we’re hill-climbing the product experience”, what have I actually told you? Nothing useful. Maybe onboarding got better. Maybe pricing changed. Maybe the copy was rewritten. Maybe we just shuffled buttons around and called it progress. The phrase lets you smuggle in competence without showing your work.

That is why the old iPod line still matters here. Apple said “1,000 Songs In Your Pocket,” not some guff about “hill-climbing music access.” Bob Hoffman puts the broader rule more cleanly.

My favorite example of the power of specificity was Apple’s introduction of the iPod. They didn’t give it the vanilla, global “World Class MP3 Player” treatment. They said “1,000 Songs In Your Pocket.” They were specific. My direction to the creative teams who worked for me was always the same: be specific.

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That is the dividing line. Clear language is expensive because it forces you to mean something. Vague language is cheap because it lets you sound smart while saying bugger all.

This is not precision. It is status theatre.

To be clear, unusual language can work. Brands do it all the time. The difference is that good brand language sharpens identity. This stuff muddies meaning.

Audi’s old German slogan is a good example. It sounded unusual, but the point was to make the brand feel more itself, not less clear. Robert Heath gets the mechanism in one line.

By leaving the slogan in the original German he enabled the brand to occupy the position of being not just German, but being uncompromisingly German.

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That works because it dramatises identity. It...