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.
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.
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.
That works because it dramatises identity. It is trying to be memorable.
“Hill-climbing” is trying to sound smarter than the underlying thought.
The funniest part of the WSJ piece is when this language starts leaking into normal life. One AI researcher asks his daughter whether she wants to “climb the geometry hill today.” Another parent explains a lost tennis match as a “hill-climbing process.” Imagine talking like that in your kitchen. Bleak. A metaphor that explains everything eventually explains nothing.
What this tells you about Silicon Valley tech
This is the bit I actually care about. “Hill-climbing” is not just an annoying phrase. It reveals what this culture thinks intelligence is supposed to sound like.
Everything has to sound computational. Everything has to sound systematised. Everything has to sound like it came out of an optimisation lab instead of a human brain using judgement.
Vic Polinghorne and Andy Palmer had the right rule for this too.
Hill-climbing does the opposite. It complicates and mystifies a basic human activity because complication now signals status. That is why these phrases spread. They are prestige goods for people who want to look sharp without having to be sharp.
And yes, that matters commercially. If you work in branding, strategy, copy, or sales, this is useful to notice. Buyers copy the language of the groups they want status from. Markets do this all the time. So you need to know when to translate this stuff, when to puncture it, and when to refuse to talk like a wanker just because the category does.
The ideology hiding inside the phrase
The real problem is not the phrase itself. It is the worldview hiding inside it.
“Hill-climbing” makes one style of progress sound obviously intelligent: small steps, constant optimisation, no big detours. Sometimes that is sensible. Sometimes it is just caution dressed up as technique.
That is why the phrase matters. It turns temperament into status. Incrementalism becomes a flex. Basic common sense gets repackaged as if it came off a whiteboard at DeepMind.
When a company talks like this all day, you can infer plenty. It probably overvalues optimisation. It probably undervalues judgement, taste, and theatre. And it probably thinks sounding technical is the same as being persuasive. Usually it isn’t.
The only sane response
Rolf Dobelli has a useful warning here too. This is what bad “hill-climbing” talk often does: it takes a messy reality, gives it a neat label, adds a bit of evidence, and pretends the explanation is finished.
That is worth remembering here, because “hill-climbing” can sound explanatory long before anyone has explained anything.
Still, the deeper pattern is real. Jargon thrives when it signals belonging, makes the ordinary sound intelligent, and removes the burden of being specific. That is why it catches on, and it is also why you should mistrust it. When someone says they are “hill-climbing”, the only question worth asking is: what, exactly, are you doing?
I think it is a shabby way of sounding clever.
It encourages vagueness. It rewards fog. And people start parroting it because it makes them feel like insiders.
And if you work in brand, strategy, or positioning, that instinct matters. Clear language is still a competitive advantage precisely because so many people are hiding behind inflated crap like this.