Drawing on nearly two decades across DevOps, platform engineering, startups, and large organizations, Adam Korga dissects the language, rituals, and incentive structures that shape modern IT work. Not as theory, but as lived reality.
Named one of the Best Books of 2025 by Independent Book Review, IT Dictionary is not a parody of tech culture, but a translation manual written by someone who has lived inside it.
If you’ve sat through sprint planning that solved nothing, watched “temporary” fixes harden into infrastructure, or learned that incident response is often more about narrative control than resolution, this book is already familiar territory.
Inside, the book decodes:
- Agile and DevOps rituals — sprint planning, retros, velocity, and the ceremonies that promise alignment while quietly generating chaos.
- Buzzwords as systems — “building for scale,” “quick wins,” “AI accuracy,” and what they actually mean once incentives, risk, and politics enter the room.
- Operational truth — why fixing the bug often matters less than controlling the story around it, and how organizations learn to weaponize failure.
- Startup mythology — pivots, hype cycles, and the recurring belief that this time the dysfunction is strategic.
- AI as belief system — the New Age of enterprise tech, where probabilistic tools are marketed as certainty, responsibility is outsourced to models, and skepticism is quietly labeled as resistance to progress.
“An irreverent insider’s guide to the world of IT.” — Kirkus Reviews
Rather than long prose, IT Dictionary uses sharp definitions, tables, and single-sentence observations to expose how IT really functions — how work gets justified, delayed, escalated, or quietly buried.
As Independent Book Review notes, the book decodes corporate-speak with “delightfully eviscerating” precision and was named one of their Best Books of 2025 for its clarity, insight, and insider accuracy.
This book is for:
- Engineers and DevOps professionals who know that “it works on my machine” is a survival mantra.
- Product and platform teams navigating Agile theater, stakeholder pressure, and permanent urgency.
- Anyone who has ever been trapped in a corporate meeting, listening to people in plaid shirts, trying to figure out what they are actually talking about.
You won’t learn how to code from IT Dictionary.
But you will learn how to survive in the industry.
Adam Korga has worn almost every hat the tech industry could throw at him: developer, scrum master, team lead, architect, DevOps and platform engineer—sometimes all at once. Over nearly two decades, he's worked everywhere from scrappy freelancing gigs and chaotic startups to small software houses and multi-billion-dollar corporations.
In short: he's seen a lot, survived most of it, and now writes with the authority (and the sarcasm) of someone who knows the grind from the inside. IT Dictionary is the result—a survival guide that mixes laughter with a painful amount of recognition.
