@ Corporate speak

May 5, 2023 6:34 AM

I've been hearing "at scale" and "at speed" a ton at my current company in strategy/corporate speak. At scale = "able to scale up", "at speed" = "fast". When were these terms popularized? Have these terms gone outside of corporate culture?
posted by sandmanwv to Work & Money (17 answers total)

I don't have any citations offhand, but I'm reasonably sure "at scale" is from venture capital. I've never heard it outside of business, but I think that's because not much scales at the level that business can. A monogamous family can only scale up one child per nine months unless there are twins or triplets, and even then it's still linear growth. (I guess there's adoption, but you get my point.) And there's Baumol's cost disease - a string quarter still needs the same number of people and same amount of time to play a piece that it did a couple centuries ago. That can't scale.

I've heard "at speed" in sports contexts before, but not often, because there's an existing adverb ("quickly") that everyone already knows for this concept. (Which is why buzzwords like this are so frustrating.)
posted by kevinbelt at 6:52 AM on May 5, 2023

I've heard 'at scale' used sometimes in applied math and science, going back to the mid/late 90s. More likely is usage with a modifier, but it works as-is with appropriate context. Lots of biz bro jargon sort of apes useful phrases from science/research/industry but as far as I can tell the utility and meaning are mostly stripped away.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:08 AM on May 5, 2023

I don't know about "at speed" but "at scale" is something that emerged in the mid-oughts/early 2010s with "web 2.0" and usually means "at web scale" which originally meant: serving billions of web requests but today just means "for lots of users" or "lots of money".
posted by dis_integration at 7:09 AM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

I haven't heard "at scale" used to mean "capable of scaling", but instead with a related meaning: "at large scales", like dis_integration's examples above. As in, this app might be efficient for a small number of users, but is it efficient at scale?

To me these are adaptations from "at full/half/... scale" and "at full/half/... speed", which you'd hear in lots of contexts (art, engineering, etc. for the former; sailing, engineering, etc. for the latter).

There is also the (old, somewhat literary) construction "at length" ("he spoke at length") and possibly a few others where you have "at [noun of dimension]" without an adjective of quantity in the middle.
posted by trig at 7:19 AM on May 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

A google n-gram view of 'at scale' and few variants may be of interest.

Note the bump around 1960, not sure what's driving that but pretty sure it wasn't the web. And yes this doesn't mean "able to be scaled up" anywhere I've seen, but I don't talk to business people much.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:21 AM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

"At scale" was a thing we said at the job I started in 2000 in the web hosting center for a big network company. We had a lot of processes that failed when you pushed them too hard, because we were operating at the limits of cost effective hardware. Some problems could be solved merely by throwing more (cheapish) servers at the problem and rebalancing the load distribution, but other problems were either going to involve significantly more expensive hardware or some new software solution that nobody had developed yet. Every proposed solution for a given sort of problem got some testing to figure out if it was going to break at scale the way our current systems did, but even after testing we were never quite sure what problems we had failed to predict.

(Also the "at scale" we were talking about in 2000 is stuff you could do on a laptop now. I learned a lot about efficient processing of high volume streams of data then and the techniques are still useful now, but "at scale" has a whole new meaning. Just talking about this makes me feel old.)
posted by fedward at 7:37 AM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here's a search of Project Gutenberg that brings up a number of examples, with several from the 1800s, where "at speed" is used to mean "fast". (Note that around half of the usages of "at speed" there have other meanings.)
posted by trig at 7:38 AM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I frequently used the term "at scale" when talking about highly scalable Internet services such as USENET at least back in the '90's. It does not strike me as having been particularly unusual at the time, although the number of network service type things that were designed to scale well at the time were not that many. At the time, I was advocating for distributed designs for USENET and e-mail services; the big monolithic systems that were commonly built would fail when expected to scale to an unreasonable size. Stuff would "fail at scale" because you can only pack so many users onto a given server, but if you distributed the load and designed ways to allow the work to be performed on a bunch of smaller servers, you could actually scale up to very large levels. All the modern Kubernetes folks will go "a-duh" but it was relatively radical at the time. Solving problems to make things work at scale was hard at one time.
posted by jgreco at 7:44 AM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

As a non-profiteer, we always get these corporate jargon speak terms after they gain use in the corporate world. "At scale" has become generally used in my corner of the non-profit ecosystem, as someone said above, usually re: website capacity. I haven't heard "at speed".
posted by RajahKing at 7:57 AM on May 5, 2023

Another note about "at scale" and its VC connection is the link between it and startups. You build a product in a startup as fast as you can, which means it might be a product that works, but maybe doesn't work "at scale" since you're trying to race to get it to market before the investment capital runs out. But if it doesn't scale, then you can't have tons of users so you can't get a return. So it's more attractive to be able to argue to early investors that you're building something that will work "at scale", since "at scale" is when VCs start to see the value that will give them a return. Like if I built a gmail alternative but as soon as it had 500 users it became unusuable, that means you have to work on scaling it before it can create returns. But if it's built "at scale" from the start, then theoretically you just have to market it well enough to get 100 million users and make everyone rich.
posted by dis_integration at 8:09 AM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't have any citations offhand, but I'm reasonably sure "at scale" is from venture capital.

That's how I know it - for example, PG's "Do Things that Don't Scale" post*:

For hardware startups there's a variant of doing things that don't scale that we call "pulling a Meraki." Although we didn't fund Meraki, the founders were Robert Morris's grad students, so we know their history. They got started by doing something that really doesn't scale: assembling their routers themselves.

*I offer this link here as an example of using the phrase and make no claims about the usefulness of any advice contained therein
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 8:09 AM on May 5, 2023

'At scale' has gone outside of corporate culture, for example The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale by economist John List.
posted by catquas at 8:58 AM on May 5, 2023

I feel like "at X" means "having reached the intended stable value of X", e.g. "at altitude" as an aviation term for "having reached cruising altitude". So "at speed" doesn't necessarily mean "fast" so much as "ramped up to the desired speed", e.g., if I'm driving, "at speed" is how I might describe having gotten to a point where I've gotten up to a good traffic flow for a road without a lot of stop signs/stop lights (which could be anywhere from 40 to 75 mph, depending on the specific road). "At scale" is probably similar, meaning, "scaled up to the point where we expect to stop growing quickly".
posted by jackbishop at 9:16 AM on May 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

"At scale" is very definitely a decidedly not recent engineering/computer science term that's filtered up from programmers to tech management to be currently popular in the wider corporate culture.

I've never done any corporate science engineering and the term is so familiar to me that it never even occurred to me that it was technical jargon until you asked this question. A very brief and lazy google scholar search comes up with papers at least as early as the very early 80's using the term. And I wasn't going to send more than a couple seconds weeding out cartographers talking about "at scale 1:X" so it was likely in use well before that.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:24 AM on May 5, 2023

"At scale" certainly predates my career, which started in the early '90s working in a group that scaled up chemistry from lab scale to pilot manufacturing levels. Asking about a proposed reaction "can you run it at scale?" was common. (This is a little more exciting in chemistry than many fields, because this is basically way of asking if it will blow up in spectacular fashion.) A bit nitpicky but it does mean "at large scale," not "able to be scaled up."

So if the term is being disseminated up by VCs, they learned it from exposure to people doing real work who were already using and producing physical stuff.

I've seen and used the phrase so long that it's hard to be sure, but I'm pretty confident I've seen it in histories that cover industrialization or economics since forever, in the sense of sentences like "the Chortlemuffin-Finknottle process was a huge increase in efficiency but did not gain acceptance because it could not be run at scale." I will use the n-gram chart above as confirmation that I'm not just imagining this.
posted by mark k at 10:58 AM on May 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

'At speed' is a common phrase in British English synonymous with 'moving quickly'. It usually describes a vehicle and is probably just a shortened version of 'at full speed'. I've assumed this was the source for the phrase's adoption into US corporate culture, but I have no evidence for that.
posted by theory at 12:51 PM on May 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

“At scale” is absolutely tech industry jargon, to the point that it’s become self-parody. I’m sorry I don’t have any citations but xkcd has joked about it, for instance.
posted by stoneandstar at 12:43 AM on May 6, 2023