In case you missed that and were impressed by the bullshit language used. ;-)
Synergy is a great example - what the person saying it hopes you understand is that Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros have a complimentary set of skills that when put together will be more profitable. What they actually mean is that when we merge these two companies we're going to have two sets of sales teams, two sets of marketing teams, two production teams, two sets of HR, accounts, back office etc. And so we're going to be more efficient because everyone I just mentioned is going to be fired.
So yeah of course, the intent is to trick you and the likelihood of success is (inversely) proportional to how smart you are and it turns out if you're smart you probably also do other parts of your job well.
Its like a horoscope, it applies to everyone.
Its closer to a tautology "Its raining or its not" than a contradiction "Its raining and its not".
The closer to contradiction limits the possible realities, which makes it better science.
Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.
> Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.
That's a terrible example of your point. As long as you can define a metric for "worse at their jobs" (it'll vary a ton based on which job we're talking about, but it still sounds like something you could assign a metric to) then you have a really clear and testable hypothesis.
>it'll vary a ton based on which job we're talking about, but it still sounds like something you could assign a metric to
This is the problem, you didn't you can find 100000000 ways for it to be correct. 'They didn't eat breakfast, and they spent 1 second on HN. Therefore breakfast would have been better.'
As long as you can define some measure of "worse at their jobs", which corporations routinely do, this seems like an easy thing to falsify.
Go get employee eval scores and poll everyone on whether they eat breakfast.
You usually have to ask people to change their behavior. Pretty straight forward in this case though.
Certainly not as unhealthy as crack.
I've been on HN since 2010 (lost the password to my first account, alexc04) and I recall a time when it felt like every second article on the front-page was an bold directive pronouncement or something just aggressively certain of its own correctness.
Like "STOP USING BASH" or "JQUERY IS STUPID" - not in all caps of course but it created an unpleasant air and tone (IMO, again, this is like 16 years ago now so I may have memory degredation to some extent)
Things like donglegate got real traction here among the anti-woke crew. There have been times where the venn diagram of 4chan and hackernews felt like it had a lot more overlap. I've even bowed out of discussion for years at a time or developed an avoidance reaction to HN's toxic discussion culture.
IMO it has been a LOT better in more recent years, but I also don't dive as deep as I used to.
ANYWAYS - my point is I would be really interested to see a sentiment analysis of HN headlines over the years to try and map out cultural epochs of the community.
When has HN swayed more into the toxic and how has it swayed back and forth as a pendulum over time? (or even has it?)
I wonder what other people's perspective is of how the culture here has changed over time. I truly think it feels a lot more supportive than it used to.
But I guess it is good to have this study to point to in your workplace, instead of just seeing that it is self evident.
We are undoing much of this progress by now insisting everything be expressed in natural language for a machine to translate on our behalf, like a tour guide.
The natives will continue to speak amongst themselves in their mother tongue.
OOP has no firm theoretical foundation, unlike FP which is rooted in the formalisms of mathematics.
The first theoretical foundation of OOP is structural induction. If you design a class such that (1) the constructor enforces an invariant and (2) every public method maintains that invariant, then by induction it holds all the time. The access modifiers on methods help formalise and enforce that. You can do something similar in a functional language, or even in C if you're disciplined (especially with pointers), but it was an explicit design goal of the C++/Java/C# strand of OOP to anchor that in the language.
The second theoretical foundation is subtyping or Liskov substitution, a bit of simple category theory - which gets you things like contravariance on return types and various calculi depending on how your generics work. Unfortunately the C++ people decided to implement the idea with subclassing which turned out to be a mess, whereas interface subtyping gets you what you probably wanted in the first place, and still gives you formalisms like Array[T] <= Iterable[S] for any S >= T (or even X[T] <= Y[S] for S >= T and X[_] <= Y[_] if you define subtyping on functors). In Java nowadays you have a Consumer<T> that acts as a (side-effectful) function (T => void) but composes with a Consumer<? super T> to get the type system right [1].
Whether most Java/OOP programmers realise the second point is another question.
[1] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api/java.base...
I see you're familiar with Uncle Bob's handiwork
They're the corporate equivalent of USSR soviet style conformism, when everyone had to call each other comrade and refusal to do that had repercussions.
Similarly, if you say you refuse to follow the Agile/Scrum manifesto or clean code practices, you get ousted, as that's Haram/not-Kosher in this racket.
I still wonder how Valve manage to ship Half Life without Agile or clean code practices.
Except dependency injection. I really can’t imagine why you’d ever not use that. I suppose it’s possible to overuse, but you’d still have better code than without. Certainly more testable code.
With direct dependencies, if you are trying to understand some code that calls some function and what it does exactly isn't completely obvious, you can press a button to go to it, understand it, and come back.
With dependency injection it depends on what is going to be inserted during runtime, so you can't.
Hence the benefit to testing; allowing you to inject a deterministic implementation while under test.
Dependency injection simply means to take objects as parameters, and not instantiate them themselves (which causes "Inversion of Control" also commonly mentioned when talking about DI). DI Containers just makes the managing of objects easier.
Avoiding it like a plague seems excessive, did you have a bad experience with them?
I look at OOP Patterns as standards and practices.
The same way we have building codes for staircases the framing of walls and electrical installations to prevent injury or collapse or fire.
Sure, you can dodge a lot of design pattern paradigms and still make a working application that makes money. You can also invent your own system when building your house and maybe nothing bad will happen. That tragedy hasn’t yet struck does not make the building codes bad just because you got away with it.
I believe C has allowed passing and returning functions from... the jump, no?
def addX(x: Int): Function[Int,Int] = {
y => x+y
}
Once you get used to doing this, you realize it's useful everywhere.
In a decent language with functional programming and generics support a lot of GoF patterns can be directly encoded as a simple type signature where you receive, return, or both some function, so there's not really much else to say about them. Like half of the behavioral patterns become variations of the interpreter pattern.
The *concept* of patterns makes sense. A shared language that developers can use when building things.
The *reality* of patterns has been much less useful. The original ones were indeed a reaction to warts in the popular languages of their era. And as we tend to do in our industry, these have been cargo culted along the way and for some reason I still see people talking about them as first class citizens 30 years later.
People don't seem to realize that patterns should be and are fluid, and as our industry evolves these patterns are evolving as well. A major difference between software engineering and the analogous fields people use when talking about patterns is those industries are much older and move less quickly
You can have your building engineered, in which case building walls out of 2x6's 16 inches on center is not off the table, but neither is a mortise and tenon timber frame with partition walls. In that paradigm, the code tries not to be descriptive of an exact technique but only gives you criteria to satisfy. For example you could run all of your electrical wiring on the outside of the walls or on the outside of the building, and you could use ramps instead of staircases. It only talks about ingress and egress for fire safety, and it explains how you're supposed to encase wires, or if wires are not encased it describes the way the wiring must be sheathed to protect the occupants.
You can heat your house entirely with an open fire, and the code speaks to how to do that safely. So it's unlike "design patterns" in a lot of ways in that the code tries to accommodate the kinds of buildings we try to build and the ways in which we modify buildings because that's easier than saying "these are all the allowed ways of building an entry staircase." Design Patterns are more in the latter category.
OOP can be wonderful, but the people who aren't able to step up a level in conceptual abstraction should really not touch it. Remember, for many years languages like Java didn't have any concept of lambda's and higher order functions, so design patterns were essential for elegant solutions. As they say, a design pattern is a symptom of the language being not expressive enough. In other words, many design patterns in OOP languages express the same thing as first-class language features in the functional paradigm would do, Visitor vs fold for instance.
Design patents are more of "you need to build house with this exact room layout" than "the materials and ways to put them together are standarized"
Corporate speak as a signalling mechanism is only effective among the "clueless" in the Gervais model. If any CEO tried to talk 1:1 to a competent board member that way, they would lose all credibility. Once you've operated at a certain level you get it
>a system for turning bullshit into parse errors.
This is the (cynical version of) the framing I tend to hold about corporate speak. It's deliberately vague as a way to navigate uncertainty while still projecting authority and avoiding accountability in settings like a town hall, large meeting etc. Which is not to be read as a necessarily "bad" thing. No one wants a micromanaging CEO. They have to set vision and direction while leaving space for it top be executed by all the layers under them
I (and many others) read it as "dishonesty"
I suspect that most people just aren't wired up that way - we have a natural tendency to want to follow leaders and what we seem to want most from leaders is certainty and confidence. Does it matter what leaders are certain and confident about - not really.
You've most likely trained yourself to value critical thinking in your leaders, most likely from an early enough age that you don't remember what it was like without it. Lots of people don't get this training or don't apply it in a fully general way.
There are other things I do remember having to train myself to do though, such as not make value judgments based on the language skill level of others. Rationally I have never cared where someone is from and if they are a native speaker or not, but emotionally that required some effort.
Let's say there are a thousand people there at the town hall. You don't want any of them to leave upset, or even concerned. But they each have different things that will make them concerned and upset. So there are maybe 10,000 tripwires out there, and you don't want to trip any of them.
So you're not being dishonest, exactly. You're being nonspecific. You don't want to get down in the weeds and nail down the answer too tightly, because you may trip someone's tripwire. (And also because it would take to long.) So you say something true but not very specific.
(I mean, there can be dishonesty, too, but that's a different thing. Smooth vagueness can still be honest, just unsatisfyingly vague.)
It's all dishonesty at the end of the day.
A prime example of corporate speak that is, as you rightly said, 'only effective among the "clueless"'
Social organizations require some sort of glue to bind them together. They need ways to maintain cohesion despite vagueness and to obscure (small) errors. There is a cap put upon max individual output, but aggregate output is much higher than whatever a collection of individuals could attain. This is a very basic dynamic that is lost amidst a cult of individualism that refuses to admit to any good greater than themselves.
Yes - the CEO talking to the board in this way would lose credibility. But a CEO failing to deploy this jargon correctly would also lose credibility with the board : it's obvious he doesn't know how to lead.
What I would like to see is a study of the ratio's between corporate speak and technical speak - and the inflection points at which too much of either causes organization ruin.
Edit: seems that searching for „Gervais principle“ turned up what was talked about…
This also holds true for competent non-board members. I have interacted with C-level executives at fortune 100 companies, as well as smaller businesses. It is almost impressive how quickly they can switch in and out of corporate bullshit mode. I think it's what the kids call code-switching.
In general, once they trust you a bit, and they know someone isn't listening they talk like a normal person. Then you ask a difficult question about the business and the corporate-speak kicks in like a security sub routine trying to prevent them from saying the wrong thing.
I have also met some that seemingly calculate their tone and cadence to try to manipulate the person(s)/people(s) they're talking to. It's fascinating when you catch them doing it, and it's different than simply matching like a chameleon. For example, they may use an authoritative tone with younger people, a kind but subtly threatening tone with anxious people, and a buddybuddy tone with a plumber or someone they know isn't going to put up with any bullshit.
I'm really curious how much of it is formally taught in MBA programs and stuff, how much is them copying each other, and if any of it is just a natural defense mechanism to the pressures of being in power.
It definitely takes a certain kind of person to be a good fit in that role
It's some combination of what they call "self monitoring" in social psychology, plus general EQ and Machiavellian personality traits that allow people to read the room and adjust their tone, speaking style, word choice (including picking up in-group lingo quickly), posture etc to be most effective given the setting. This applies to basically any social environment, and is often a frustrating reality to many people who may be extremely competent but see others around them who are obviously less competent "getting ahead" through social acumen, office politics etc.
This has been studied among MBA graduates, Do Chameleons Get Ahead, The Effects of Self-Monitoring on Managerial Careers (pdf): https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/...
This is a trait of a psychopath. Not surprisingly, one finds a lot of them in the executive ranks.
Sociopaths can code-switch instantly - I wonder how much of this is training, versus emulating others, versus a fundamental difference in brain operations...
Formalism is a product of prior (semantic) reasoning that isn't formal. And because formalism is syntactic, not only can you still jam your semantic nonsense through it (through incoherent subjects and predicates, for example), but the formalism, stripped of semantics, can itself allow for nonsense. So formalism can actually aid and abet bad reasoning. The danger, of course, is the mistaken notion that "formal = rigorous".
Formalism is also highly impractical and tedious in many circumstances, and it can depart from human reasoning as expressed in the grammar of natural language enough to be practically inscrutable. There is no reason why natural language cannot be clear and well-written. So, I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree here.
The problem with LLMs isn't that they're not "formal". It's because they're statistical machines, not reasoning machines, yet many people treat them like magical oracles.
that's a very neat way to put it!
Because when I go to view an old website from the 90s that's missing a closing tag for something, I don't want the content-- I want a big red XML parse error with a gigantic horizontal scrollbar.
The history of programmers blithely attempting to add new parsing errors to existing problems instead of obviating them is long and storied. Your sentence would look right at home as part of the BS generated for the test subjects from the article.
You don't need formal language (though formal languages can serve that purpose). You just need to listen like a normal human being rather than like a corporate suit, and that kind of language is just incomprehensible - a parse error. You have to work at it to make sense of that kind of language. And why I took from your first paragraph is permission to treat it as a parse error instead of as some valid message that I needed to decode.
Theres no high minded difference. Its just in/out group identification.
It is awfully unproductive way to do it but I'm sure HR approves.
Software is not the output. The output is the theory-building process by which one arrives a formal description of both the problem and (hopefully) the solution. Avoiding the effort to express a problem (or a model of the problem) in a formal language is a self-defeating enterprise.
And the best part is that while we’re talking about making a decision, we won’t have to actually do any real work.
The people who roll their eyes at corporate nonsense are your skunkworkers.
Technically that's a positive feedback loop, or reinforcing feedback loop. The author is probably using "negative" in to mean undesirable. Gotta get your jargon right!
(There are dozens of us!)
"Pipeline". I hate this so much. At a previous job, it was used so much by management it became a meme on the production floor. When asked how many units had been sold, there was always a big number in the pipeline, when the real actual number was zero.
It's a non-commitment word. Whatever is talked about may or may not happen or exist. Maybe it's ignorance or a straight up lie to shut up the people on the floor, but "pipeline" works maybe once or twice and then everyone is onto your bullshit.
The phrases "Come here, boy!" and "Could you come here for a second?" have the same function, but the structure is inverted. Same for the phrases "I simplified the function so it's read easily" and "I made an strategic decision that enables robust scalability and growth". It all boils down to authority signaling.
SOCIOPATHS
│
SOCIOPATHS WITH MBAs
│
SOCIOPATHS WHO LIKE POWERPOINT
│
OVERWORKED DOERS
│
CONFUSED PEOPLE
│
LOSERSDespite it being a joke, I think there’s a lot of truth in there that explains corp-tongue -- from being visible in endless meetings to in-group parlance to cutthroat promotion tracks, a lot of corporate America boils down to narrative, storytelling and performance more than booking sensible profit and delivering the very best to client and user. This type of language and expression is a major tool for making people feel good about your actual, contestable value in an organization.
It’s both kabuki and kayfabe lol
Now, does this mean it's the right way to talk everywhere? Of course not. And since it's often seen as safe, it's overused. But it doesn't just arise, as a bug. plain language that means what it says creates more conflict, and isn't always better.
Also a lot of corporate jargon does have specific connotations for skilled communicators to send a message that is seemingly polite but is actually saying something controversial that is picked up only by those in the room savvy enough to understand. In skilled hands it’s very useful, in unskilled hands it’s complete gibberish. In many ways that’s a feature as the clueless cargo-culters quickly out themselves, and then the smart leaders can use that knowledge to route around them or deploy them in non-harmful ways. All without any overt confrontation ever taking place.
Anecdotally I have seen BS used to delay or avoid making commitments. BS can mask someone's lack of knowledge, or lack of execution. Middle managers seem to be the position to squash or spread BS. They often have a hard time detecting BS because they are too far from the work. When I think back to the best Directors and skip-level managers I have had in my career, they were all great BS detectors. They didn't let smooth talkers in their organization rise based on BS alone. They didn't let dependencies wriggle out of their commitments based on BS.
Love ? That's for plebs. The right thing is to leverage wholistic synergizing paradigms.
And you can get the gist of that company or people during the interview actually.
I believe this is the whole point. To confuse listeners and subtly manipulate them into thinking that they don't understand so they will stay quiet. Politicians do absolutely the same, in today's world it's called "smoke screen".
"Hmm, I want to hire people who fail CBSR test, I'll look like god to them. F*ck critical thinkers, I only need slightly above average people anyway."
> Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”
and a link to the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400597536_The_Corpo...
Managers use it with peers because their job is coordination and communication.
Managers shouldn’t talk to their reports in corp-speak, but think of it like a shared protocol for all messages in the corporate message bus.
The study found that being more receptive to corporate bullshit was also positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements. Moreover, those who were more likely to fall for corporate BS were also more likely to spread it.'
How is this a paradox?
https://brightpath-global-solutions.com/
Edit: repo link: https://github.com/chronick/global-business-solutions
That’s always the line you’re listening for. Everything before that is bullshit, everything after is trying to justify the new product for that one change.
In favor of preferable outcomes of operational excellence as part of our customer success. Barf.
It got mentioned in WSJ of all places as news of it spread.
For the history+app from its creator, see:
https://lurkertech.com/buzzword-bingo/
(Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo )
I'm glad to see, 25-30 years later, the hackers/cynical-tech-workers who birthed it getting justified by actual social science research.
Poetry inaction!
Often it is misuse of terms that actually have real meanings that annoy me most
In a work environment dominated by office social situations, language plays a key role in establishing social status, but there are other forms of posturing, with promotions generally based more on social status than job performance, reinforcing the social hierarchy. Technical buzzwords aren't even the only kind of jargon used in this manor, there's often an entire litany of language used outside of the job functions themselves. For example, human resources has its own language rules.
The author has come across this phenomenon and is attributing it to language alone, but there is far more involved here.
Modern politics by a different name. The parallels are obvious, along with the Peter Principle and so on.
Lots of people on here saying 'that's not me', but probably say 'ping me back' or 'learnings' which is very much one end of the spectrum of corporate bullshit that infects everyone. Some of it is stupidity (the English language has a word: 'lessons'), some of it is natural language evolution, and some of it is 'global' English: 'please revert', and some of it is very intentional management waffle. As the (unviersity) saying goes, 'if you can't blind 'em with science, baffle them with bullshit'.
So it might be a substantive decision that affects how everybody in the room will do their jobs going forward. Or it could be a random stream of words chosen because they sound impressive, which everyone will nod respectfully at and then ignore. And like an LLM, he might have made it into his current position without needing to know the difference.
Sure, the junior manager might use them vaguely to mimic, but IMHO, when vague language comes up at decision tables, it's usually coding something more precise in a sort of plausible deniability.
A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.
A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players
etc etc.
If my impressions are correct, of course ICs are going to balk at these statements - they seem disconnected from reality and are magically disconnected from the effects on purpose. Yes, this is bad management to the ICs, but it's pretty culturally inevitable, I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language.
A good manager takes this direction in front of all their ICs, laughs it off as corpo speak, but was given the signal to have a private talk with one of their group who triggered the problem... I dunno maybe my time in management was particularly distopian, but this seemed obvious once I saw it.
You _want_ most ICs to ignore a negative message that doesn't involve them, and you _want_ to give middle / lower managers the discretion to address an ICs "nonsynergistic" contributions on their own time. It's a signal not a prescription. This allows a public person to make a public statement and set direction without prescribing actions so lower management and ICs can do their thing.
Upper management becomes increasingly vibes-based, from what I can tell.
This sort of management is dysfunctional even in it's premises.
QED.
or even best possible outcomes for the shareholders. cuz most of this coded BS is to make some executive's life easier, not to keep the board happy.
if they had a concrete plan they'd say it, and coded signals are only for certain audiences, who in most cases may not be most people, most shareholders, or more employees.
Sure, direct, cold, concrete, public data is "best" in the objective sense, but people's feelings and pride matter, and any attempt to wave that away is just naive.
I definitely agree with what you're saying here where these words actually do mean something, but it's completely opaque to those outside the "know". I also have found that there's not any better way to express information to those in the group than in this coded language, even if it makes completely no sense to me.
I wish younger me understood that the way I'm being perceived is the only important thing, not choosing the "best" words to technically describe a situation
As with all forms of cynicism, it has a grain of truth. And a much larger grain of truth than is comfortable.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
What's specifically interesting about corpo-speak though is it's one of the only version of this (at least that I know of) where it's main purpose is to be euphemistic. In most other fields, the coded language is meant to be more descriptive to the in-group. In management, the coded language is designed to be less descriptive on purpose to avoid the human cost of the decision.
It's dystopian because it follows the same patterns as military language, and serves the same purpose to sanitize unpleasant realities. "Neutralize the target" in military lingo, "Right-size" in corpo-speak. In both cases, the human at the end is stripped of their humanity into a target or resource to be managed (or killed).
The day the layoffs take your job (but not your officemate’s) might be a good day to learn how to read the corporate signals.
Early in my career, I hated, and I do mean despised people who used the term "value".
And then, one day when my colleague suggested migrating all our servers from windows to Linux but couldn't for the life of them articulate what that would do for the business / client, it started clicking. A lot of us talk about effort, activities, tasks, accomplishments. I did this, Bob did that, Fatime did the other thing. At some level of management, "value" is the well understood shorthand for "when we follow the chain of benefits, what does this actually do for the client / business?". Its their job (when done well) to ensure technical tasks contribute to business value.
And we could be upset that they are inventing weird jargon for no clear reason, but then spend a minute explaining "garbage collection" etc as a term of art, and realize that pots are calling kettle black and all that - nobody has weird jargon like IT techies :->
When you put enough bafflegab around it, you can almost ignore that you said something unpleasant. Because the part of our brains that processes for emotional content, doesn't process complex language very well. Hence the example with ten paragraphs of complexity to hide the pain of a major lay-off.
After I noticed this, I found that I did this. I reliably use complex language when I don't like what I'm saying. So much so that I could use readability checkers to find discomfort that I was not aware that I had!
And I'm not the only one to notice this. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVtJNv4ZNM for George Carlin's famous skit on how the honesty of the phrase "shell shock" over time got softened over time to "post-traumatic stress disorder". A phrase that can be understood, but no longer felt.
Corporations have just developed their own special complex language for this. And you're right. It is emotionally dishonest. That's why they do it.
Pretty shocking belief when you're of courseing all "ICs".
If it was inevitable than the amount and degree of corporate BS would've been stable over the last 5 decades, and across countries and languages.
In reality, it has been anything but, instead showing massive differences across both.
And there's blatant bullshit, like paradigm shift, culture building, and so on.
Two categories of execspeak.
Yep. I'm a director now. This is exactly how it is. A big part of being effective in this role is understanding how direct you can be in a given scenario.
A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.
Option 1 is how I'd say it to a peer whose org is duplicating effort. You can give your advice, but at the end of the day: not my circus, not my clowns.
Option 2 is a more-direct way of how I'd say it to someone in my own org. I'd rephrase to: "Someone else is already doing this; focus your efforts on something more impactful."
> “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”
I'm taking issue with "semantically empty" and saying they're actually semantically rich, but they are coded signals. Coded signals become increasingly indistinguishable from noise.
The Big Short by Michael Lewis, page 101.
Further much of it is not even code. Examples like the microsoft letter are clearly a performative act to soften the blow of bad news. No one in the know is reading such an email to discern some hidden message; it's written to not be read.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
the Cornell article is basically just empirical testing of these concepts.
it does make Rao's original article a little easier to digest but it was already pretty tight through the first 3-4 parts.
"We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" is an example from the article - you can't actualize a level, you can't renew a level either. And "cradle-to-grave credentialing" is at best a bad way to describe some real concept. It's word-salad from start to finish. It's not coded language, it's bullshit.
On the rare occasions I've used it sincerely in meetings I've always caveated it with some variation of "the real meaning, not the BS one." This never seems to work so I've just dropped it from my verbal lexicon altogether.
No individual holds power over connotations. Language just evolves.
Okay, but I still reserve the right to be pissed off at teenagers using 'out of pocket' when they mean 'off the wall' or 'out of bounds'.
I do sometimes rebelliously use words in their original connotation along with an unnecessarily lengthy explanation. Never anything that's now an insult, of course, those I just stay away from and am not mad about either.
If I know a given wording is widely misunderstood, to the point I'm planning to immediately follow it with a clarification - often that's a sign it's not a very good wording.
There are exceptions, of course - go ahead and say Cephalopods (things like octopuses and squid) if you're a marine biology educator.
So yeah, sure, context does matter.
I do wonder whether adding chips or bacon to counteract the cloying one-dimensional sweetness of the other ingredients would make me a fan though... chunky natural PB, blackberry jelly, hickory-smoked bacon on ciabatta? Hipster PbB&J might be the ticket.
So by using such a phrase, underlings signal both how close they are to bigwigs by knowing such a phrase first, and also demonstrate a vote for alignement, by quoting some phrases more and others less. Bigwigs raise status of underlings by repeating and expressing interest in their new phrases.
These phrases come and go in waves. Underlings laughing with them basically signal they are not worthy of attention in the political melee.
Conversely, when someone talks about "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices, to me it's a clear statement about who gets to define meaning and whose history counts, but to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.
Can you expand on this?
I think to get the full meaning of both, you'd need to be fairly steeped in a world that uses those words all the time AND it is often used to identify people who "get it" from those who don't.
These are separate things. If he's interpreting it as an outright attack, he _is_ hearing it correctly. But incoherence would imply he's _not_ hearing the coded language in it's true meaning.
Trump is taking a lesson from Putin. Social media makes this extra easy, as you can bury criticism with a hoard of what-aboutism-bots, redirected arguments, and straight up BS.
Is it like when an executive or politician "retires" to spend more time with their friends & family?
> A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players
In my experience neither one of those are automatically a sign of impending layoffs. Rather, it's an executive doing their job (getting the organization moving in one direction) in the laziest way possible: by telling their directs to work out what that direction is amongst themselves and come back with a concrete proposal for review that they all agree on. The exec can then rubber-stamp it without seriously diving into the details, knowing that everyone relevant has had a hand in crafting the plan. And if it turns out those details are wrong, there's a ready fall guy to take the blame and save the exec's job, because they weren't the one who came up with it.
Interestingly, this is also the most efficient way for the organization to work. The executive is usually the least informed person in the organization; you most definitely do not want them coming up with a plan. Instead, you want the plan to come from the people who will be most affected, and who actually do know the details.
If the managers in question cannot agree or come up with a bad plan, then it's usually time for layoffs. A lot of this comes down to the manager having an intuitive sense of what the exec really wants, though, as well as good relationships and trust with their peers to align on a plan. The managers who usually navigate this most poorly (and get their whole team laid off in the process) are those who came from being a stellar IC and are still too thick in the details to compromise, the Clueless on the Gervais hierarchy.
It's like that phenomenon of, you have these British people, Hyacinth Bucket types. They want to be seen as upper class when they're not. So they speak in an overly polite register that they think makes them sound upper class. Actual aristocrats, by contrast, speak rather plainly amongst each other. They know where they are in society, and they know that everyone else who matters also knows.
Similarly, the people who speak of operationalizing new strategies and leveraging core competencies are trying to sound impressive to those below, and like good little do bees to those above. The people who lead an organization to success speak in terms of the actual problems they encounter and the real things that need to be done to solve them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Ev...
So you’re saying people who thought randomly-generated, meaningless sentences sound smart aren’t themselves smart? Who would’ve thought.
Hey, I find that type of lingo nauseating, and I still struggle with practical decision-making.
That's what she said.
> Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it
The rank and file don't elevate leaders, it's decided by higher-ups, and the higher you go the more they care about actual non-bullshit results. Where bullshit thrives is because higher level business strategy is actually hard and ambiguous, so there's a continuum of bullshit where you are expected to at least say credible things, but it's couched in bullshit terminology to broaden the range of success they can claim, and leave room and plausable deniability for failures. Strong leaders are keenly aware of this nuance, and therefore leaders are judged on reputation and outcomes over time, because any given thing they say may be wrong, but the track record is undeniable. This is why you never hear a bad word about leaders while they are there, they are just fired (or more likely "resign") one day seemingly out of the blue.
What this article misses is that to survive in a corporate environment everyone needs to put up and nod along to bullshit. Most of the time whether it's right or wrong and the level of bullshit doesn't really matter to most of the employees, they're just incentivized to play along and not express negativity. Within the rank and file, obviously some are more susceptible to bullshit than others, but I don't think this study necessarily gets at that, as a lot of people will act agreeable just to survive in corporate life, and their disposition will be largely independent of their true understanding and feelings about whatever bullshit they are presented with day to day.
The study measures analytic thinking as a proxy for performance, but that is only the right metric if the organization rewards individuals on the basis of their ability to make good decisions. Which anyone who has spent time in a corporate setting will know is often far from the route to success in such a setting, regardless of what the organization would say.
If your role has no concrete output and your organization rewards BS-fluency, you need a jargon that performs productivity without being too specific - so this argot isn't useless, it maintains a hierarchy that the BS-fluent can be promoted through. Not so much a rising tide but a blocked toilet backing up through the org chart. And BS-receptive workers are more satisfied with their jobs, because by their organization's actual values (versus whatever might be written in the mission statement), they're succeeding.
The BS-intolerant and analytically competent are less satisfied because they're the ones running into the blockers that the BS is covering for - or working through them only to discover that there's no tangible work to do under all the jargon.
The takeaway for me is: if you're interviewing somewhere and the hiring manager starts talking about "actualizing synergistic paradigms" instead of telling you concretely what the team shipped last quarter, it is likely one of those organizations. Places that can tell you plainly what they do are the places where your work will matter.
Then came PowerPoint.
Before that it was more of a political and religious style of communication. In those areas, speeches and texts designed to be popular but not commit to much dominate. Religious texts are notorious for their ambiguity.
The point seems to be to express authority without taking responsibility.
[1] https://www.rivier.edu/academics/blog-posts/circling-back-on...
In the end, you just have this universal language to justify and excuse power and blame victims for being weak enough to be victimized. Powerful people move with the energy flow and direct it, and weak people move against it, twist it, and are twisted by it. Mastery of this makes money and happiness flow towards you, and resistance to it makes money and happiness flow away from you.
Very convenient moral calculus for people who inherited money and hand it to people who do what they say. Convenient justification to do anything that pays, no matter how corrupt and harmful. If it were really harmful, it wouldn't pay in the end. And isn't everything harmful, in a way, to some extent?
In the 80s, you start to see books laying out fairly incoherent systems for total personal, business and societal organization, but the premises are really drawn from all of the previous nonsense. It's easy to say it's stupid, but leading into this time (and dying during this time along with its practitioners) the overwhelmingly dominant psychological theory was the cynical word salad of Freudian psychoanalysis. This stuff was honestly more based in the real world.
> Before that it was more of a political and religious style of communication.
This is the time when the terminology was finally settling. There was to be a new priesthood of consultants. Tbh, I don't think that it's designed to be popular, it's designed to supply language to justify predatory acts. This was also the rise of the "think tank," which came to dominate society through writing laws and supplying the language to help politicians deliver for their donors.
I still think that the real harm was done by the popularization of Freud, training the public to speak about the real world in speculative, scientistic, psychological terms. This sort of management language just washes over people trained not to ever verify their theory-theories against any sort of real outcomes (i.e. Freud), other than the post hoc justification of wealth.
My father went into "organizational development" in the late-80s at Allstate Insurance. Bringing this all full-circle, it turned out he was also being trained in crypto-Scientology: https://www.lermanet.com/scientologynews/allstate2.html
Sorry about the rant, it might come off as word salad. I wish it was.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260302211051/https://news.corn...
Generally speaking, analytical people care more about numbers than words, so isn't this more of an 'expected result'?
Corporate speak is unfortunately used seriously by some people, not just in Dilbert and similar.
"Don't sign this because you are screwed if x, y, or z happens!" would be a good summation in many cases.
Has anyone had much success with this kind of AI interaction?
throwpoaster•8h ago
franktankbank•8h ago