[HN Gopher] On Corpspeak
___________________________________________________________________
On Corpspeak
Author : signa11
Score : 186 points
Date : 2022-08-23 08:30 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (goodreason.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (goodreason.substack.com)
| pid_0 wrote:
| ThePadawan wrote:
| Corpspeak is super useful!
|
| It lets you know early in the hiring process that this employer
| is probably not one you want to work for (:.
| dvirsky wrote:
| I actually think that Bandwidth is an excellent term, especially
| when you're talking about team resources. When I'm working on
| team planning it is exactly like allocating bandwidth for the
| different things I want to pass down the pipeline. It makes less
| sense in the context of a single person, but when I'm thinking
| about a team it's a good choice.
|
| Also regarding context - I actually use it in the original sense
| too - being new to my team I don't have enough context to
| understand the constraints of a decision I'm asked to evaluate,
| and it's not only knowledge - it's historical context as well. So
| again, might be misused but in the right situation it's the right
| word.
| selimnairb wrote:
| "But goddammit, I don't use ask as a noun." Hallelujah!
|
| About 20-years-ago, Ken Smith published a series of books call
| "Junk English" (see [1]), which may be of interest.
|
| [1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8355222M/Junk_English
| unholiness wrote:
| Honestly "ask" as a noun, despite the hate, was one of the most
| useful corpwords they mentioned.
|
| If I say "what's the ask here?" I mean the concrete part. I
| mean the "request" just described (by a middle-man) was so
| fluffy in its language I couldn't figure out what actual action
| we need to take to make the asker happy. It's a common
| situation in a corporate world, and imo deserves its own word.
| dizhn wrote:
| One of my pet peeves but apparently it's not a new thing.
|
| https://www.dailywritingtips.com/is-ask-a-noun/
| phailhaus wrote:
| This is a great post. Another reason why Corpspeak naturally
| arises is systemic: corporations bring together people from many
| different contexts. It is really important for everyone to be on
| the same page (another Corpspeak-ism!) when communicating and
| coordinating on work. The most effective way to do that is to
| settle on neutral phrases devoid of subjective value judgements.
| [deleted]
| misterflibble wrote:
| In my enterprise (fr)Agile job, copious amounts of Corpspeak
| abound. I truly feel like "the inmates are running the asylum".
|
| For example: during one of our morning stand up, I remember
| bringing up a major production issue that I found with our
| website. Someone "important" uttered the phrase: "Let's take it
| offline". After the stand up, no one bothered to follow-up with
| me about it and I suppose, everyone in our team assumed some
| technical person would fix it anyway. So naturally I assumed that
| the "Let's take it offline" phrase meant "I don't want to talk
| about that now" or "Sounds scary! I hope that goes away" :-]
|
| My question is: were some parts of Corpspeak invented to permit
| non-technical people to sound more sophisticated and/or
| intelligent than they actually are?
| phailhaus wrote:
| > After the stand up, no one bothered to follow-up with me
| about it
|
| Feedback: it was your responsibility to bring it up later,
| since you owned the discussion in standup. The reason it was
| "moved offline" is because standup is not where you solve
| problems, it's meant to be a quick sync.
| fudged71 wrote:
| That's my interpretation, too. "We don't have the time to go
| into this right now"
| Arrath wrote:
| Sounds like you were supposed to take the website down and wait
| for the screaming to start.
| tekla wrote:
| Taking it offline is a power move
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RAMRukKqQg
| jcalabro wrote:
| Beat me to it! Their other one on corp speak is also amazing
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvhC_RdIwQ
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| I'm not sold at all.
|
| Cool! Sick! Groovy! Rad! Awesome! Legit! Tight! Dope! Peachy
| keen! Fresh! Fly! Spiffing! Capital! ...
|
| Any subculture creates its own jargon. Whether or not 'corpspeak'
| serves other purposes, it's primary reason to exist is to signal
| group membership.
| hengheng wrote:
| They described the origin of all these phrases, which as most
| corporate behavior is about shedding responsibility and shifting
| blame.
|
| In practice though, these phrases are all used mindlessly, by
| people who don't talk much outside the office, and see no problem
| in never thinking about the words they use all day. And that's
| what most people seem to take issue with: people that are
| operating on autopilot, without allowing themselves any time to
| reflect.
|
| (I'm German, and for us it's anglicisms. If some middle manager's
| entire business vocab is in English and they mix it into their
| German sentences without giving it any thought, you can be
| certain that their mind is at capacity.)
| bgribble wrote:
| There's a lot of focus on the corpspeak vocabulary, which is
| definitely ridiculous... My current employer incessantly refers
| to the recent layoff as "ETP" for, I guess, Employee Termination
| Program, and the laid off workers as "people affected by ETP".
|
| But the thing that drives me insane is the tone of voice and
| cadence affected by people who are full-time corpspeakers. I
| can't quite describe it the way it deserves, but there's this
| singsong sort of rising and falling, yet monotone, sound to it
| that is so, so artificial and inhuman sounding.
|
| Almost every sentence sounds like a question, in that there's an
| upward inflection at the end, except for the last sentence of
| each slide/paragraph which ends on a downward note. It's like
| they are intentionally sounding like they are reading a text that
| they don't fully understand -- except it's their own words!
| ospzfmbbzr wrote:
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Most of this stuff is extremely useful and intuitive. It's just
| interested in getting things done and being polite, while
| addressing specific dynamics you find when working with other
| people.
|
| _Let 's take this offline_ for instance is one of the best
| linguistic inventions ever IMO. It's so useful to refocus
| meetings and curtail BS.
|
| I would call most of this just "workspeak" over "corpspeak"
| (which seems to evoke the "evils" of the corporation). Corpspeak
| I would reserve for more PR and HR specific domains, which are
| often actually annoying to listen to.
| devteambravo wrote:
| I'm infected, what a gross realization. I need to bleach my
| vocabulary.
| Izkata wrote:
| Oh nice, now I have something to point to as an example. I've
| been independently calling this "manager-speak" for a while,
| since co-workers seem to only pick it up when they switch from
| development to management.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Won't dissagree, but it seems like a partial explanation.
|
| Another reason for corporate language is attempting to make the
| ordinary sound exciting. Executives would much rather talk about
| their "vision" or "north star" than how many units they want
| shipped in the fourth quarter.
|
| A lot of the language churn in corporate culture seems to stem
| from this. Eventually terms seem old and boring, so they have to
| come up with new ones.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I really hate this kind of language, but it is really useful in
| an American corporate context, as I have recently realized while
| doing an executive MBA program. A lot of Americans tie up a lot
| of their emotions in work success. A lot of other Americans don't
| care about their co-workers, and don't want to put in the effort
| to figure out how to actually respect people (calling cheap
| places to work "discount" is a good example of this). Sometimes,
| the same person is in both groups.
|
| The way to usefully make both groups work with others is to use
| language that is devoid of meaning and, in particular, lacking
| value judgments. That way, you can say "Steve, can you explain
| the learnings from your recent project?" and mean either, "Steve,
| you fucked up, what are you not going to do again?" or "Steve,
| your project went great, what tips can you share?" That way,
| Steve can feel recognized for his achievements even when Steve
| did something that was really stupid. Steve's colleagues have an
| emotional barrier, too: they won't feel bad for Steve if you are
| calling out his failures, and they won't feel bad for themselves
| if you are saying that Steve did something exceptional.
|
| It's really fucked up how we have created this sanitized
| dictionary, but it's too effective in a corporate context not to
| use it.
| hammock wrote:
| >calling cheap places to work "discount" is a good example of
| this
|
| What kind of places do you mean- Can you give an example?
| jiayo wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > To distinguish where employees receive high pay versus low
| pay, Company X organized the locations into three bins:
| discount, national, and premium. New York City, naturally, is
| a premium location. Detroit is a discount location. One of
| her friends works in Detroit, and something doesn't sit right
| about her friend being a discount employee.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| > A lot of Americans tie up a lot of their emotions in work
| success.
|
| For anyone else still wondering "why" corpspeak still exists,
| this is it. America has a very work-centric culture. Within a
| few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about
| their family or work.
|
| I guess I'm just disappointed at the world I've inherited. Why
| are people so afraid of direct conversation? Why is hearing bad
| news "too much" for some people? I remember a quote from a
| comic strip saying "people would rather hear an outright lie
| than an uncomfortable truth". Which is true, but I wish
| American work culture didn't need to hide from the truth.
|
| To me part of being a professional is being able to have
| direct, pragmatic conversations. You learn to keep your own
| emotions in check and focus on the discussion at hand. Look at
| the larger picture of the meeting / your work / whatever is
| being discussed.
|
| What would it take to change work culture to be more pragmatic?
| hammock wrote:
| >For anyone else still wondering "why" corpspeak still
| exists, this is it. America has a very work-centric culture.
| Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically
| talk about their family or work.
|
| Are there other societies where corpspeak does not exist-
| what are they?
| interroboink wrote:
| >> A lot of Americans tie up a lot of their emotions in work
| success. > America has a very work-centric culture.
| > Why are people so afraid of direct conversation?
|
| I feel like the "emotions" side is just as important as the
| "work" side, here. To be able to (1) be emotionally invested
| and (2) have those emotions hurt from time to time can be
| just fine, as long as you can also (3) process those emotions
| in a healthy way. I feel like a lot of Americans (and humans
| in general, to be fair) have trouble with (3).
|
| If I could magically fix it, I think I would be less
| interested in "make people more able to maintain emotional
| distance at work" and more in "make people more able to deal
| with emotions when they come up, in general".
|
| Just my 2C/
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| In my personal opinion, if we just stopped doing this, and
| people at work experienced their first "breakup" (in the form
| of being told "you screwed up" or having to say "I am sorry
| that I screwed up") we would all be able to be more honest
| with each other. Just like dating, some people would go
| through an emotional trauma, but everyone would learn to get
| over it. Similarly, each manager would learn how to say "this
| project went poorly" or "you screwed up" in an empathetic
| way.
|
| However, that is just not the culture, and it takes a _very_
| long time to change a culture. To make matters worse, the
| presence of the linguistic emotional barriers makes their
| removal a lot more painful. The people fighting against this
| oppressive language would be labeled "mean" (or worse, "non-
| inclusive"), and unfortunately that is a much worse label
| than "bad programmer."
|
| I think this culture is dangerous, and normalizes both
| weasel-talk and lies. It has already infected media and
| politics. I just don't know how to stop it.
| [deleted]
| bgribble wrote:
| "You screwed up" is a tricky one. Yes, individuals do screw
| up. But that's actually not very interesting; a true
| individual screwup (with no one else contributing) has a
| very small blast radius.
|
| The bigger the screwup, the more people had a hand in it,
| and the less truthful it is to point to one person and say
| "you did it."
|
| Let's say I merge a syntactically incorrect piece of code
| that brings down the entire system on the next release.
| Nobody notices for a few hours and the company loses a
| bunch of money. Did I screw up? Yes I did, but that's the
| tiniest piece of it.
|
| * How did my change get merged? Who reviewed it? Did nobody
| test it or notice that it had no test coverage that would
| exercise my stupid change? Do we have any standards or
| accountability for review quality?
|
| * How did it get released? Do we not have any automated
| tooling to stand up a candidate release in staging and do
| smoke tests?
|
| * How did the downtime last so long? Do we have any
| operational monitoring? Was someone on call? Who is
| accountable for system uptime overall?
|
| A bad boss would just throw the person closest to the cause
| of the failure -- me -- under the bus. But who among us has
| never committed bad code? That's why we build systems for
| code review, for automated test, for release QA, for
| operational monitoring. And if all those systems fail or
| are inadequate, it's not really the fault of any single
| developer who was essentially walking a tightrope without a
| net.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| You basically nailed the problems with a non-blameless
| approach to business. Blamelessness has some very clear
| benefits, but I have also seen the pendulum swing too far
| (eg refusing to blame someone for gross negligence). I do
| think you can have blamelessness without corpspeak, but
| it takes a lot more humility and self-control.
| tayo42 wrote:
| this is basically why i got fired recently. now, idk what
| to do from here. being so "fake" (idk a better one, using
| that word feels like angsty teenager) just isn't in me.
| corporate life isn't for me maybe, but those paychecks...
| [deleted]
| hnuser847 wrote:
| > America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few
| minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their
| family or work.
|
| I specifically make a point to not ask the dreaded "what do
| you do?" question. In my experience, that question is an
| absolute energy killer. Most people do not like what they do
| for a living, so asking them to talk about it brings the mood
| down. Plus there's the whole "sizing up" aspect of that
| question that's very off-putting to me, as if we need to know
| how much money people make before we decide how we feel about
| them.
|
| I'd much rather talk to people about their hobbies, travels,
| creative pursuits, kids, etc. - the things that people are
| actually excited to talk about.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I've started asking people "What do you do with your time?"
| It's an open enough question that people can answer with
| work, hobbies, or life, whichever they feel more
| comfortable enough to share with someone they just met. It
| also invites unprompted switching between the topics.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| > talk to people about their hobbies, travels, creative
| pursuits, kids, etc.
|
| This backfires when you have more hobbies or travels than
| the other party.
|
| Also interests don't usually align (e.g "I spent last month
| looking for that one elusive comet from my DX-7512
| telescope. here.. see this photo. What about you ? Umm.
| well nothing much")
|
| It's better to gradually start with some topic where
| opinions are likely to align.
|
| For small talk I do realize how important (and how easy
| once you've run this with 4-5 people) it is to find a hobby
| I enjoy, and pick sharable stories around it and back it up
| with some artifacts (like photos on my phone).
|
| I think it would help to come up with clusters of topics
| that are well aligned. Pick a topic from one cluster and
| see how it works, if not pick one from the next. If it
| worked, pick another one from the same cluster.
| watwut wrote:
| I find people of other profession talking about their
| professions genuinely interesting thing to listen about. It
| is topic they have deep knowledge about and I usually
| don't.
|
| People with kids dont tend to have deep hobbies and
| exciting travels. Thinking about it, most people without
| them dont have hobbies they are super invested in either.
| There are some people with those and it is interesting when
| they talk about it, but most of them splits time between
| work and familly, putting a movie on top of it here and
| there.
| MockObject wrote:
| I enjoy discussing my work. If someone asked me about my
| hobbies, I'd stare blankly, wondering if they really want
| to hear that I go to the gym, or the hours I spend on
| obscure corners of Wikipedia, or doing math for fun. For
| small talk, stick with questions that folks are asked
| constantly, and that everyone has a ready and rehearsed
| answer for.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I'm usually interested to here what other people do as a
| selfish endeavor because people usually do or work for
| something at least moderately interesting. If someone
| doesn't want to talk about it, there's plenty of ways for
| them to steer the convo away from work.
|
| I'm excited to talk about what I do too, so I enjoy when
| people ask me...
| anonymousDan wrote:
| I was always taught growing up that asking that is rude! I
| still make a conscious effort not to do it straight off.
| It's a bit of a lazy conversation opener and with a bit
| more imagination (e.g. based on something
| interesting/strange that is happening in the moment) I
| often get better conversations. Or maybe people just think
| I'm weird
| geodel wrote:
| > I'd much rather talk to people about their hobbies,
| travels, creative pursuits, kids, etc.
|
| Yeah , this gets exciting only to people who can afford
| these things. It's possible that one only meet these types
| of people. In most context I have seen asking people what
| they do is not out of some deep interest in other's
| jobs/work but just the safe topic to broach with an adult.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > just the safe topic to broach with an adult
|
| Why is it unsafe to ask people about hobbies, even if
| they "can't afford these things"? They can just say that
| "I can't afford hobbies" and then you can talk about
| that.
|
| People also might not have a job/work, so asking about
| that could get uncomfortable too, if you are not willing
| to hear negative answers.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Yep. I remember we had specific training at my company on
| not mentioning literally any of these things when
| interviewing candidates, in part for that reason.
| debacle wrote:
| pards wrote:
| > can you explain the learnings from your recent project?
|
| I've seen a lot of organisations publish "learnings" as an
| artifact of the retrospective on a project that went pear-
| shaped, but IMHO they can only be classified as learnings once
| the org has internalised the error(s), developed strategies to
| mitigate against them, and demonstrated an ability to avoid
| them.
|
| Until then, they're merely a set of recommendations (with a
| grammatically questionable name).
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Hence the distinction between lessons identified and lessons
| learned
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| And hence a reason why "learnings" is so powerful: it
| doesn't make it clear that you have actually learned your
| lesson.
| mpalczewski wrote:
| you can be neutral without corp speak. "Steve, what did you
| learn from your recent project?"
| nopassrecover wrote:
| Interesting tie-in with the excellent Gervais Principle series
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...
| wikitopian wrote:
| I was pleasantly surprised by this article.
|
| I clicked it expecting generic kvetching about those dorky suits
| and walked away with a newfound appreciation for the art of
| emotionally neutralizing communication.
| mcrwfrd wrote:
| > Office Space, Fight Club, American Beauty, and I Heart
| Huckabees satirized the dreary emptiness of white collar life.
| Didn't my coworkers realize how ridiculous it sounds to use this
| jargon?
|
| Fight Club had an enormous influence on me during my teenage
| years. It would kill the younger version of myself to learn the
| kind of white collar environment I operate in every day.
|
| On one hand, Corpspeak is one of the most consistent forces of
| office life that beats the dying young punk voice that still
| whispers to me from time to time. Why don't we all just quit the
| tip-toeing and cut to the heart of each interaction? This way we
| would all be acting in our most authentic form. This would be a
| hardcore way to build something great together.
|
| On the other hand, as the author describes, Corpspeak allows me
| to gloss over any bad feelings that may be felt or insinuated by
| myself or my colleagues. Although it feels inauthentic and may
| increase existential dread if pondered too closely, this
| "glossing over of feelings" makes the job less tiring, and
| enables me to show up for 40 hours, week after week. It also
| leaves me with tons of energy leftover to live the other 128 on
| my own terms -- as long as I don't think too deeply about it all.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I think you're ignoring that those 40 hours of corporate speak
| don't allow you to live the other 128 on your own terms:
|
| - they're how we ended up with technology panopticon,
| authoritarianism, etc
|
| - they're how we ended up with Wall St looting the nation,
| executives committing open crimes, etc
|
| - they're how we ended up with ever worsening products,
| nutrient depleted foods, etc
|
| CorpSpeak is the emotional balm to never consider you're
| creating hell on Earth for yourself, your peers, and your
| children -- to emotionally disconnect yourself as the cause of
| your own suffering.
|
| That emotionally numb 25% of your life is why the other 75%
| sucks and is on a downward trend.
| hedora wrote:
| Has anyone ever encountered someone that was good at corp speak,
| but not also a sociopath of middling intellect?
|
| I mean: I've found it's difficult for individual contributors to
| ramp up and be recognized for doing their best work without
| adequate context from their peers.
| milansm wrote:
| I like and see the value of corpspeak. Take "bandwidth", for
| example. It's superior to "time", because it implies that
| something else has already filled up all the available time.
| Plus, by definition, bandwidth = [unit of work] / time. So if I
| don't have bandwidth for something, I imply that something else
| needs to be removed from my workload to be able to do the thing.
|
| Having an arsenal of phrases is not a bad thing per se; as with
| technology, it depends how one uses it.
| alexashka wrote:
| This reminds me of people who think guns are _the problem_. Guns
| and language are _tools_.
|
| If the people you work with are using language to engage in and
| win at zero sum games - that's a _human_ problem, not a language
| problem.
| Terretta wrote:
| In case author is reading this thread:
|
| > _When I told her the story, my girlfriend argued that HR should
| have found a term that conveyed the meaning of "discount" without
| its negative feeling._
|
| > _I think this is impossible. Employees in some locations are
| paid less than employees in other locations, and that kinda sucks
| for the lesser-paid employees to remember. Any word that
| accurately conveys the situation will also convey it kinda
| sucks._
|
| An example of term you can use is _"high ROI location"_.
|
| Conveys HR-magical-thinking that the company invests in its
| employees (ha), and that the output from Detroit is better return
| on investment than the output from New York.*
|
| Further, since ROI is the actual thinking that has -- for
| instance -- all the banks moving from New York to Houston and
| Tampa, so unlike much of corporate speak, it doesn't bring that
| 1984 black-is-white dissonance if you understand what's really
| going on.
|
| Finally, well paid individuals from Brooklyn and San Jose are
| moving to e.g. Buffalo or Minneapolis for the ROI. The term "high
| ROI location" is a location classification that makes them feel
| clever, not bad.
|
| *. There's a better algo than median pay or cost of living for
| where to put your headquarters: (talent pool x domain learning
| opptys) per median salary rate. _If you are doing knowledge work_
| there's no point in moving your HQ to discount low-cost towns
| without a vibrant ecosystem of similar domain firms and
| independent meetups for the crafts needed by the firm. This tends
| to surface not just Austin, Charlotte, or San Diego, but even
| more so, Kyiv or Minsk.
|
| **. If you want to use an employee-centric term instead of a
| company-centric term, use "affordable" and the word "location":
| https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/2022-most-affordable-sma...
| molotovh wrote:
| > Why did people have bandwidth instead of time?
|
| Because "bandwidth" isn't about having time to deal with an
| issue. It's about the mental capacity and effort necessary to
| process the issue. When you're working on complex multi-step
| issues, even if you have _time_ between steps to handle another
| issue, you may not have the mental capacity to add that effort
| into what you 're already doing without losing focus on the
| primary task. "Bandwidth" indicates the ability to recieve,
| process, and return information in a timely manner, not just the
| time itself.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I think it is a good article, technically it is "speaking
| diplomatically[1]" rather than "corpspeak" per se. And it is very
| important, and the author _almost_ gets there.
|
| Emotions don't belong in the workplace. They are there, but they
| too often don't help get things done. And yet, communicating is
| critical in order to both set expectations and to understand
| intent. Further, at least according to some references I've read,
| thinking diplomatically makes it possible to keep your emotions
| from interfering with your reasoning ability.
|
| So if you're a manager or a leader, and you need people to work
| together that think poorly of each other, then you need a way to
| talk to them that won't amplify their negative emotions in the
| hope that you can maximize their ability to get stuff done. And
| if you are artful with it, you can have discussions about touchy
| subjects without getting dumped into an angry argument.
|
| Poor leaders and managers use this to talk "over" people,
| generally young people who have yet to realize that conversations
| can have layers where what is being said on one layer is very
| different than the words that are coming out of the conversant's
| mouths. It is also popular to snipe at their fellow managers in
| this way.
|
| That said, organizations that engage in a lot of "speaking in
| code" are often quite political, and that comes right from the
| top, the CEO. One of the great things about NetApp when I was
| there was that Dan Warmenhoven really didn't approve of that sort
| of crap and put a stop to it. At Google it was highly valued, and
| the politics reflected it[2].
|
| An interesting warning flag is that if you are asked to say
| something (or hear something) that is a "bad thing" but clearly
| phrased in enough code to be deniable. An example would be "we
| need to move these employees into organizations that are more
| culturally compatible with the way they work." where the
| commonality of "these employees" is they are part of some
| protected class. Or "you need to get your team more focused on
| these deliverables" when team members have been speaking out
| about poor working conditions or, heaven forbid, labor actions.
|
| At the end of the day, if a non-ambiguous statement would inflame
| emotions, it is going to interfere with getting stuff done. And
| in places where we are forced to work with people we might not
| normally choose not to associate with that means keeping things
| "diplomatic."
|
| [1] Definition of Diplomacy: Telling someone to go to hell such
| that they look forward to the trip.
|
| [2] I made a number of enemies in upper management by
| "translating" what they were saying into things that people could
| understand.
| trgn wrote:
| Just an observation. The best managers I've had, all had a very
| flat, neutral affect. In some sense, they had no personality,
| and I mean that in the best possible way.
|
| They weren't necessarily using corpspeak, but their phrasing
| was always very beige. I think it helped to create a perfectly
| bland atmosphere, like a starbucks, where nobody necessarily
| felt elated, but at the same time nobody took offence.
|
| The worst managers I had were usually deceptively jovial or
| unnecessarily brusque.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Agreed! For me, "fake joviality" is the WORST. I may or may
| not be anticipating today's work day but do not pretend that
| coming to work is "fun".
| pyrolistical wrote:
| Heh its Lingua franca as many people within a company are from
| different trades.
|
| This is how a business person can communicate with a software
| developer
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Could you tell whether any particular batch of corpspeak was
| generated by a GPT3? Or do you even need a GPT3? Could you tie a
| vocabulary list to a random number generator and just a little
| bit of logic, and create convincing corpspeak?
|
| As the Cluetrain Manifesto said, this stuff sounds literally
| inhuman. And we crave genuine human interaction, and corpspeak
| isn't it.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| https://lurkertech.com/corpspeak/
| mguerville wrote:
| Corpspeak is the worse for strategy and product because there's a
| lot of meaning in the precise wording of something but inveitably
| every slide gets wordsmithed to death and ends up a vague
| buzzword bingo sheet.
|
| Simple (if not particularly potent) example I'm dealing with
| right now: "right to win"... my employer wants to use this
| wording in various strategy templates across all businesses and
| product. So every discussion is why do we think we have the
| "right to win" this or that market. In reality some products are
| differentiated in a way that serves a smaller segment (hence
| technically not "winning" the market) and perhaps deliver a
| higher IRR than an alternative strategy that is better boxed in
| this "must have a 'right to win'" perspective
| Finnucane wrote:
| If any of you ever catch me using the word 'space' to mean
| anything other than actual space, just shoot me in the head.
| xhevahir wrote:
| What really bothers me is how this kind of language creeps into
| other areas of life besides work. It's nauseating listening to
| the pompous, obfuscating speech favored by a lot of American
| professionals.
|
| Another disturbing phenomenon I've noticed is the use of more
| generic language _on principle_. A case in point is the phrase
| "sex worker" which seems like it's often used deliberately to
| blur the (many and important) distinctions between prostitutes,
| masseuses, bikini baristas, and what have you. And for what?
| Solidarity? Surely there are better ways of achieving that.
|
| Alarmingly, this sort of thing has been showing up a lot in the
| discourse surrounding monkeypox. Spokespeople and journalists
| keep using the term "LGBT community," when surely the relevant
| group is specifically that of men who have sex with other men?
| Whatever purpose their wording serves, it sure isn't a public-
| health one.
| hbn wrote:
| I've always loved Jonathan Coulton's song (which was actually
| feature in Left 4 Dead 2), Re: Your Brains which is essentially
| an email sent to someone who is hiding behind a door from his
| coworkers who were turned into brain-eating zombies and the
| author of the email is using passive corporate speak to convince
| him to let them in so they can eat him.
|
| It only got funnier when I got my first white-collar job.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tmzjaN2DWc
|
| > I've got another meeting, Tom, maybe we could wrap it up
|
| > I know we'll get to common ground somehow
|
| > Meanwhile, I'll report back to my colleagues
|
| > Who were chewing on the doors
|
| > I guess we'll table this for now
|
| > I'm glad to see you take constructive criticism well
|
| > Thank you for your time, I know we're all busy as hell
|
| > And we'll put this thing to bed
|
| > When I bash your head open
| Peer_to_Peer wrote:
| Can I just say, I feel like the world has missed an incredible
| opportunity to colloquially refer to this sort of business lingo
| as "Blingo"?
|
| Think about it, you could be playing Blingo Bingo in all your
| meetings!
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| I think the author forgot that
|
| > Let's take things offline
|
| May mean "I don't want any paper trails on this".
| misterflibble wrote:
| Oh dear, I hear that loaded phrase exchanged all the time in
| meetings, and it is usually when someone doesn't want to listen
| to a topic or idea anymore :-[
| shlurpy wrote:
| Yeah, I just mentally translate it to "Just shut up already
| and let's move on to stuff that matters."
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| What separates corpspeak from any other style of communication
| shared by a group of people in certain contexts?
|
| I thought corpspeak was just a type of codeswitching. How is it
| different than me using different phrases when gaming, or in
| formal situations. If everyone just spoke literally all the time
| it would be boring.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| One of our stakeholders just told my project manager (who was
| needlessly bugging the stakeholder over email) that "We may need
| to rethink our communication strategy", which is corpspeak for,
| "If you send me one more goddamn email about this I will gut you
| like a fish".
| barbs wrote:
| One thing I always found confusing in corpspeak is the use of the
| phrase "speak to [something]" instead of "speak about
| [something]". It seems confusing and doesn't appear to have any
| benefit other than possibly somehow making it seem more
| professional somehow.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Am I alone in not finding many of these examples particularly
| hard to understand? Maybe in the context in the workplace they
| are easier to understand than in isolation on paper. All
| professions have lingo, for example, the Army has its own unique
| jargon. It seems like there is a trend you see in writing where
| the author has to exaggerate or feign the severity of a problem
| for dramatic effect to get the content viral. It's like how
| Dilbert is an exaggeration of the workplace, because it would not
| be funny otherwise.
|
| Saying "touching base" does sound stupid but whatever
| maztaim wrote:
| nobody9999 wrote:
| In the beginning was the DEMO Project. And the Project was
| without form. And darkness was upon the staff members
| thereof. So they spake unto their Division Head, saying, "It
| is a crock of shit, and it stinks." And the Division
| Head spake unto his Department Head, saying, "It is a
| crock of excrement and none may abide the odor thereof."
| Now, the Department Head spake unto his Directorate Head,
| saying, "It is a container of excrement, and is very
| strong, such that none may abide before it." And it came
| to pass that the Directorate Head spake unto the Assistant
| Technical Director, saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer
| and none may abide by its strength." And the
| assistant Technical Director spake thus unto the Technical
| Director, saying, "It containeth that which aids growth
| and it is very strong." And, Lo, the Technical Director
| spake then unto the Captain, saying, "The powerful new
| Project will help promote the growth of the
| laboratories." And the Captain looked down upon the
| Project, and He saw that it was Good!
|
| (Source[0])
|
| [0] https://www.anvari.org/fortune/Best_Fortunes/820_in-the-
| begi...
| dasil003 wrote:
| > _Let's take things offline could mean: [...] "If I have to talk
| about this with you for one more minute I'm gonna go apeshit in
| front of all these people."_
|
| Couldn't help but be reminded of
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RAMRukKqQg
| CPLX wrote:
| One thing you learn as you get older is just how much the entire
| world runs on the concept of plausible deniability. It's kind of
| a core basis for human interaction, and it gets especially
| sophisticated in complex organizations with power structures.
|
| It goes back a very long way. Just google the phrase "meddlesome
| priest" for a particularly illustrative and amusing example.
|
| Corporate speak is just a combination of that with the more
| prosaic concept of jargon.
|
| Jargon, the part that doesn't involve purposeful obfuscation at
| least, is often highly useful for saving time because it allows
| people who engage in repeated interactions to be _highly_
| specific. The phrase "annual review" could mean a bunch of
| things, but a Y1-AAR could be a specific set of questions with a
| specific range of predetermined outcomes for a specific type of
| employee.
|
| When jargon is done well it's just really effective, people
| within an org can communicate highly efficiently with extremely
| clear meaning. When corporate weasel words are used well they can
| be highly effective at communicating intent while _obscuring_
| meaning for those in an out group and creating plausible
| deniability.
|
| For the uninitiated the fact that the two concepts live so
| closely side by side can be bewildering of course.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| 100% this. Your boss has a myriad of ways of communicating what
| they want w/o directly asking.
|
| This is a big reason I've never wanted to go into management.
| At my level I can just pretend I don't understand the implied
| ask (heh) if I feel like it. I have a hard skill. Worst case
| scenario I can get another job. Your levers of power don't work
| on me.
| stall84 wrote:
| yoooo lmfao !!
| dogleash wrote:
| Talking about the indirect meanings of 'corpspeak' is only
| interesting to me in the way we approach the topic.
|
| Corpspeak isn't novel in being duplicitous language. Compared to
| deliberately vague, concealing, and/or loaded language from life
| outside work, the corporate lingo is easy mode.
|
| But corpspeak has the property that in can be publicly discussed.
| "lol look at this dumb bullshit we all do for exactly these
| reasons" can be stated openly and plainly in a innocuous blog
| post, and posted to hacker news for people to hem and haw at.
|
| Rarely does anyone even bother scratching at the fiction of our
| real life linguistic tricks. Because a very bland explainer of
| surface level phenomenon leads to outright denial, or develops
| into flamewars.
| psyc wrote:
| > Rarely does anyone even bother scratching at the fiction of
| our real life linguistic tricks
|
| My mind is sort of constantly doing this in the background,
| because even in mid life it never stops being jarring to me and
| knocking me out of the flow of language-interpreting.
|
| My favorite example has always been "senseless act of violence
| that took the lives of 20 innocent people."
|
| 1. Come on. The guy had a reason that would be _comprehensible_
| to most people, even if nobody considers it a justification.
|
| 2. What does it mean to call a group of people innocent? What
| were they innocent of? Telling lies? Emotionally abusing others
| on occasion? That's doubtful. Innocent of anything that would
| merit being executed by a concerned citizen? Since when do we
| endorse vigilantism at all? Was there some doubt as to whether
| all 20 people in the west wing of the elementary school were
| all chomos maybe? WHY DO THE VICTIMS ALWAYS HAVE TO BE
| EXONERATED OF NOTHING IN PARTICULAR
| Jiro wrote:
| >Innocent of anything that would merit being executed by a
| concerned citizen? Since when do we endorse vigilantism at
| all?
|
| There's absolutely such a thing as self-defense. If a woman
| kills her potential rapist, she's killed a not-innocent
| person. We don't use the word "vigilantism" or "execution"
| for it, but it's a case of a person being killed by a
| concerned citizen where that person isn't innocent.
|
| And even ignoring self-defense, "not innocent" doesn't mean
| "okay to kill them", it's more like "did something bad which
| increases the chance of getting killed". If a bank robber
| argues with another bank robber over the stolen money and
| gets shot, we don't call that the killing of an innocent
| person, even though it's not legal to shoot your partner in
| order to take his stolen money.
| psyc wrote:
| I'm talking about mass killings. It wouldn't sound jarring
| to me in the contexts you're talking about.
| bmhin wrote:
| > Maybe it bothers me that using ask as a noun is passive voice,
| like the request is disembodied. I'm not asking, the ask just
| appeared there!
|
| I think the latter is the key to corpspeak as a whole and it has
| ramifications beyond just stripped emotion. It always erases
| causality from the communication. Everything is just "appearing"
| with no thought to how or why things are the way they are.
| Businesses are really, really bad about asking "Why?" at times
| and this kind of language reinforces that. There is no "Why?",
| things just materialize into existence and are and you (have to)
| deal with them.
|
| The emotion part makes sense, because often the answer to a
| "Why?" is because someone has made a mistake or done something
| dumb and it provides cover. However, it also leads to rote,
| wasteful, inefficient behaviors. It doesn't necessitate that
| there is no reason "why" things are being done, but it does mean
| that a reason isn't required either.
|
| "Why are we having this sync meeting?" "Well, to sync of course!"
| cfcf14 wrote:
| Completely agree! It's not even clear _who_ is asking.
| Causality is erased, as you say.
|
| "I have an ask for you" - is it my ask? Am I conveying somebody
| else's ask? Who knows? It's atemporal, acausal, you can choose
| to investigate by querying but there's a good chance the
| response is going to be a shrug and a small, apologetic smile
| accompanied by "ah - you know, the usual" at which point you'll
| sigh and respond with "yep - ok, let me see if I have the
| bandwidth and circle back to you on that".
| mpalczewski wrote:
| You could just substitute "ask" with "request", and it's less
| corp speak but has all the same connotations. It looks more
| like tribal signaling.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| It's just jargon. Every profession has jargon. And the purpose of
| jargon is to demonstrate that you belong to the group.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| The main purpose of jargon is to concisely communicate complex
| concepts using convenient labels - see [0]. If your workplace
| is using jargon merely to signal belonging to the group, then
| that's just sad.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32564931
| __derek__ wrote:
| Yesterday, during a bi-weekly _sync_ , someone said that they
| would _take an action item_ to research something and _follow up
| offline_.[1] There were three of us on the video chat, and we
| ended ten minutes early. After nearly three years away, I know I
| romanticize the office, but it seems like _everything_ is _taken
| offline_ nowadays.
|
| [1]: Sure, this meeting could just be an email thread or Slack
| channel, but it's one of my few recurring meetings where everyone
| turns on video.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| This is something that has been on my mind a lot lately - just
| wanted to share a couple articles I came across and love:
|
| - https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/23/from-inboxing-t...
|
| - https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/spread-of-corporate-speak.ht...
|
| Along with a book I haven't read but have considered gifting to a
| bunch of people:
|
| - https://smile.amazon.com/30-000-Pound-Gorilla-Room-Annoying/...
| joegahona wrote:
| That Vulture article was getting recirculated on Twitter
| yesterday, and I'm appreciative because I missed it the first
| time. What a masterpiece -- so well written, funny, and just
| spot-on.
| naravara wrote:
| I'm sure this is part of the deal with considered corp-speak, as
| in the stuff that ends up in formal documents. But honestly a big
| chunk of it is just the sort of specialized jargon that always
| develops in a specialized industry. It's not like doctors or
| plumbers or anyone else don't end up with little idiomatic
| expressions like this after a while. It's just that we all
| somewhat resent office work for being bullshit so we resent the
| signifiers associated with it. It's "cool" to not be corporate,
| so corporate behaviors become cringey.
|
| Also, a lot of the surrender to it I think just happens because
| people are tired and not always paying close attention so when
| they're put on the spot in meetings to respond it's much easier
| to just spit out some vague but related sounding jargon salad
| than to actually make an incisive point.
| erganemic wrote:
| I used Corpspeak pretty much exclusively for the year I spent as
| an entry-level analyst at a consulting firm, because--as a
| consequence of all the points mentioned in this article--it was
| cognitively _easier_. If writing is like creating a painting from
| scratch, Corpspeak is like a coloring book. Instead of mixing
| your own paint, you pick from a finite number of predefined
| crayons. Instead of needing to decide on a subject and
| composition, you just need to pick what image you want to fill
| in.
|
| Corpspeak abounds in places that value "being in motion" over
| "getting results", since when you use Corpspeak, you don't
| _actually_ have to think about what the best course of action is
| --the best course of action is _always_ "organizing a connect
| with the relevant subject matter experts to draft action items
| for a discovery yada-yada-yada". This requires zero thought--it
| just requires knowing a list of buzzwords and being able to
| string them together. This is really easy to do! When promotion
| season came around, I was asked to write a report of why I
| deserved one, and I wrote 1200 words in a half hour--that's 40
| wpm, about the average typing speed of someone just copying text!
| _And I was complimented on the thoroughness and perspicacity of
| what I wrote._ I got the promotion--just in time for me to find a
| better opportunity and bounce.
|
| Nevertheless, I do believe there's value in Corpspeak. The
| reality at most companies (even ones you care about) is that a
| lot of the communicating you do is more-or-less inconsequential,
| and doesn't actually need to have a lot of care and thought put
| into it--and being able to let your eyes glaze over and engage in
| the conversational equivalent of cruise control saves cognitive
| resources for stuff that actually matters.
| agnokapathetic wrote:
| I'm curious how corpspeak became a monoculture. How did this
| spread so pervasively?
| pklausler wrote:
| Humans are prone to cargo cult thinking. Presented with a
| successful or important person, we automatically copy their
| behavior, because their behavior must have made them successful
| or important.
|
| I think that this is why usage of stupid idioms and phrases
| flows downward in hierarchies. Have you ever noticed an
| executive use a corpspeak phrase in an all-hands meeting and
| then seen it crop up immediately afterward in e-mail and
| meetings from lower-level management? It can be fun to ask them
| what a new phrase means in real terms, too -- often they don't
| really know.
| oofnik wrote:
| For all the talk about American individualism, American
| corporate culture is actually extraordinarily collectivist. The
| pervasive groupthink at all levels of the hierarchy is an
| effective survival strategy. It's quite depressing to read
| accounts of individuals who lived under the boot of various
| collectivist regimes, particularly the modes of thought and
| expression so prevalent and necessary in such societies to keep
| your family from starving, only to realize that they are more
| or less replicated in American corporate environments, for more
| or less the same reasons.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| When I was younger I spent some time in East Germany visiting
| relatives. From the inside most large corporations look like
| communist states with an planned economy. Tons of propaganda,
| a lot of phrases that mean exactly the opposite when used
| ("rightsizing" vs "layoffs"), refusal to name issues
| directly, appearances more important than facts, useless
| metrics, an emphasis on supervision instead of improving
| things and a leadership that pretends to talk for the
| underlings but is totally out of touch.
| psyc wrote:
| Promiscuous middle managers and C-Levels? I'm thinking they
| carry a heavy load, shed a lot, really get around, and
| frequently attend superspreader events.
| phailhaus wrote:
| People who work at companies tend to keep working at companies.
| You don't get as much movement going from McDonalds to Google,
| but tons of folks migrate among tech companies. So the culture
| naturally spreads.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| How tied are these examples to the tech industry? When I see the
| word 'corpspeak,' I think more about the language of company
| memoes, materials, and press releases rather than the words used
| by managers.
| calibas wrote:
| When I first heard the term "thought leader" I thought it was
| purely in jest. It seems so ridiculous and full of hubris that
| I'm amazed people can use it in serious conversations.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| There is a difference between taking the emotion out of language
| and obfuscating the meaning.
|
| "standard, national, and premium" instead of "discount, etc, etc"
| doesn't get to the point - cost of living adjustment buckets,
| which could be "low", "medium", "high" and both be devoid of the
| emotion/judgement but also effective in communicating the
| rationale.
|
| Corpspeak allows middle tier employees (structure not
| performance) to neglect precision, but real business people hate
| people who speak it as it beats around the bush. That's posture
| talk to them.
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...
| badrabbit wrote:
| I have an ask for corpspeak to be mandated by HN rules.
| lantry wrote:
| every hn post has a relevant krazam: https://youtu.be/1RAMRukKqQg
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