[HN Gopher] Workers who love 'synergizing paradigms' might be ba...
___________________________________________________________________
Workers who love 'synergizing paradigms' might be bad at their jobs
Author : Anon84
Score : 470 points
Date : 2026-03-06 13:30 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.cornell.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.cornell.edu)
| throwpoaster wrote:
| I am shocked. Shocked! This is shocking /s
| franktankbank wrote:
| Eee fucking gads man!
| masfuerte wrote:
| In summary, employees who are impressed by corporate bullshit do
| badly on tests of analytic intelligence. This is very
| unsurprising.
| oytis wrote:
| Happy to see that the term "bullshit" has established itself in
| the scientific literature.
| ericmay wrote:
| "Might be bad at their jobs" was a very corporate speak way of
| saying they might be dumb.
|
| In case you missed that and were impressed by the bullshit
| language used. ;-)
| reedf1 wrote:
| There is a grotesquely pulsing layer of overconfident dumbasses
| in business (and society in general) and this is the language
| they speak. My job at any company, as far as I can see it, is to
| make sure my local orbit is cleared of these wackos. They are
| parasitic extractors of value and soul.
| newyankee wrote:
| Operational jobs are filled with these though. Not saying they
| are bad at work but the corporate culture leads to this
| language and style overwhelming everyone else and rising to the
| top
| Aeolun wrote:
| It works perfectly! You can become the president of the
| (debatably) most powerful nation on earth by employing it
| successfully.
| Traster wrote:
| Isn't this just the obvious conclusion you would expect going in?
| Corporate bullshit is _meant_ to sound impressive whilst
| simultaneously either saying nothing, or hiding the real meaning.
|
| 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.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| These headlines are crack for HN.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Sure, but it's not clickbait. It accurately reflects the
| article content, and seemingly, the discussed study's results.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| The Karl Popper in me says: Its barely useful science because
| its not falsifiable.
|
| 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.
| delecti wrote:
| How is it not falsifiable? They found a correlation between
| susceptibility to bullshit and the result of a previously
| established cognitive tests.
|
| > 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.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| You have the word 'falsifiable' backwards.
|
| >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.'
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| > Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at
| their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.
|
| 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.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| And they did use cognitive tests that were correlated
| with job performance. If the people did not perform
| differently on those tests, or performed better on those
| tests... well there you go. Is it the most rigorous study
| in the world? Obviously not. Does it indicate what it
| purports to indicate? It sure does.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| That sort of method has proven problematic, as the thing
| that matters could be something correlated with
| breakfast, and the breakfast itself could be irrelevant.
|
| You usually have to ask people to change their behavior.
| Pretty straight forward in this case though.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| It looks to me like they designed a test to measure
| someone's susceptibility to corporate bullshit, and then
| administered tests that were correlated with job
| performance in other studies. If the results were not
| different on the cognitive tests, then it would be false.
| If the people who scored higher with their bullshit scores
| did better on the cognitive tests, then it would be false.
| If you disagree with the methodology then criticize that,
| but saying it's not falsifiable is simply false.
| ivl wrote:
| It's like crack, but for being able to be a little derogatory
| to the masses.
|
| Certainly not _as_ unhealthy as crack.
| alexc05 wrote:
| that's a bit of a meta discussion and it'd probably reveal some
| super interesting things about how tech culture have changed in
| the last ~15 years.
|
| 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.
| stephbook wrote:
| Understandable. None of us is one of those sheeple! /s
| gostsamo wrote:
| Won't forget from one of the Pratchett's book, where the word
| "synergy" was called a whore. Don't have the english edition of
| Going Postal handy to find the exact quote, but it was a glorious
| rant against a CEO's interview in the newspaper.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| How was this a surprise to anyone with more than three
| braincells?
|
| 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.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| i don't think it's _that_ self-evident - many people believe on
| some level that these hierarchies (like in the workplace i
| mean), so i think it can be useful to point out the self-
| reinforcing bs-generating structure and that bullshit from
| above is still bullshit
| rdevilla wrote:
| I suspect this is why formal languages exist; as a sieve to keep
| the hordes of fools at bay, and a system for turning bullshit
| into parse errors.
|
| 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.
| alcasa wrote:
| Maybe controversial, but I believe a lot of OOP/Clean Code
| patterns are the software equivalent of corporate BS.
| rdevilla wrote:
| I agree. Mostly they are copes for lack of first-class
| functions and multiple dispatch. Go through GoF and you will
| see this is the case for 80% of the patterns.
|
| OOP has no firm theoretical foundation, unlike FP which is
| rooted in the formalisms of mathematics.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Ok, I'm in an argumentative mood, and I think this is more
| true than not.
|
| 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...
| delecti wrote:
| I worked with a junior dev who suddenly got _really_ excited
| about Clean Code. Every example he brought up left me feeling
| that there was a kernel of good advice, but the book wanted
| you to take it to such an extreme that it would result in
| shitty code.
| ansgri wrote:
| I feel like half of junior programmers are susceptible to
| this.
| jghn wrote:
| > there was a kernel of good advice, but the book wanted
| you to take it to such an extreme that it would result in
| shitty code
|
| I see you're familiar with Uncle Bob's handiwork
| teddyh wrote:
| There is now a second edition of that book which has
| supposedly been rewritten to fix that.
| oldestofsports wrote:
| It strongly pushes for max 3 LOC per function, and I am not
| even joking.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> but I believe a lot of OOP /Clean Code patterns are the
| software equivalent of corporate BS._
|
| 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.
| t43562 wrote:
| I think it's more the idea that if using a pattern is good
| then using all of them at once is even better.
| glitchc wrote:
| Why is OOP lumped with Clean Code? Objects are useful for
| managing complex states and relationships. They are
| complementary, not mutually exclusive, to procedural and
| functional programming.
| kdfjgbdfkjgb wrote:
| I think they meant "OOP patterns". Not that I agree with
| them
| array_key_first wrote:
| Usually when people refer to OOP they don't mean
| encapsulation, although that's the core tenant of OOP.
| Encapsulation, private and public etc is a given. Usually
| they're talking about the other OOP stuff, like
| inheritance. Inheritance is pretty much bad and is the
| wrong abstraction for 90% of stuff.
| Aeolun wrote:
| When applied without thinking about why. Yes.
|
| 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.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Because code becomes harder to understand.
|
| 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.
| 9rx wrote:
| If you can press a button to understand what is going on,
| "it's possible to overuse" most definitely applies.
| Dependency injection, as the name implies, is for dealing
| with _dependencies_ -- things that you cannot observe
| until runtime.
|
| Hence the benefit to testing; allowing you to inject a
| deterministic implementation while under test.
| layer8 wrote:
| Unless you mean just regular constructor parameters,
| dependency injection in the sense of a runtime dependency
| injection framework is the one thing I try to avoid like
| the plague.
| oldestofsports wrote:
| That is called a "DI Container", and usually manages the
| objects and order of instantiation etc.
|
| 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?
| layer8 wrote:
| When Martin Fowler coined the term Dependency Injection
| [0], that was specifically for the context of container
| instrumentation. Merely passing service objects as
| constructor parameters is more akin to the Strategy
| pattern. At least in the Java world where it originated,
| "dependency injection" has always been about wiring
| application components and services together at runtime
| based on configuration, often directly injecting the
| dependencies into object fields via reflection, and not
| about statically compiled constructor invocations that
| happen to pass service objects.
|
| [0] https://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html
| antonymoose wrote:
| Wildly controversial!
|
| 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.
| domga wrote:
| A decent chunk of OOP patterns was due to lack of language
| features, notably passing and returning functions
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Are you referring to function pointers?
|
| I believe C has allowed passing and returning functions
| from... the jump, no?
| scott_w wrote:
| I recall a lot of this comes from Java 5/6 where I think
| passing function pointers around was difficult, if not
| impossible. Back in those days, I had many a conversation
| with a friend who would ask "can Python do
| pattern/feature X?" to which I'd respond "it doesn't need
| to."
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Not just function pointers. E.g. in Scala:
| def addX(x: Int): Function[Int,Int] = { y =>
| x+y }
|
| addX(5) then returns a function that adds 5. So closures,
| which are equivalent to objects (behind the scenes, the
| compiler needs to allocate a structure to remember that 5
| and know the "member function" to call to do the plus),
| and _usually_ more straightforward.
|
| 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.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Pardon my ignorance, isn't that a lambda in c++?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Yes, and in Java and other languages (e.g. in Lean you
| can literally use the syntax l x - x + 5). When OOP was
| more of the zeitgeist, these languages didn't have lambda
| functions.
| DauntingPear7 wrote:
| You can return function pointers but not first class
| functions, which means you can't do closures and other FP
| things in C
| gavmor wrote:
| A lot of patterns have become frameworks, or language
| features, yes. It's just paving cowpaths.
| layer8 wrote:
| Since a single-method object easily serves the role of
| such a function, that's simply not true. Looking at the
| 23 GoF patterns, I can't identify any that would be
| obviated by having first-class functions (or lambdas, as
| many OO languages nowadays have). Some of the patterns
| can employ first-class functions (e.g. an observer could
| be just a callback function reference), but the pattern
| as such remains.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The language feature isn't "passing and returning
| functions" but "loose coupling." Lambdas and Functors are
| just a way to represent that in OOP languages that care
| more about inheritance than about messaging.
| jghn wrote:
| It's both.
|
| 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
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Design Patterns is more like the Human Factors and
| Ergonomics Handbook.
|
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| I disagree with that take. Design patterns are a language
| for (= give standard names to) patterns that tend to
| repeatedly occur in code, so that we can efficiently
| communicate about them. Programmers working in the
| respective contexts tend to reinvent them sooner or later
| if they don't know them already, so it makes sense to
| circulate the knowledge about them. But that doesn't mean
| that they are prescriptive.
| hibikir wrote:
| OOP pattern were useful for people stuck in a pure OOP
| language (say Java 1.4) And needed to make something
| understandable. Today, when many languages, including Java,
| have reasonable functional programming support, a large
| percentage of the patterns are over complicated. Just look at
| the list, and see how many can be replaced with less
| boilerplate by passing a function, doing some currying, or
| both.
| bluGill wrote:
| That doesn't replace the pattern, it just does the pattern
| by a different name. Design Patterns was never about OOP -
| the publisher added OO to the title because that was the
| fad at the time, but the patterns happen in other systems
| as well, they are just implemented differently.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| I believe it's more like formal letter, or prefilled form
| where you only fill data when required. It actually can be
| useful.
| exceptione wrote:
| I think you can safely omit 'maybe'. OOP is harder and
| requires more design experience to achieve good results than
| functional programming. I welcome you to look at OOP code
| from people who don't get the patterns.
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Most of OOP and design patterns was yet another attempt to
| make it possible for lower-ability (i.e. cheaper) developers
| to be productive. Just like dimensional lumber and standards
| like "wall studs are spaced 16 inches on center" made it
| possible for a lower-ability carpenter to frame a house and
| have everything fit together properly. Though in the latter
| case, it actually was successful.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Nah, the engineering standards like that _generally_ make
| everyone 's job easier; the "pro" carpenter will save just
| as much time as the newbie, hell maybe more.
|
| 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"
| mikkupikku wrote:
| There's a strong element of that, but there's more to it.
| It is to the advantage of management that even their
| experienced developers all speak the same design language,
| if only because this makes any individual developer easier
| to replace. Corps don't want a situation where the whole
| company is hanging off one brilliant programmer's
| completely impenetrable code. TempleOS is awesome, but not
| for businesses.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| >a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay
|
| 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
| duped wrote:
| > Which is not to be read as a necessarily "bad" thing
|
| I (and many others) read it as "dishonesty"
| Barbing wrote:
| Is there a historical example or does anyone have an
| anecdote of some crunch time where the CEO blowing hot air
| was the best thing for morale? Compared to what I might
| think a lot of us would prefer in many cases, which might
| be an honest assessment & making us part of the journey to
| overcome whatever adversity.
| arethuza wrote:
| _" an honest assessment & making us part of the journey
| to overcome whatever adversity"_
|
| 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.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| It is hard to argue with a vague statement like "most
| people" without a proper scientific study. But I
| disagree: following the scientific principle, and being
| willing to change opinion in the face of new evidence
| increases my trust in someone. Someone who is certain and
| confident without showing their work / sources make me
| suspicious. And critical thinking is (pardon the pun) a
| critical skill.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| If you actually think and _act_ that way, so much the
| better. I don 't even particularly disbelieve you. But
| can you really look at the mass of humanity around you
| and believe they think the same way? Even if they claim
| to value critical thinking, watch what they do, what they
| buy, how they vote.
|
| 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.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| Hm, having a journalist and an academic (with a heavy
| focus on applied rigorous statistics) as parents probably
| helped there, you are right. But school is supposed to
| teach this, at least here in Sweden it is a part of the
| curriculum. But indeed, that doesn't seem to help, and
| the US it is especially bad (not saying the situation is
| good here either though).
|
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Not exactly?
|
| 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.)
| duped wrote:
| "Smooth vagueness" to me comes off as tautologies. If you
| cannot say anything specific it means either you don't
| know, or don't want others to know. So it is a lie about
| ones' competency, or a lie by omission.
|
| It's all dishonesty at the end of the day.
| jonahx wrote:
| > They have to set vision and direction
|
| A prime example of corporate speak that is, as you rightly
| said, 'only effective among the "clueless"'
| aerodexis wrote:
| The Gervais model is predicated on sociopathy as the driving
| force of social cohesion. This is the kind of model a
| sociopath would construct. There are other models available
| to us.
|
| 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.
| moepstar wrote:
| Hate to ask, but since it came up again and a quick search
| couldn't find it - what's that Gervais model? Links /
| explanations welcome!
|
| Edit: seems that searching for ,,Gervais principle" turned
| up what was talked about...
| pklausler wrote:
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-... is a good explanation. The diagram of the
| "MacLeod Cycle" utterly convinced me, having been around
| that loop a few times.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _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_
|
| 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.
| justonceokay wrote:
| The higher up you are in a company the more of "yourself"
| you have to give as realistically many more people are
| relying on your job results than they are on your personal
| wellbeing.
|
| It definitely takes a certain kind of person to be a good
| fit in that role
| macNchz wrote:
| Ultimately I think all of what you describe there falls
| into a bucket of personality traits and social skills that
| contribute to success in many areas of life.
|
| 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/Article
| s/15341_Readings/...
| anthonypasq wrote:
| what you view as subtly manipulative is just having good
| social skills
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is a trait of a psychopath. Not surprisingly, one
| finds a lot of them in the executive ranks.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| The polite term these days is "sociopath", which takes
| out the whole "psycho-killer" weightedness (because a
| sociopath can be very likeable and friendly) - and they
| fill the ranks of leadership in all professions...
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Haven't there also been many studies that show high-level
| executives also have a high number of "sociopaths" in their
| ranks?
|
| Sociopaths can code-switch instantly - I wonder how much of
| this is training, versus emulating others, versus a
| fundamental difference in brain operations...
| gzread wrote:
| The Gervais model! I haven't heard that in a while.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| There are no natives anymore. For some time, really. Honestly I
| don't even think there ever were.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| That's not quite accurate. Formal languages (which have an old
| pedigree) can be useful for clarification and inference, but
| they can also obfuscate the truth, and what's more, subvert it.
| Every logical formalism necessarily presupposes some
| metaphysics, and if the metaphysics is bad, or you fail to
| recognize the effective bounds of that formalism, you can fall
| into mechanically generated bullshit. Modern predicate logic
| suffers from known paradoxes and permits nonsensical and
| vacuous inferences (like those caused by material implication).
| More subtle effects are expressed in, for example, the problem
| of bare particulars.
|
| 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.
| raffael_de wrote:
| > formal languages exist; as [...] a system for turning
| bullshit into parse errors
|
| that's a very neat way to put it!
| jancsika wrote:
| > a system for turning bullshit into parse errors
|
| 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.
| utopiah wrote:
| Which is precisely why proper scammers, not to say "top"
| management, is excellent at spotting keywords, or even better
| shibboleh, and using them. If they must they'll even learn and
| adopt new keywords from HBR or whatever trendy management
| publication can help them look the par.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| But if someone says something like "synergizing paradigms",
| isn't that essentially a parse error to any normal person?
|
| 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.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| My guy: corporate sloganeering is as much cultural
| appropiation as ghetto speak and drug culture.
|
| Theres no high minded difference. Its just in/out group
| identification.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| The corpo-speak sounds like mostly way to communicate
| contentious things in nice way, everything done to not sound
| negative or aggresive, while knowing (or hoping) that other
| side gets the message.
|
| It is awfully unproductive way to do it but I'm sure HR
| approves.
| adampunk wrote:
| You seem nice
| leonardoe wrote:
| This observation really resonates with me. I have spent a lot
| of energy trying to communicate that ditching formal languages
| for natural language is a terrible idea in some (most?)
| domains. The power of formal languages comes precisely from
| their "limitations".
|
| 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| To analyse the impact of this study I recommend that we set up an
| interdepartmental committee with fairly broad terms of reference
| so that at the end of the day we'll be in the position to think
| through the various implications and arrive at a decision based
| on long-term considerations rather than rush prematurely into
| precipitate and possibly ill-conceived action which might well
| have unforeseen repercussions.
| sanex wrote:
| Let's amplify this visionary perspective. This is exactly the
| caliber of commentary we should be encouraging more of on HN.
| Intermernet wrote:
| No, we need to move forward into the retrospective.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Translation: Lets think about it before we do stupid shit.
| Clent wrote:
| Outcome: Fail to think about it, only do stupid shit.
| sillywabbit wrote:
| Rushing prematurely into precipitate does sound pretty
| dangerous.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| Excellent idea!
|
| And the best part is that while we're talking about making a
| decision, we won't have to actually do any real work.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| The trick in corporate environments is to watch for the people
| who respond well to this kind of speech and avoid/eject.
|
| The people who roll their eyes at corporate nonsense are your
| skunkworkers.
| phkahler wrote:
| "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, creating a sort of negative feedback loop.
|
| 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!
| RobotToaster wrote:
| You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
| andai wrote:
| I found this title amusing, since I'm actually synergizing
| paradigms, i.e. trying to find the commonalities between
| different models of human behavior.
|
| (There are dozens of us!)
| oniony wrote:
| This sounds very impressive ;)
| dghf wrote:
| Wouldn't that be synthesising paradigms?
| andai wrote:
| Crap, you're right! The goal is synthesis. Can we distil a
| bunch of models down to something more fundamental and
| elegant.
| Intermernet wrote:
| Yes, but have you decoded the ontological kerygma of the
| gestalt. No point synergizing paradigms unless you've got the
| kerygma sorted.
| donohoe wrote:
| Its describing every second LinkedIn post, no?
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| LinkedIn is the worst purgatory world of this study for sure.
| eucyclos wrote:
| I thought tfa would say seeking synergy is a sign one is
| struggling with ones own deliverables so one tries to add value
| elsewhere in the organization. Is synergy really such a poorly
| defined term that it's synonymous with corporate bullshit?
| zbentley wrote:
| Yes. In a huge majority of cases, I've seen it used as a
| weasely, subjective synonym for "more than one thing being
| done".
| VorpalWay wrote:
| Yes. (There are other phrases too that should be red flags such
| as "strategizing", but "synergy" is probably the poster child).
| encom wrote:
| >other phrases
|
| "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.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I feel like "synergy" has been _the_ poster child for corporate
| buzzwords.
| ranyume wrote:
| The intention of these phrases is to "hack" into the inner-
| workings of the human brain, into how people create power
| structures. Legalese exists for a reason. Language is not just a
| tool for communication but a system that defines roles for people
| in a power structure.
|
| 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.
| johnsillings wrote:
| SOCIOPATHS | SOCIOPATHS WITH MBAs
| | SOCIOPATHS WHO LIKE POWERPOINT |
| OVERWORKED DOERS | CONFUSED
| PEOPLE | LOSERS
| pjerem wrote:
| that's genius.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| I am growing comfortable with bouncing between the confused and
| the losers. In this model, anybody between the losers and
| sociopaths are the true suckers. I am no sociopath so I better
| make myself comfortable at the bottom of the barrel. More time
| for my own problems.
| Aeolun wrote:
| You think?
| kevinsync wrote:
| Last time I worked corporate, we were acquired and I was asked
| what my job was by somebody on the other side. I said "My job is
| to make you feel good about whatever it is that I may or may not
| be doing around this place."
|
| Despite 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
| darreninthenet wrote:
| As a highly experienced consultant once said to me, forget all
| the objectives, priorities and corporate culture bullshit,
| whatever anyone tells you, your job is to make your boss look
| good.
| wmeredith wrote:
| It's called busy-ness for a reason.
| NoSalt wrote:
| "synergistic leadership" or "growth-hacking paradigms" are, in my
| opinion, what my teenage son refers to as "brain rot". I don't
| know where these people come from who make up these terms, or
| what childhood trauma has done this to them, but I absolutely
| cannot tolerate any of it, it makes my skin crawl.
| hibikir wrote:
| It's a bit better: They are forms of obfuscation and lowering
| information in a channel. They are designed for environments
| where being clear is very risky. In certain organizations, you
| are better off being unclear than asking for approval or
| consensus on a tricky decision: You produce an
| incomprehensible, vague mess of a message, and avoid argument,
| as argument in those places leads to paralysis.
|
| 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.
| dasil003 wrote:
| There's also a compounding effect. Even though they tend to
| be a bit hand-wavy, you can use the words synergy or paradigm
| in a sentence and still have it confer some kind of meaning.
| However as soon as you utter the phrase "synergistic
| paradigm" you are obviously and completely full of shit.
|
| 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.
| eel wrote:
| Corporate BS is the topic I want to study if I ever pursue a PhD.
| Not only BS that is directed from the top down, but also BS from
| the bottom and laterally. I'm curious what in corporate culture
| allows it to grow and what slows it. I also wonder if it's always
| bad or if it's beneficial in small amounts.
|
| 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.
| dchest wrote:
| Note that this isn't a study of actual workplaces, it's based on
| cognitive tests, so "bad at their jobs" may be a stretch. For
| example, "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic
| abilities" may be good for business, e.g. when dealing with US
| government contracts in 2026.
| srean wrote:
| There was a good corporate bullshit generator posted here in HN
| but probably before chatGPT became a thing. Can't seem to find
| it.
|
| Love ? That's for plebs. The right thing is to _leverage_
| wholistic synergizing paradigms.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| On the bright side, it's nice that a significant number of these
| folks self-select by moving to Dubai.
| tamimio wrote:
| This is known to everyone who worked with these corpo drones,
| that language is just to look smart and give the optics of being
| knowledgeable and professional, and it doesn't end there, I also
| personally add to that anyone who jumps into XYZ bandwagon trend
| that are being used by popular silicon valley companies, like
| open office environment, scrum useless meetings, the forced
| harmony, daycare level team activities, among many more.
|
| And you can get the gist of that company or people during the
| interview actually.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| I have always been skeptical / disdainful of people who speak in
| corporate bullshit all the time. It's very tryhard and rather
| unnecessary in my view.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| >Overall, the findings suggest that while "synergizing cross-
| collateralization" might sound impressive in a boardroom, this
| functionally misleading language can create an informational
| blindfold in corporate cultures
|
| 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".
| thewillowcat wrote:
| Engineers, I am so sorry. They are still going to be your bosses.
| reedlaw wrote:
| Isn't this the premise behind Dilbert?
| inaros wrote:
| Workers who spend all day posting on LinkedIn might be bad at
| their jobs...
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| So I guess this is a double-edged test.
|
| "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."
| languagehacker wrote:
| Twaddling and puffery!
| foundart wrote:
| A good takeaway line from the article:
|
| > 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...
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| There does exist _some_ purpose for corp-speak: it is a shared
| language for people in disparate parts of a large organization to
| communicate with. It is a tool, mostly for managers.
|
| 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.
| ta988 wrote:
| But how much of that is real as in has measurable positive
| impact vs random decision making.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| That sounds like a problem with the people producing and
| consuming the messages, not a problem with the protocol
| itself :)
| persedes wrote:
| Agreed, I think it also acts as a hiring filter to scan for
| candidates that have been exposed to this kind of language and
| can speak it fluently. The bigger the cooperation, the more
| widespread that is though, don't see it as often in mid sized
| companies. Was looking into a director role at a large org and
| there were lots of very new words thrown at me very quickly.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| You may be right but often I feel it's a tool to sound
| confident while at the same time having no idea what they are
| doing.
| c16 wrote:
| In other news, the grass is green and the sky is blue.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Bluesky thinking about Greenfield projects, perhaps
| quux wrote:
| This article sparks joy
| lunias wrote:
| Now the turbo encabulator on the other hand...
| cess11 wrote:
| 'The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more
| susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more
| charismatic and "visionary," but also displayed lower scores on a
| portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive
| reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to
| corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of
| effective workplace decision-making.
|
| 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?
| headcanon wrote:
| If anyone wants a chuckle, I vibe-coded an endless supply of
| "synergizing paradigm" terms as a slideshow for a fake
| corporation. It's fun to put on in the background on a tv
| somewhere to see if anyone notices.
|
| https://brightpath-global-solutions.com/
|
| Edit: repo link: https://github.com/chronick/global-business-
| solutions
| el_benhameen wrote:
| A delightful update to
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
| reactordev wrote:
| Ah, "the only difference being..."
|
| 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.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| I keep hearing this from the naysayers, but I just think
| that they haven't fully integrated unilateral phase
| detractors into their work effectively. Maybe you're using
| the free retro encabulator tier so you don't see the full
| capabilities, but some of us are already twice as
| productive.
| plaidphantom wrote:
| Here's another for the pile.
| https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4?si=yTB_dICMqnLjqVEi
| mv4 wrote:
| as someone frequently exhibiting at various industry trade
| shows, I can confidently say nobody would notice.
| utopiah wrote:
| Where can I transfer millions in investments already? This is
| revolutionary. It'll change everything! /s
| fnands wrote:
| Some of those pictures are delightfully cursed
| linolevan wrote:
| This is awesome. Almost all of these are believable even if
| you're looking at pretty carefully. I need this on a firestick
| or something.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Brilliant!
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Turn it into an endless LLM trap. The sooner tgese aystems are
| piinsoned, the batter humanoty will last
| janalsncm wrote:
| Reminds me of corporate ipsum
|
| https://www.corporate-ipsum.com/
| gregw2 wrote:
| A bit of "hacker history"... at the dawn of the web 1993 was
| birthed the first app (that I know of) along these lines:
| "Buzzword Bingo".
|
| 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.
| johnisgood wrote:
| "Affordable ... at premium prices". :D
| rawgabbit wrote:
| This is a masterpiece. I have seen similar slides in many
| consultants' decks over the years.
| Nevermark wrote:
| But can you blame them? Just say it! "Synergizing paradigms!"
|
| Poetry inaction!
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I find it interesting how different companies have a different
| BS, that marks people as insiders. The insiders like to make the
| implication that it is the newcomer who is at fault, because they
| only know the real words for things. Slimey salesey newcomers
| pick up on it instantly.
|
| Often it is misuse of terms that actually have real meanings that
| annoy me most
| rambojohnson wrote:
| Actually disagree. Based on the last 20 years of my experience in
| corporate America, "practical decision-making" was never part of
| the job at any level of leadership.
| ekholm_e wrote:
| George Orwell wrote about this 80 years ago:
| https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
| dlcarrier wrote:
| This is what offices exist for. In fields where efficiency
| matters, you end up with contractors, working remotely, getting
| paid by the project, and not being tied to one company. This is
| how lots of engineering and architecture works as well as many
| other fields.
|
| 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.
| DrBazza wrote:
| > "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."
|
| 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'.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| In a discussion yesterday about a large and complex physical
| system that is hard to optimise further without more work for it
| to do (lots of excess capacity), the VP suggested we should
| 'consider how emergent technologies could be leveraged to
| decrease overhead'. It is a clever way to say, I have no ideas
| either, but if a better machine that hasn't been invented yet
| becomes available we should use that'. I say 'clever', because
| the other execs nodded in approval, and agreed. From other
| conversations I have had with him I was just glad he didn't say
| 'AI' as per usual, although I am in two minds as to whether he
| did actually mean AI, but thought he had said it too many times
| in the last week. I'm not popular because I ask difficult things
| like, what kind of AI?
| dkarl wrote:
| Bullshit is so dangerous because it _could_ mean something.
| That VP could mean, it 's time to look beyond the set of mature
| technologies we've been considering and look at newer
| technologies that we would normally ignore because they come
| with risks and rough edges and higher cost of ownership.
|
| 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Correct, and in my opinion we seem to have a cutting edge
| machine, the best available. So it was BS. What was really
| troubling them is that for years the operational delivery
| part of the business has saved everyone else by finding more
| and more effiencies. I had stated that it was no longer cost
| effective to spend the money on the diminishing returns of
| squeezing tiny %s more out of it. The room took on a complete
| silence, because their strategy (of leaving it to someone
| else) has gone. Much harder tasks, what goes through the
| machine, how it is sold, need to come to the fore... and that
| is terrifying for people who PowerPoint for a living... so
| instead, they break the silence with BS, nod, pretend it's
| not happening.
| sharadov wrote:
| When you can't convince, confuse is how you sum up corporate
| speak.
| zoke wrote:
| In hypnosis terms, this is confusion induction.
| gzread wrote:
| This is very relevant to the LLM era.
| billfor wrote:
| The original buzzword generator for palmOS. I used it
| extensively: https://archive.org/details/palm3_buzzword
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It's surprising to me that people don't consider these coded
| language.
|
| 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.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Do note that senior manager thinking the work is redundant also
| might be completely not aligned with reality. so "I think your
| work is redundant" is much closer to usual reality. And it's
| easy to be seen that as you pretty much also need to be a PR
| person for your own department, not just a manager, especially
| if department is doing necessary but not glorious tasks
| Muromec wrote:
| Its an interesting take, bit why is this coded ingroup
| messaging is communicated to outgroup then?
| estimator7292 wrote:
| To solidfy the in-ness of the in-group. To underscore that
| management is _better_ than ICs and ICs are considered
| _other_
| jvanderbot wrote:
| One example elaborated:
|
| 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.
| contubernio wrote:
| It would be a hell of a lot more functional to simply say
| directly what you want and mean.
|
| This sort of management is dysfunctional even in it's
| premises.
| Muromec wrote:
| Saying exactly what you mean is generating the paper
| trail and accountability, which is a liability.
| dsr_ wrote:
| In a sane system, it would not be a liability.
|
| QED.
| Muromec wrote:
| Define sane
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| best possible outcome for most people
|
| 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.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| In this example you're actually just being polite. You
| are not calling out a person publicly, you're
| transmitting a course-correction through their manager
| that allows the person who knows you best to communicate
| the correction the best way AND it allows the corpo to
| take the blame for being vague and uninformative.
|
| 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.
| beardedetim wrote:
| Early in my career I tried very hard to "be concrete,
| cold, and direct" because that's what I thought a good
| communicator would do. It was seen as attacking to anyone
| below me and confusing to anyone above me. I was naive
| and I suffered for it.
|
| 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
| btilly wrote:
| For a somewhat cynical explanation of why that happens, I
| recommend https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-....
|
| As with all forms of cynicism, it has a grain of truth. And a
| much larger grain of truth than is comfortable.
| bananaflag wrote:
| Also see Scott Alexander's review
|
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-
| pri...
| geodel wrote:
| Yup, saw that review. My takeaway is if one has knowledge
| and training level of Scott Alexander then this book has
| nothing new to offer. But since most folks don't so this
| maybe a interesting read.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. Language has always been a tool for tribal
| gatekeeping and in-group signaling, but also as a tool for
| precision.
|
| 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).
| rebolek wrote:
| It's not like they're very subtle about this with their
| "human resources" horror speak.
| geon wrote:
| For anyone else as confused as I was; apparently "IC" means
| Individual Contributor, as opposed to leadership or management.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Let's play "spot the manager"
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't mean to shame anyone for learning new information,
| but even if you have no interest in management, your career
| will benefit greatly from knowing the terms and concepts
| that managers in your industry commonly use. There's a lot
| of people out there who are aggressively against learning
| "corporate jargon" and then find themselves lost trying to
| understand why their company's leaders talk and act the way
| they do.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| A lot of the "I won't learn it" people are young. The
| ones who aren't young end up appearing naive and
| ignorant.
|
| 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.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Couldn't agree more.
|
| 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 :- >
| QuercusMax wrote:
| When I was hired at my current role, it was clear to me
| that I'm in an IC vs Management position. It's really not
| that weird and is a very common term.
| btilly wrote:
| More precisely than "plausible deniability", it is plausible
| EMOTIONAL deniability.
|
| 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.
| deaux wrote:
| > it's pretty culturally inevitable, I think, to have an in-
| group signalling their strategies using coded language.
|
| Pretty shocking belief when you're _of course_ ing 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.
| elzbardico wrote:
| There's CYA jargon, like layoffs, workforce rationalizations,
| letting someone go, challenging fiscal environment.
|
| And there's blatant bullshit, like paradigm shift, culture
| building, and so on.
|
| Two categories of execspeak.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I think those are just degree of difference in "context
| required to understand", not different categories.
| johnisgood wrote:
| You think so, with a term such as "culture building"?
| cushychicken wrote:
| _it 's usually coding something more precise in a sort of
| plausible deniability._
|
| 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."
| jjk166 wrote:
| In the test these weren't coded language, they were randomly
| generated phrases. The finding is that the people who don't
| know how to decipher the code are easily impressed by it and
| have poor analytical skills.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| from TFA:
|
| > "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.
| oblio wrote:
| > Eventually they figured out that language served a
| different purpose inside the bond market than it did in the
| outside world. Bond market terminology was designed less to
| convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. Overpriced bonds
| were not "expensive" overpriced bonds were "rich," which
| almost made them sound like something you should buy. The
| floors of subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors--
| or anything else that might lead the bond buyer to form any
| sort of concrete image in his mind--but tranches. The
| bottom tranche--the risky ground floor--was not called the
| ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it
| sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a
| highly prized seat in a domed stadium. A CDO composed of
| nothing but the riskiest, mezzanine layer of subprime
| mortgages was not called a subprime-backed CDO but a
| "structured finance CDO." "There was so much confusion
| about the different terms," said Charlie. "In the course of
| trying to figure it out, we realize that there's a reason
| why it doesn't quite make sense to us. It's because it
| doesn't quite make sense."
|
| The Big Short by Michael Lewis, page 101.
| astrange wrote:
| I thought a mezzanine was when you go see a movie at
| noon.
| mikrl wrote:
| That's a martingale you're thinking of
| vermilingua wrote:
| I believe that's a matinee
| rawgabbit wrote:
| The mezzanine is the drink with the worm in it; after you
| get "mezzed", you feel like the worm is eating you from
| the inside.
| ahoka wrote:
| No, that's mescaline (Spanish for tequila).
| rawgabbit wrote:
| It was my attempt at a joke.
| jjk166 wrote:
| But they're not semantically rich. People who speak the
| code aren't doing it to more efficiently communicate, such
| that a long and complicated message can be expressed
| quickly. They are taking a short simple message, stripping
| away all the details, then padding it such that it becomes
| more verbose and vapid. This makes the real message harder
| to decipher for the uninitiated, it removes information
| even for those who understand the code, and it serves as a
| display for people who appreciate the flourish. There may
| still be some meaning left, but it's semantically emptier.
|
| 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.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| In some cases, sure, they're semantically rich, but the
| result here is that in some cases it doesn't matter whether
| they are or not, that some people can't tell. That can
| still be true even if corporate jargon originated and is
| sometimes still used for rational-ish reasons.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| The Gervais Principle by the Ribbonfarm guy gets into this:
| powertalk vs. babytalk
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
|
| the Cornell article is basically just empirical testing of
| these concepts.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Also summarised in https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-
| michael-scott-theory-of...
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| this reads like an AI clickbait.
|
| it does make Rao's original article a little easier to
| digest but it was already pretty tight through the first
| 3-4 parts.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| You're confusing bullshit with jargon, which is something they
| talk about in the paper. The word synergize has a bad
| reputation, but its mere presence in a sentence is merely a
| signal, it doesn't mean the sentence is bullshit.
|
| "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.
| alexjplant wrote:
| Synergy has a real meaning: 1+1=3. A cigar and a whiskey.
| Chocolate and peanut butter. Hall and Oates. Et cetera.
| Unfortunately it's one of those terms like "DevOps" or "jam
| band" or "martini" whose true meaning has been sullied by
| people trying to sound cooler than they are.
|
| 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.
| fhd2 wrote:
| That's the right move. If a word changes its colloquial
| meaning, better drop it and find a new one. Happens all the
| time. From stuff like "agile" in a software development
| context (pretty meaningless at this point, can mean anything
| from the original definition to the systematic micro
| management it got to be commonly associated with), to
| previously neutral words that became offensive (because they
| were commonly used as such).
|
| No individual holds power over connotations. Language just
| evolves.
| atroon wrote:
| > 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'.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| This usage is probably older than you're thinking: some
| 80s and 90s hip hop songs used "out of pocket" like that.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Absolutely. I'm pro emotions :) Just also good to realise
| what battles are lost.
|
| 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.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Why would you drop it altogether? Medications and/or
| supplements can have synergistic effects, for example.
| Synergy is actually a term that is formally defined as
| "Effect(A + B) > Effect(A) + Effect(B)".
| michaelt wrote:
| The point of saying and writing things is to be understood
| by your audience.
|
| 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.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I am pretty sure the term "synergistic" is widely used
| among laymen as well in the context of supplements and
| medications.
|
| So yeah, sure, context does matter.
| collingreen wrote:
| I always avoid synergy and say "bigger than the sum of its
| parts" or "peanut butter and jelly". Simple language with
| less baggage.
| alexjplant wrote:
| ...except for those of us who think that PB&J is a culinary
| abomination in which case the metaphor disintegrates ;-D
| (apologies to my mother for having to make me PB-only
| sandwiches growing up)
|
| 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.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| There is also the signalling when a new, truly meaningless
| fragment pops up. The bigwig says it first, then his direct
| reports, then their underlings, etc.
|
| 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.
| zippyman55 wrote:
| At my final Job, I jokingly used the word SPITBALL... in no
| time, everyone was saying.... I'm just spitballing here....
| So funny.
| sp1nningaway wrote:
| I think this also explains some of our political climate.
| Everything the current administration says sounds like
| gibberish and equivocation to me, but to its intended audience
| it is a clear communication about wielding power and grift.
|
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| > "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized
| voices
|
| Can you expand on this?
| sp1nningaway wrote:
| Those are just examples of academic/progressive jargon that
| I hear often in the Bay Area and in progressive circles.
| "Decolonizing," could mean for instance changing world
| history curriculum to cover non-western civilizations.
| "Centering" seems like maybe it just means focusing on, but
| there is a whole academic apparatus for designing
| curriculum around say, indigenous practices, and centering
| is the word used for that entire concept, which includes
| specific techniques.
|
| 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.
| g3f32r wrote:
| > to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright
| attack.
|
| 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.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > The Russian language has two different words for what most
| European languages would describe as lies. One is lozh
| (lozh'), best translated into what we consider to be a lie;
| something that is the opposite of the truth. There is also
| vranyo (vran'io). Vranyo is more than a simple lie. It is
| described as: 'You know I'm lying, and I know that you know,
| and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a
| straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.'
|
| 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.
|
| see also: https://militairespectator.nl/artikelen/vranyo
| wisty wrote:
| Yes I too have seen the 2022 Perun video where an
| Australian Youtuber gives a lesson on Russian linguisics,
| but I'm not certain he's right.
|
| English also has more than one words for lies - lies,
| falsehoods, fibs, bs, prevarication.
|
| Yeah sometimes we know stuff is a load of crap at work, but
| we gotta humour the process. Maybe it's 10x as bad in
| Russia. But I've seen little independent evidence those
| words Perun used mean completely different things, I think
| he's just accidently exhaggerating a possible bit of
| nuance.
| wnevets wrote:
| > I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies
| using coded language.
|
| Is it like when an executive or politician "retires" to spend
| more time with their friends & family?
| nostrademons wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| Corporate speak, as satirized in the Weird Al hit "Mission
| Statement", actually serves an important social function. It
| signals "I'm one of you, the business class, I will align my
| goals with those of the organization."
|
| 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.
| 0ckpuppet wrote:
| this is a roadmap for the conniving lickspittles. Paired with the
| 48 laws of Power (and weak leadership), it's a winner.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| No love for Erving Goffman here at all?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Ev...
| loganc2342 wrote:
| > To test this, he created a "corporate bullshit generator" that
| churns out meaningless but impressive-sounding sentences like,
| "We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave
| credentialing" and "By getting our friends in the tent with our
| best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive
| coherence."
|
| So you're saying people who thought randomly-generated,
| meaningless sentences sound smart aren't themselves smart? Who
| would've thought.
| elzbardico wrote:
| In related news, water is wet and cats usually don't seem to feel
| confortable when sprayed with it.
| tantaman wrote:
| This has been proven out again and again in my experience. Going
| as far back as being a student advisor in college. Any time I
| would run into someone using these words (in advising sessions,
| interviews, casual conversation), the speaker had no further
| depth when pressed on the topic they were trying to wave at.
| excalibur wrote:
| > Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like
| "synergistic leadership," or "growth-hacking paradigms" may
| struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study
| reveals.
|
| Hey, I find that type of lingo nauseating, and I _still_ struggle
| with practical decision-making.
| semiinfinitely wrote:
| deloitte
| xg15 wrote:
| > _"By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices,
| we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence."_
|
| That's what she said.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Reminds me of how a Plumbus is made
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMGd_rzRdY
| dasil003 wrote:
| I feel like this study is very naive about how corporate status
| and power works. Consider this part:
|
| > _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.
| Illniyar wrote:
| I hate these studies. They make such bold claims and then when
| you dig deeper they basically gave a few students some
| questionuerre with leading questions and then claim they figured
| out how people work.
| garethsprice wrote:
| The headline says these workers "might be bad at their jobs," but
| considered in the context of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" thesis -
| that a huge chunk of white-collar work is pointless make-work for
| surplus labor - then in a hierarchy that rewards BS-fluency
| (which Littrell speculates), they are actually _good_ at their
| jobs.
|
| 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.
| drob518 wrote:
| So, it wasn't my imagination.
| johnisgood wrote:
| What does it mean to be "impressed" by such terms?
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Cf.
| https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374721237/whattechcallsth...
| Animats wrote:
| Corporate jargon is a relatively recent development in business
| history.[1] It wasn't seen much until the 1950s and 1960s, when
| "organization development" and management consulting became an
| industry. Peter Drucker seems to have popularized it in the
| 1980s.
|
| 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...
| pessimizer wrote:
| I absolutely think that this is the result of the chaotic
| formation of a bizarre American religion (that is largely
| universal among the world's "middle class" now.) It's Silva
| Mind Control -> Leadership Dynamics -> Holiday Magic,
| Scientology, Large Group Awareness Training (as you can still
| see in the Landmark Forum), Synanon, etc.; mixed up in a pot
| with hippie language/consciousness raising, 70s-80s spiritual
| self-help Carlos Castaneda and Jane Roberts/Seth neo-
| Spiritualism; all banged in with garbled Cybernetics, RAND
| corporation papers, military operations jargon and the 70s-80s
| obsession with personal physical fitness and orthorexia.
|
| 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.
| LowLevelKernel wrote:
| Doesn't your brain tune out those words?
| bell-cot wrote:
| I'd view it as cargo cult competence. If we can just repeat the
| buzzwords and phrases enough times, with enough zeal, then
| everything will work out great.
| aljgz wrote:
| Seems to be hugged to death. Link from The Wayback Machine:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260302211051/https://news.corn...
| blobbers wrote:
| Based on how they conducted the test: - used an IQ / analytical
| test - correlated that to whether people cared about flowery
| language
|
| Generally speaking, analytical people care more about numbers
| than words, so isn't this more of an 'expected result'?
| sleight42 wrote:
| One word: Retroencabulator.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| That is done in jest though (technobabel is also used in scifi
| of the softer variety of course, Star Trek is infamous for it).
|
| Corporate speak is unfortunately used seriously by some people,
| not just in Dilbert and similar.
| jackbravo wrote:
| The Simpsons helped popularize this theory:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8grGedzAw
| knights_gambit wrote:
| I read the article and thought it was referring to combining
| paradigms from different fields to create synergistic effects and
| was disheartened to hear that wasn't a useful thing to do.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I always thought one of the best promises of AI was to be able to
| feed it a 'jargon heavy' document (business contract, corporate
| policy, congressional bill, etc.), and have it spit out the real
| meaning in plain language.
|
| "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?
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I've generally found it better at doing the opposite: taking
| readable, concrete terms and obfuscating them into LinkedInish.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| In this study it was randomly generated phrases.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| My daughter did a high school IT class, she had to do a
| presentation, I told her to say synergy a few times. The teacher
| raved about her presentation, best marks she ever got, its both
| funny and sad.
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