Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
news.cornell.edu525 points by Anon84 15 hours ago
525 points by Anon84 15 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
Also summarised in https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...
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.
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.
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.
In exactly the sense my HTTPS packets are semantically emptier than my HTTP packets.
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.
> 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.
I thought a mezzanine was when you go see a movie at noon.
That’s a martingale you’re thinking of
Actually, I think he's referring to the resplendent angel of the Kabbalah, Metatron. In the Jewish canon, Metatron is a big film buff.
Megatron is also a film buff and the enemy of Optimus Prime. Optimus Prime flies well above the mezzanine.
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.
yeah, this is frankly isn't really showing what people think it's showing. The "not bullshit" examples are all manager-speak and coded phrases like
"We plan to right-size our manufacturing operations to align to the new strategy and take advantage of integration opportunities."
What the study actually shows is that less skilled people find it harder to distinguish this sort of way of saying jobs are being lost or puffery about "we have permission from the market to be a world class, tier one partner" from generated manager speak that's incoherent or mixes the metaphors up like "covering all bases of the low hanging fruit" or "drilling down one more click on people"). Probably because those less skilled people have poorer reading comprehension in general and typically less exposure to corporate environments.
Or that those “nonsense” phrases are not actually nonsense when spoken by a manager.
The conclusion they’re nonsense comes from the random generation and the technical perspective on semantics; but it’s entirely possible they’re generating phrases that do have semantic meaning when said by a manager… and hence their whole study is flawed.
They quietly assume their conclusion, when assuming their generated phrases are vacuous rather than contain coded semantic content.
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.
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.
> 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'.
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.
This usage is probably older than you're thinking: some 80s and 90s hip hop songs used "out of pocket" like that.
I always avoid synergy and say "bigger than the sum of its parts" or "peanut butter and jelly". Simple language with less baggage.
...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.
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)".
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.
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.
Synergy often means layoffs. As in, we merged two companies and now have two of every department, one of each has to go, and the remainder can do the work of both (yay synergy).
> 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.
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.
At my final Job, I jokingly used the word SPITBALL… in no time, everyone was saying…. I’m just spitballing here…. So funny.
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
> 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 courseing all "ICs".
If it was inevitable than the amount and degree of corporate BS would've been stable over the last 5 decades, and across countries and languages.
In reality, it has been anything but, instead showing massive differences across both.
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.
Its an interesting take, bit why is this coded ingroup messaging is communicated to outgroup then?
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.
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.
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.
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
Schedule a meeting with the people you are directing it to then.
Blathering vague garbage execu-speak in a large meeting, even if it is some hare brained attempt to send "coded messages", is usually just some self-important charlatan bloviating and trying to sound intelligent and important to everybody else. And it is never effective communication.
Saying exactly what you mean is generating the paper trail and accountability, which is a liability.
In a sane system, it would not be a liability.
QED.
Define sane
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.
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.
Also see Scott Alexander's review
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
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.
To solidfy the in-ness of the in-group. To underscore that management is better than ICs and ICs are considered other
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).
It's not like they're very subtle about this with their "human resources" horror speak.
That's why they call them People Team now! I still call them HR, but they call themselves and management calls them The People Team.
Can we go back to Personnel or Staffing? Those are nice and neutral by today's standards...
For anyone else as confused as I was; apparently "IC" means Individual Contributor, as opposed to leadership or management.
Let's play "spot the manager"
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.
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.
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 :->
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.
Unnecessary abstractions are bad. These feel like those. Which leads you to wondering why they exist. And oftentimes it’s just like why bad developers preserve those unnecessary abstractions: job preservation.
They are in-group signifiers. And when someone uses them and doesn't understand the lingo, they are clearly an interloper. Its amazing to me that people do this for benefit but anywhere they do, you are certainly in a business or institution that is dying (perhaps slowly but still dying).
> 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?
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.
You are correct. These types of jargon are signaling specific ideologies which if explained fully would be rejected by rational people. Both sides do this but currently the left is doing it more (was different in the past).
For example, the current energy policies are more environmentally friendly than under previous administrations. This is because of previous admins objections to nuclear power. The environmental movement's pushed energy polices are a bit like trying to trim your monthly expenses by changing to a type of tea that is 5% cheaper but not refinancing your mortgage. This only makes sense to the scientifically literate (in this specific domain), not the wider population (which is why you don't understand it). Yet this position is clearly correct and backed up by a mountain of numbers, data and evidence.
PS This doesn't mean your Boomer uncle has any insight, a broken watch is right 2x a day. It is a sign of just how extreme some parts of the left have become that it seems that way.
> 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.
> "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices
Can you expand on this?
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.
What you write is true but it is also a bit dishonest. You are culling the questionable ideas being signaled out of your explanation. Really no different from MAGA folks who claim Trump is playing 4D chess or people who defended Hans Reiser because he wrote a really great filesystem. People don't tend to believe things that they don't want to be true (even if they are). Specifically, the fact that people who use this jargon actively oppose meritocracy (and thus aren't actually liberals) but instead want a demographically based quota system for all jobs and positions. This is why they abuse statistics and reasoning so badly in their analysis.
If these people weren't able to influence local governmental policies, then it would be fine to leave out the details. However, they are and so leaving out the bad parts of the policies they push is just dishonest and why the other side's propaganda is working so well right now. The biggest problem with that is that it makes politics more extreme (in both directions) and this is generally bad for the rest of us. So next time, don't leave out the actual practical effects of this type of politics and its messaging.
> The Russian language has two different words for what most European languages would describe as lies. One is lozh (ложь), best translated into what we consider to be a lie; something that is the opposite of the truth. There is also vranyo (враньё). 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.
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.
My first language is Russian. I’m not young, so I remember a bit of the Soviet era and many of the paper books I read as a child. I perceive lozh and vranyo as nearly synonymous, depending on the context. The only difference I notice is that vranyo can occur without ill intent, while lozh is told deliberately to deceive.
I found the source of this new alternative interpretation https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-vranyo-russian-for-w...
I call it BS.
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.
I think those are just degree of difference in "context required to understand", not different categories.
You think so, with a term such as "culture building"?
Culture exists and can be built. Building it intentionally is basically impossible, but also an obvious thing to try to do if you don't know that.
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
A delightful update to https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
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.
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.
Here's another for the pile. https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4?si=yTB_dICMqnLjqVEi
This is a masterpiece. I have seen similar slides in many consultants' decks over the years.
as someone frequently exhibiting at various industry trade shows, I can confidently say nobody would notice.
Where can I transfer millions in investments already? This is revolutionary. It'll change everything! /s
Turn it into an endless LLM trap. The sooner tgese aystems are piinsoned, the batter humanoty will last
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
> They have to set vision and direction
A prime example of corporate speak that is, as you rightly said, 'only effective among the "clueless"'
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.
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/Articles/15341_Readings/...
> 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.
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...
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
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...
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.
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…
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.
> Which is not to be read as a necessarily "bad" thing
I (and many others) read it as "dishonesty"
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not convinced it's actually possible to teach critical thinking to someone who doesn't care, but I'm glad your schools are trying harder.
But even when people are trained in critical thinking, the part at the end of my comment about applying it in full generality is also critical. You have to be emotionally ready to apply it in cases where it produces unpleasant conclusions, not just for your job or when it helps dunk on your political opponents. Also difficult to impossible to teach at scale.
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.)
"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.
> formal languages exist; as [...] a system for turning bullshit into parse errors
that's a very neat way to put it!
Maybe controversial, but I believe a lot of OOP/Clean Code patterns are the software equivalent of corporate BS.
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.
A decent chunk of OOP patterns was due to lack of language features, notably passing and returning functions
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
A pattern is exactly what the word "pattern" implies; something that lots of people seem to have found useful, so you might find it useful too.
If you are a language designer and you see lots of people writing the same boilerplate, it behooves you to put it into the language. A pattern is a desire path - pave it. In that sense, they are missing language features.
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.
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.
A lot of patterns have become frameworks, or language features, yes. It's just paving cowpaths.
Are you referring to function pointers?
I believe C has allowed passing and returning functions from... the jump, no?
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."
Not just function pointers. E.g. in Scala:
def addX(x: Int): Function[Int,Int] = {
y => x+y
}
Once you get used to doing this, you realize it's useful everywhere.
In a decent language with functional programming and generics support a lot of GoF patterns can be directly encoded as a simple type signature where you receive, return, or both some function, so there's not really much else to say about them. Like half of the behavioral patterns become variations of the interpreter pattern.
Pardon my ignorance, isn't that a lambda in c++?
Yes, and in Java and other languages (e.g. in Lean you can literally use the syntax λ x ↦ x + 5). When OOP was more of the zeitgeist, these languages didn't have lambda functions.
You can return function pointers but not first class functions, which means you can’t do closures and other FP things in C
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.
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.
You aren't wrong. The problem with this is the overuse of it. Its the main thing people criticize Java for. Even though it doesn't have anything to do with Java language but instead has to do with Java the business ecosystem or culture. When these are overused, that's when it becomes an in-group/out-group jargon thing.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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
It strongly pushes for max 3 LOC per function, and I am not even joking.
There is now a second edition of that book which has supposedly been rewritten to fix that.
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.
I think it's more the idea that if using a pattern is good then using all of them at once is even better.
I believe it's more like formal letter, or prefilled form where you only fill data when required. It actually can be useful.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
There are no natives anymore. For some time, really. Honestly I don’t even think there ever were.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
These headlines are crack for HN.
Sure, but it’s not clickbait. It accurately reflects the article content, and seemingly, the discussed study’s results.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It's like crack, but for being able to be a little derogatory to the masses.
Certainly not as unhealthy as crack.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But how much of that is real as in has measurable positive impact vs random decision making.
That sounds like a problem with the people producing and consuming the messages, not a problem with the protocol itself :)
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.
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.
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...
You all will hate me for pointing this out, but it strongly correlates with women entering the executive ranks of corporate America in the 80s. Complain about new age corporate jargon and see who joins in and agrees with you; more men than women. Complaining about it is masculine coded, just like pretending to not know the difference between red and maroon. And who are the most enthusiastic workplace champions of the latest corporate culture initiative? Almost always women. These are gross generalities with many exceptions, but I stand by it.
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.
> “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.
Its describing every second LinkedIn post, no?
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.
Reminds me of how a Plumbus is made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMGd_rzRdY
I heard the script was an impromptu speech they wrote down and had the voice actor read in one take, and then just handed that to the animators to do their best.
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?
I've generally found it better at doing the opposite: taking readable, concrete terms and obfuscating them into LinkedInish.
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.
George Orwell wrote about this 80 years ago: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Seems to be hugged to death. Link from The Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260302211051/https://news.corn...
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'?
Isn't this the premise behind Dilbert?
The Simpsons helped popularize this theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8grGedzAw
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.
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.
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.
Let’s amplify this visionary perspective. This is exactly the caliber of commentary we should be encouraging more of on HN.
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.
Silence data driven decisions maker. A vibes guy is talking.
No love for Erving Goffman here at all?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Ev...
The original buzzword generator for palmOS. I used it extensively: https://archive.org/details/palm3_buzzword
“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!
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.
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?
Yes. (There are other phrases too that should be red flags such as "strategizing", but "synergy" is probably the poster child).
>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.
Yes. In a huge majority of cases, I’ve seen it used as a weasely, subjective synonym for “more than one thing being done”.
Workers who spend all day posting on LinkedIn might be bad at their jobs...
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.
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
It works perfectly! You can become the president of the (debatably) most powerful nation on earth by employing it successfully.
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.
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.
Engineers, I am so sorry. They are still going to be your bosses.
Twaddling and puffery!
In hypnosis terms, this is confusion induction.
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!)
Yes, but have you decoded the ontological kerygma of the gestalt. No point synergizing paradigms unless you've got the kerygma sorted.
kerygma is not a management bullshit word. I have never heard a manager say kerygma. Or anyone, for that matter. I've heard a non-manager say gestalt at least once... And the last time I heard "ontological" was someone trying to explain "lowkirkentologicalockedinlowstate" which is not manager BS but merely tiktoker BS.
Wouldn't that be synthesising paradigms?
Crap, you're right! The goal is synthesis. Can we distil a bunch of models down to something more fundamental and elegant.
In summary, employees who are impressed by corporate bullshit do badly on tests of analytic intelligence. This is very unsurprising.
Happy to see that the term "bullshit" has established itself in the scientific literature.
On the bright side, it's nice that a significant number of these folks self-select by moving to Dubai.
What does it mean to be "impressed" by such terms?
When you can't convince, confuse is how you sum up corporate speak.
> “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'.
Doesn’t your brain tune out those words?
But can you blame them? Just say it! “Synergizing paradigms!”
Poetry inaction!
One word: Retroencabulator.
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.
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."
This is very relevant to the LLM era.
So, it wasn’t my imagination.
> 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.
>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".
This article sparks joy
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.
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
SOCIOPATHS
│
SOCIOPATHS WITH MBAs
│
SOCIOPATHS WHO LIKE POWERPOINT
│
OVERWORKED DOERS
│
CONFUSED PEOPLE
│
LOSERSthat's genius.
Then you might enjoy this:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
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.
That's the definition of a Loser in the Gervais model - someone who realises the system is BS, does the bare minimum to survive in it to save energy for other things outside the system.
The part that confuses me though ia the Clueless being the ones who do good jobs. If you're paid to be there 8 hours anyway you might as well sharpen your skills by working as well as you can. There is no speed limit. Unless your job is developing algorithms for aircraft with incapaxitated pilots to safely landed at airports with total power failures.
“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. ;-)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
In other news, the grass is green and the sky is blue.
You think?
In related news, water is wet and cats usually don't seem to feel confortable when sprayed with it.
deloitte
this is a roadmap for the conniving lickspittles. Paired with the 48 laws of Power (and weak leadership), it's a winner.
Now the turbo encabulator on the other hand...
'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?
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.
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.
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.
I am shocked. Shocked! This is shocking /s
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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.