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Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

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Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#141

Post by justonceokay »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #122
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 corpor…

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…

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

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#143

Post by dlcarrier »

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.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#144

Post by the_real_cher »

headcanon wrote: post #118

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

Brilliant!

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#145

Post by butILoveLife »

delecti wrote: post #108
butILoveLife wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

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.'

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#146

Post by DrBazza »

> “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'.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#147

Post by macNchz »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #122
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 corpor…

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…

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/...

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#148

Post by el_benhameen »

reactordev wrote: post #134
el_benhameen wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#149

Post by jimnotgym »

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?

Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

#150

Post by AnimalMuppet »

rdevilla wrote: post #16

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.

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.

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