Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment • Hacker News Board

Re: Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment

#21

Post by jiveturkey » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 7:27 PM UTC

> Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil.Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil.

oh come on.

jargon is incredibly useful. here on HN we know that very well. clanker, agent, +1, LGTM, these are extremely convenient jargon we use daily. and here, he's complaining about 'space' not 'AI'. AI is itself jargon. There's nothing "artificial" about it (just non-organic), and nothing "intelligent" either.

'enshittification' is jargon.

> I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler."

it's just descriptive (usefully so), not self-congratulatory.

and what's wrong with "thought leader"? it's a pejorative, not acclaim. even more so when the user takes themselves seriously.

he does go on to get to the point about "bullshit", and i would agree completely with the title, that there is a correlation. why lament and complain about it? i absolutely adored adobe flash -- ad blocking was oh so easy in those days. i would actually narrow the problem from "bullshit" to "doublespeak". i think that is where the real problem lies. bullshit is just bullshit, it's fine.

Re: Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment

#22

Post by wat10000 » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 7:30 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #12

tombert wrote: post #7

It's utterly maddening to me how much annoying doublespeak permeates through corporate American culture. Even when management does something that seems objectively awful, they always feel a need to try and spin it into something aggressively positive (e.g. treating layoffs as an "opportunity to reorganize"). You can't speak candidly about anything because anything remotely negative will come off as a "bad attitude" o…

> I am sure there are studies saying that being overly candid and honest leads to worse outcomes in corporations, and fine, maybe it's "necessary", but I don't have to like it. I wish I could live in the a utopia where people say what they actually mean. I wish I could live in a society were I'm not expected to pretend that this isn't fucking weird. I've met a few genuinely atypical people who do wish this, and maybe…

I really don't think it's the midlife crisis people we're protecting with this language. It's management. Corpspeak comes down to protecting their feelings from their uncomfortable truths. Management didn't tell off tombert for their remark because it might upset a worker struggling with work/life balance. They did it because it upsets management, who is invested in the idea that people come to work for higher reasons, because it makes them feel good and because they want it to be true because it means they can get away with paying less.

When companies describe putting a bunch of people out of work as "restructuring" or whatever, who is that for? It's not for the people who lose their jobs, they know what it means. It's not for the people who remain, and who just saw a bunch of coworkers get the boot, they know too. It's ultimately for the people who put out the statement, because it lets them distance themselves from the reality of what they're doing.

The people with the power are the ones who set the tone, and they're going to set a tone that makes them happy.

Re: Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment

#23

Post by antod » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 7:33 PM UTC

next_xibalba wrote: post #11

I absolutely love corporate jargon. Not in an earnest way, but maybe more in the way people love terrible movies. For example, I’ll inject corpo-bullshit into regular conversations. When someone asks me to do something, instead of saying “no thanks”, I’ll say something like “this ideation aligns poorly with our 10,000 foot goals on a go-forward basis. Let’s revisit in a few cycles.”

Excellent, I'm going to cascade that outcome to my team.

Re: Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment

#24

Post by froh » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

next_xibalba wrote: post #11

I absolutely love corporate jargon. Not in an earnest way, but maybe more in the way people love terrible movies. For example, I’ll inject corpo-bullshit into regular conversations. When someone asks me to do something, instead of saying “no thanks”, I’ll say something like “this ideation aligns poorly with our 10,000 foot goals on a go-forward basis. Let’s revisit in a few cycles.”

ah that reminds me of when small startup SUSE was acquired by Big Corporation Novell. German engineers saying "no" and "yes" and "the F word! in meetings!" met very polite Corporate Americans who had twenty supportive soundings ways of saying no.

like

"this is an interesting idea" -> no

"we need to discuss this further" -> no

"can you help me better understand?" -> no

the only yes was "I do it, by such and such date"

so the jargon created a culture clash which only accelerated the decline.