These headlines are crack for HN.
Understandable. None of us is one of those sheeple! /s
Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
211–220 of 354 posts
Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
#212Last 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 corp…
It's called busy-ness for a reason.
Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
#214I 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.
Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
#215It'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…
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.
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.
Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 :->
Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
#217I 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.
>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…
The Gervais model! I haven't heard that in a while.
Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
#218It'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…
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.
Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
#219In 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 'cleve…
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…
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.
Re: Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
#220The 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.