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

news.cornell.edu

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

#51

Post by Intermernet »

sanex wrote: post #30
RobotToaster wrote: post #18

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.

Let’s amplify this visionary perspective. This is exactly the caliber of commentary we should be encouraging more of on HN.

No, we need to move forward into the retrospective.

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

#52

Post by Aeolun »

RobotToaster wrote: post #18

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.

Translation: Lets think about it before we do stupid shit.

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

#53

Post by Aeolun »

reedf1 wrote: post #8

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.

It works perfectly! You can become the president of the (debatably) most powerful nation on earth by employing it successfully.

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

#54

Post by kevinsync »

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

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

#55

Post by NoSalt »

"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.

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

#56

Post by eel »

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.

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

#57

Post by AlexC04 »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #11

These headlines are crack for HN.

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.

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

#58

Post by antonymoose »

alcasa wrote: post #21
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.

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.

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

#59

Post by dchest »

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.
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