They described the origin of all these phrases, which as most corporate behavior is about shedding responsibility and shifting blame.
In practice though, these phrases are all used mindlessly, by people who don't talk much outside the office, and see no problem in never thinking about the words they use all day. And that's what most people seem to take issue with: people that are operating on autopilot, without allowing themselves any time to reflect.
(I'm German, and for us it's anglicisms. If some middle manager's entire business vocab is in English and they mix it into their German sentences without giving it any thought, you can be certain that their mind is at capacity.)
Oh dear, I hear that loaded phrase exchanged all the time in meetings, and it is usually when someone doesn't want to listen to a topic or idea anymore :-[
I used Corpspeak pretty much exclusively for the year I spent as an entry-level analyst at a consulting firm, because--as a consequence of all the points mentioned in this article--it was cognitively easier. If writing is like creating a painting from scratch, Corpspeak is like a coloring book. Instead of mixing your own paint, you pick from a finite number of predefined crayons. Instead of needing to decide on a subject and composition, you just need to pick what image you want to fill in.
Corpspeak abounds in places that value "being in motion" over "getting results", since when you use Corpspeak, you don't actually have to think about what the best course of action is--the best course of action is always "organizing a connect with the relevant subject matter experts to draft action items for a discovery yada-yada-yada". This requires zero thought--it just requires knowing a list of buzzwords and being able to string them together. This is really easy to do! When promotion season came around, I was asked to write a report of why I deserved one, and I wrote 1200 words in a half hour--that's 40 wpm, about the average typing speed of someone just copying text! And I was complimented on the thoroughness and perspicacity of what I wrote. I got the promotion--just in time for me to find a better opportunity and bounce.
Nevertheless, I do believe there's value in Corpspeak. The reality at most companies (even ones you care about) is that a lot of the communicating you do is more-or-less inconsequential, and doesn't actually need to have a lot of care and thought put into it--and being able to let your eyes glaze over and engage in the conversational equivalent of cruise control saves cognitive resources for stuff that actually matters.
One thing you learn as you get older is just how much the entire world runs on the concept of plausible deniability. It's kind of a core basis for human interaction, and it gets especially sophisticated in complex organizations with power structures.
It goes back a very long way. Just google the phrase "meddlesome priest" for a particularly illustrative and amusing example.
Corporate speak is just a combination of that with the more prosaic concept of jargon.
Jargon, the part that doesn't involve purposeful obfuscation at least, is often highly useful for saving time because it allows people who engage in repeated interactions to be highly specific. The phrase "annual review" could mean a bunch of things, but a Y1-AAR could be a specific set of questions with a specific range of predetermined outcomes for a specific type of employee.
When jargon is done well it's just really effective, people within an org can communicate highly efficiently with extremely clear meaning. When corporate weasel words are used well they can be highly effective at communicating intent while obscuring meaning for those in an out group and creating plausible deniability.
For the uninitiated the fact that the two concepts live so closely side by side can be bewildering of course.
100% this. Your boss has a myriad of ways of communicating what they want w/o directly asking.
This is a big reason I've never wanted to go into management. At my level I can just pretend I don't understand the implied ask (heh) if I feel like it. I have a hard skill. Worst case scenario I can get another job. Your levers of power don't work on me.
Talking about the indirect meanings of 'corpspeak' is only interesting to me in the way we approach the topic.
Corpspeak isn't novel in being duplicitous language. Compared to deliberately vague, concealing, and/or loaded language from life outside work, the corporate lingo is easy mode.
But corpspeak has the property that in can be publicly discussed. "lol look at this dumb bullshit we all do for exactly these reasons" can be stated openly and plainly in a innocuous blog post, and posted to hacker news for people to hem and haw at.
Rarely does anyone even bother scratching at the fiction of our real life linguistic tricks. Because a very bland explainer of surface level phenomenon leads to outright denial, or develops into flamewars.
> Rarely does anyone even bother scratching at the fiction of our real life linguistic tricks
My mind is sort of constantly doing this in the background, because even in mid life it never stops being jarring to me and knocking me out of the flow of language-interpreting.
My favorite example has always been "senseless act of violence that took the lives of 20 innocent people."
1. Come on. The guy had a reason that would be comprehensible to most people, even if nobody considers it a justification.
2. What does it mean to call a group of people innocent? What were they innocent of? Telling lies? Emotionally abusing others on occasion? That's doubtful. Innocent of anything that would merit being executed by a concerned citizen? Since when do we endorse vigilantism at all? Was there some doubt as to whether all 20 people in the west wing of the elementary school were all chomos maybe? WHY DO THE VICTIMS ALWAYS HAVE TO BE EXONERATED OF NOTHING IN PARTICULAR
>Innocent of anything that would merit being executed by a concerned citizen? Since when do we endorse vigilantism at all?
There's absolutely such a thing as self-defense. If a woman kills her potential rapist, she's killed a not-innocent person. We don't use the word "vigilantism" or "execution" for it, but it's a case of a person being killed by a concerned citizen where that person isn't innocent.
And even ignoring self-defense, "not innocent" doesn't mean "okay to kill them", it's more like "did something bad which increases the chance of getting killed". If a bank robber argues with another bank robber over the stolen money and gets shot, we don't call that the killing of an innocent person, even though it's not legal to shoot your partner in order to take his stolen money.
That Vulture article was getting recirculated on Twitter yesterday, and I'm appreciative because I missed it the first time. What a masterpiece -- so well written, funny, and just spot-on.
Promiscuous middle managers and C-Levels? I'm thinking they carry a heavy load, shed a lot, really get around, and frequently attend superspreader events.
Humans are prone to cargo cult thinking. Presented with a successful or important person, we automatically copy their behavior, because their behavior must have made them successful or important.
I think that this is why usage of stupid idioms and phrases flows downward in hierarchies. Have you ever noticed an executive use a corpspeak phrase in an all-hands meeting and then seen it crop up immediately afterward in e-mail and meetings from lower-level management? It can be fun to ask them what a new phrase means in real terms, too -- often they don't really know.
People who work at companies tend to keep working at companies. You don't get as much movement going from McDonalds to Google, but tons of folks migrate among tech companies. So the culture naturally spreads.
For all the talk about American individualism, American corporate culture is actually extraordinarily collectivist. The pervasive groupthink at all levels of the hierarchy is an effective survival strategy. It's quite depressing to read accounts of individuals who lived under the boot of various collectivist regimes, particularly the modes of thought and expression so prevalent and necessary in such societies to keep your family from starving, only to realize that they are more or less replicated in American corporate environments, for more or less the same reasons.
When I was younger I spent some time in East Germany visiting relatives. From the inside most large corporations look like communist states with an planned economy. Tons of propaganda, a lot of phrases that mean exactly the opposite when used ("rightsizing" vs "layoffs"), refusal to name issues directly, appearances more important than facts, useless metrics, an emphasis on supervision instead of improving things and a leadership that pretends to talk for the underlings but is totally out of touch.
I really hate this kind of language, but it is really useful in an American corporate context, as I have recently realized while doing an executive MBA program. A lot of Americans tie up a lot of their emotions in work success. A lot of other Americans don't care about their co-workers, and don't want to put in the effort to figure out how to actually respect people (calling cheap places to work "discount" is a good example of this). Sometimes, the same person is in both groups.
The way to usefully make both groups work with others is to use language that is devoid of meaning and, in particular, lacking value judgments. That way, you can say "Steve, can you explain the learnings from your recent project?" and mean either, "Steve, you fucked up, what are you not going to do again?" or "Steve, your project went great, what tips can you share?" That way, Steve can feel recognized for his achievements even when Steve did something that was really stupid. Steve's colleagues have an emotional barrier, too: they won't feel bad for Steve if you are calling out his failures, and they won't feel bad for themselves if you are saying that Steve did something exceptional.
It's really fucked up how we have created this sanitized dictionary, but it's too effective in a corporate context not to use it.
> A lot of Americans tie up a lot of their emotions in work success.
For anyone else still wondering "why" corpspeak still exists, this is it. America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.
I guess I'm just disappointed at the world I've inherited. Why are people so afraid of direct conversation? Why is hearing bad news "too much" for some people? I remember a quote from a comic strip saying "people would rather hear an outright lie than an uncomfortable truth". Which is true, but I wish American work culture didn't need to hide from the truth.
To me part of being a professional is being able to have direct, pragmatic conversations. You learn to keep your own emotions in check and focus on the discussion at hand. Look at the larger picture of the meeting / your work / whatever is being discussed.
What would it take to change work culture to be more pragmatic?
In my personal opinion, if we just stopped doing this, and people at work experienced their first "breakup" (in the form of being told "you screwed up" or having to say "I am sorry that I screwed up") we would all be able to be more honest with each other. Just like dating, some people would go through an emotional trauma, but everyone would learn to get over it. Similarly, each manager would learn how to say "this project went poorly" or "you screwed up" in an empathetic way.
However, that is just not the culture, and it takes a very long time to change a culture. To make matters worse, the presence of the linguistic emotional barriers makes their removal a lot more painful. The people fighting against this oppressive language would be labeled "mean" (or worse, "non-inclusive"), and unfortunately that is a much worse label than "bad programmer."
I think this culture is dangerous, and normalizes both weasel-talk and lies. It has already infected media and politics. I just don't know how to stop it.
this is basically why i got fired recently. now, idk what to do from here. being so "fake" (idk a better one, using that word feels like angsty teenager) just isn't in me. corporate life isn't for me maybe, but those paychecks...
"You screwed up" is a tricky one. Yes, individuals do screw up. But that's actually not very interesting; a true individual screwup (with no one else contributing) has a very small blast radius.
The bigger the screwup, the more people had a hand in it, and the less truthful it is to point to one person and say "you did it."
Let's say I merge a syntactically incorrect piece of code that brings down the entire system on the next release. Nobody notices for a few hours and the company loses a bunch of money. Did I screw up? Yes I did, but that's the tiniest piece of it.
* How did my change get merged? Who reviewed it? Did nobody test it or notice that it had no test coverage that would exercise my stupid change? Do we have any standards or accountability for review quality?
* How did it get released? Do we not have any automated tooling to stand up a candidate release in staging and do smoke tests?
* How did the downtime last so long? Do we have any operational monitoring? Was someone on call? Who is accountable for system uptime overall?
A bad boss would just throw the person closest to the cause of the failure -- me -- under the bus. But who among us has never committed bad code? That's why we build systems for code review, for automated test, for release QA, for operational monitoring. And if all those systems fail or are inadequate, it's not really the fault of any single developer who was essentially walking a tightrope without a net.
You basically nailed the problems with a non-blameless approach to business. Blamelessness has some very clear benefits, but I have also seen the pendulum swing too far (eg refusing to blame someone for gross negligence). I do think you can have blamelessness without corpspeak, but it takes a lot more humility and self-control.
> America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.
I specifically make a point to not ask the dreaded "what do you do?" question. In my experience, that question is an absolute energy killer. Most people do not like what they do for a living, so asking them to talk about it brings the mood down. Plus there's the whole "sizing up" aspect of that question that's very off-putting to me, as if we need to know how much money people make before we decide how we feel about them.
I'd much rather talk to people about their hobbies, travels, creative pursuits, kids, etc. - the things that people are actually excited to talk about.
I’m usually interested to here what other people do as a selfish endeavor because people usually do or work for something at least moderately interesting. If someone doesn’t want to talk about it, there’s plenty of ways for them to steer the convo away from work.
I’m excited to talk about what I do too, so I enjoy when people ask me…
> I'd much rather talk to people about their hobbies, travels, creative pursuits, kids, etc.
Yeah , this gets exciting only to people who can afford these things. It's possible that one only meet these types of people. In most context I have seen asking people what they do is not out of some deep interest in other's jobs/work but just the safe topic to broach with an adult.
Yep. I remember we had specific training at my company on not mentioning literally any of these things when interviewing candidates, in part for that reason.
Why is it unsafe to ask people about hobbies, even if they "can't afford these things"? They can just say that "I can't afford hobbies" and then you can talk about that.
People also might not have a job/work, so asking about that could get uncomfortable too, if you are not willing to hear negative answers.
Safe in that there's a good chance that everyone has an answer for the question. It's the same thing like asking about the weather: it's easy to observe and most people will have some kind of, even minor, opinion about it. It's called "small talk" for a reason and is meant as a conversation starter and/or to avoid the awkward just-staring-at-each-other moments. Even a tiny human connection is still a connection.
> talk to people about their hobbies, travels, creative pursuits, kids, etc.
This backfires when you have more hobbies or travels than the other party.
Also interests don't usually align (e.g "I spent last month looking for that one elusive comet from my DX-7512 telescope. here.. see this photo. What about you ? Umm. well nothing much")
It's better to gradually start with some topic where opinions are likely to align.
For small talk I do realize how important (and how easy once you've run this with 4-5 people) it is to find a hobby I enjoy, and pick sharable stories around it and back it up with some artifacts (like photos on my phone).
I think it would help to come up with clusters of topics that are well aligned. Pick a topic from one cluster and see how it works, if not pick one from the next. If it worked, pick another one from the same cluster.
I find people of other profession talking about their professions genuinely interesting thing to listen about. It is topic they have deep knowledge about and I usually don't.
People with kids dont tend to have deep hobbies and exciting travels. Thinking about it, most people without them dont have hobbies they are super invested in either. There are some people with those and it is interesting when they talk about it, but most of them splits time between work and familly, putting a movie on top of it here and there.
I enjoy discussing my work. If someone asked me about my hobbies, I'd stare blankly, wondering if they really want to hear that I go to the gym, or the hours I spend on obscure corners of Wikipedia, or doing math for fun. For small talk, stick with questions that folks are asked constantly, and that everyone has a ready and rehearsed answer for.
> If someone asked me about my hobbies, I’d stare blankly, wondering if they really want to hear that I go to the gym, or the hours I spend on obscure corners of Wikipedia, or doing math for fun.
I've started asking people "What do you do with your time?" It's an open enough question that people can answer with work, hobbies, or life, whichever they feel more comfortable enough to share with someone they just met. It also invites unprompted switching between the topics.
I was always taught growing up that asking that is rude! I still make a conscious effort not to do it straight off. It's a bit of a lazy conversation opener and with a bit more imagination (e.g. based on something interesting/strange that is happening in the moment) I often get better conversations. Or maybe people just think I'm weird
>> A lot of Americans tie up a lot of their emotions in work success.
> America has a very work-centric culture.
> Why are people so afraid of direct conversation?
I feel like the "emotions" side is just as important as the "work" side, here. To be able to (1) be emotionally invested and (2) have those emotions hurt from time to time can be just fine, as long as you can also (3) process those emotions in a healthy way. I feel like a lot of Americans (and humans in general, to be fair) have trouble with (3).
If I could magically fix it, I think I would be less interested in "make people more able to maintain emotional distance at work" and more in "make people more able to deal with emotions when they come up, in general".
>For anyone else still wondering "why" corpspeak still exists, this is it. America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.
Are there other societies where corpspeak does not exist- what are they?
> America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.
That's pretty much the norm in Australia too and I would expect so even elsewhere. I'm not going to claim it's universal but I'd suggest at least widespread in the modern developed world (I was going to put in "Western", but even in Japan I'd say self-identification via career choice is largely the norm).
To what extent does corpspeak exist in other languages though?
> can you explain the learnings from your recent project?
I've seen a lot of organisations publish "learnings" as an artifact of the retrospective on a project that went pear-shaped, but IMHO they can only be classified as learnings once the org has internalised the error(s), developed strategies to mitigate against them, and demonstrated an ability to avoid them.
Until then, they're merely a set of recommendations (with a grammatically questionable name).
> To distinguish where employees receive high pay versus low pay, Company X organized the locations into three bins: discount, national, and premium. New York City, naturally, is a premium location. Detroit is a discount location. One of her friends works in Detroit, and something doesn’t sit right about her friend being a discount employee.
working with americans, i found that they tend to use this kind of passive aggressive language but then in their actions they can be very cruel and sadistic...if they have power over you.
i prefer someone who is direct and straightforward, just tell me to my face what you think as long as you're professional and i respect you, it wont be an issue.
I'm sure this is part of the deal with considered corp-speak, as in the stuff that ends up in formal documents. But honestly a big chunk of it is just the sort of specialized jargon that always develops in a specialized industry. It's not like doctors or plumbers or anyone else don't end up with little idiomatic expressions like this after a while. It's just that we all somewhat resent office work for being bullshit so we resent the signifiers associated with it. It's "cool" to not be corporate, so corporate behaviors become cringey.
Also, a lot of the surrender to it I think just happens because people are tired and not always paying close attention so when they're put on the spot in meetings to respond it's much easier to just spit out some vague but related sounding jargon salad than to actually make an incisive point.
The main purpose of jargon is to concisely communicate complex concepts using convenient labels - see [0]. If your workplace is using jargon merely to signal belonging to the group, then that's just sad.
This is a great post. Another reason why Corpspeak naturally arises is systemic: corporations bring together people from many different contexts. It is really important for everyone to be on the same page (another Corpspeak-ism!) when communicating and coordinating on work. The most effective way to do that is to settle on neutral phrases devoid of subjective value judgements.
Corpspeak is the worse for strategy and product because there's a lot of meaning in the precise wording of something but inveitably every slide gets wordsmithed to death and ends up a vague buzzword bingo sheet.
Simple (if not particularly potent) example I'm dealing with right now: "right to win"... my employer wants to use this wording in various strategy templates across all businesses and product. So every discussion is why do we think we have the "right to win" this or that market. In reality some products are differentiated in a way that serves a smaller segment (hence technically not "winning" the market) and perhaps deliver a higher IRR than an alternative strategy that is better boxed in this "must have a 'right to win'" perspective
> Maybe it bothers me that using ask as a noun is passive voice, like the request is disembodied. I'm not asking, the ask just appeared there!
I think the latter is the key to corpspeak as a whole and it has ramifications beyond just stripped emotion. It always erases causality from the communication. Everything is just "appearing" with no thought to how or why things are the way they are. Businesses are really, really bad about asking "Why?" at times and this kind of language reinforces that. There is no "Why?", things just materialize into existence and are and you (have to) deal with them.
The emotion part makes sense, because often the answer to a "Why?" is because someone has made a mistake or done something dumb and it provides cover. However, it also leads to rote, wasteful, inefficient behaviors. It doesn't necessitate that there is no reason "why" things are being done, but it does mean that a reason isn't required either.
"Why are we having this sync meeting?" "Well, to sync of course!"
Completely agree! It's not even clear who is asking. Causality is erased, as you say.
"I have an ask for you" - is it my ask? Am I conveying somebody else's ask? Who knows? It's atemporal, acausal, you can choose to investigate by querying but there's a good chance the response is going to be a shrug and a small, apologetic smile accompanied by "ah - you know, the usual" at which point you'll sigh and respond with "yep - ok, let me see if I have the bandwidth and circle back to you on that".
Could you tell whether any particular batch of corpspeak was generated by a GPT3? Or do you even need a GPT3? Could you tie a vocabulary list to a random number generator and just a little bit of logic, and create convincing corpspeak?
As the Cluetrain Manifesto said, this stuff sounds literally inhuman. And we crave genuine human interaction, and corpspeak isn't it.
Am I alone in not finding many of these examples particularly hard to understand? Maybe in the context in the workplace they are easier to understand than in isolation on paper. All professions have lingo, for example, the Army has its own unique jargon. It seems like there is a trend you see in writing where the author has to exaggerate or feign the severity of a problem for dramatic effect to get the content viral. It's like how Dilbert is an exaggeration of the workplace, because it would not be funny otherwise.
Saying "touching base" does sound stupid but whatever
In my enterprise (fr)Agile job, copious amounts of Corpspeak abound.
I truly feel like "the inmates are running the asylum".
For example: during one of our morning stand up, I remember bringing up a major production issue that I found with our website. Someone "important" uttered the phrase: "Let's take it offline".
After the stand up, no one bothered to follow-up with me about it and I suppose, everyone in our team assumed some technical person would fix it anyway. So naturally I assumed that the "Let's take it offline" phrase meant "I don't want to talk about that now" or "Sounds scary! I hope that goes away" :-]
My question is: were some parts of Corpspeak invented to permit non-technical people to sound more sophisticated and/or intelligent than they actually are?
> After the stand up, no one bothered to follow-up with me about it
Feedback: it was your responsibility to bring it up later, since you owned the discussion in standup. The reason it was "moved offline" is because standup is not where you solve problems, it's meant to be a quick sync.
But that infuriates me - surely investigating a production issue takes priority over stand-up, and I'd actually wonder why the originator didn't bring it up sooner, unless they happened to find it just before the meeting started. Even then I'd probably excuse myself and ensure everyone relevant was involved in at least triaging the issue.
I actually don't mind if stand-ups do end up being a more involved discussion providing what's being discussed is relevant to all present, if not, often the best solution is to let those who needn't be involved leave, then continue the same meeting, rather than wait for some unspecified time when people are "offline" (a term that really is especially silly in these days of zoom-only meetings).
But there's often this crazy adherence to rules that says particular meetings must follow a set pattern and not go off course or extend themselves beyond an inflexible limit. I've had stand-ups that last 5 minutes and ones that last 45, and it's invariably the latter ones where anything of significant value takes place - and I'd even argue they're the main reason for having such daily meetings.
You're absolutely right. Sorry I failed to mention that before stand up, I had actually brought it up several times in chat messages the previous night and I also created a User Story/Bug to capture it.
I eventually realised that the team "delivery lead" manager was 101% focused on delivering stories for our customer (a manager embedded in the team) and deprioritised/postponed anything not in the sprint objectives.
Because "bandwidth" isn't about having time to deal with an issue. It's about the mental capacity and effort necessary to process the issue. When you're working on complex multi-step issues, even if you have time between steps to handle another issue, you may not have the mental capacity to add that effort into what you're already doing without losing focus on the primary task. "Bandwidth" indicates the ability to recieve, process, and return information in a timely manner, not just the time itself.
Agreed. I am an English speaker and fluent in the corp speak dialect and at least to me a lot of these terms (maybe all of them?) have different connotations than what the author thought was a totally equivalent English word (e.g. "let's meet" and "let's sync" convey very different implications, to me). And why would that be surprising? I'm doing and behaving in different ways at work than I do outside of it so new words to accurately capture that are sensible. When I play survival-crafting video games with friends that requires elaborate coordination I find myself slipping into corp speak for some things and it's because we are then doing the sort of communication that corp speak can render most clearly.
At the same time I don't deny that fluently using the words is a way of signaling conformity or insiderness to the corp culture and that is distinct from the words' usefuleness. It's probably this part of them that rankles HN folks, but they are just wrong when they say the words are 100% signaling with no inherent value.
The part about how the language objectifies people or is anti-social strikes me as pure speculation by the way-- I don't find anything humans do to be particularly inhuman and definitely not corp-speak. It signals participation in what is an outgroup to some so they dislike it but shouldn't pat themself on the back for disliking it.
> e.g. "let's meet" and "let's sync" convey very different implications, to me
I think the author was just using that as a set-up for the rest of the article, and that the point was that the corp-speak version intentionally removes any implication by making it passive. The interpretation then becomes what you infer, not what was implied.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadIt lets you know early in the hiring process that this employer is probably not one you want to work for (:.
In practice though, these phrases are all used mindlessly, by people who don't talk much outside the office, and see no problem in never thinking about the words they use all day. And that's what most people seem to take issue with: people that are operating on autopilot, without allowing themselves any time to reflect.
(I'm German, and for us it's anglicisms. If some middle manager's entire business vocab is in English and they mix it into their German sentences without giving it any thought, you can be certain that their mind is at capacity.)
> Let’s take things offline
May mean “I don’t want any paper trails on this”.
Corpspeak abounds in places that value "being in motion" over "getting results", since when you use Corpspeak, you don't actually have to think about what the best course of action is--the best course of action is always "organizing a connect with the relevant subject matter experts to draft action items for a discovery yada-yada-yada". This requires zero thought--it just requires knowing a list of buzzwords and being able to string them together. This is really easy to do! When promotion season came around, I was asked to write a report of why I deserved one, and I wrote 1200 words in a half hour--that's 40 wpm, about the average typing speed of someone just copying text! And I was complimented on the thoroughness and perspicacity of what I wrote. I got the promotion--just in time for me to find a better opportunity and bounce.
Nevertheless, I do believe there's value in Corpspeak. The reality at most companies (even ones you care about) is that a lot of the communicating you do is more-or-less inconsequential, and doesn't actually need to have a lot of care and thought put into it--and being able to let your eyes glaze over and engage in the conversational equivalent of cruise control saves cognitive resources for stuff that actually matters.
It goes back a very long way. Just google the phrase "meddlesome priest" for a particularly illustrative and amusing example.
Corporate speak is just a combination of that with the more prosaic concept of jargon.
Jargon, the part that doesn't involve purposeful obfuscation at least, is often highly useful for saving time because it allows people who engage in repeated interactions to be highly specific. The phrase "annual review" could mean a bunch of things, but a Y1-AAR could be a specific set of questions with a specific range of predetermined outcomes for a specific type of employee.
When jargon is done well it's just really effective, people within an org can communicate highly efficiently with extremely clear meaning. When corporate weasel words are used well they can be highly effective at communicating intent while obscuring meaning for those in an out group and creating plausible deniability.
For the uninitiated the fact that the two concepts live so closely side by side can be bewildering of course.
This is a big reason I've never wanted to go into management. At my level I can just pretend I don't understand the implied ask (heh) if I feel like it. I have a hard skill. Worst case scenario I can get another job. Your levers of power don't work on me.
Corpspeak isn't novel in being duplicitous language. Compared to deliberately vague, concealing, and/or loaded language from life outside work, the corporate lingo is easy mode.
But corpspeak has the property that in can be publicly discussed. "lol look at this dumb bullshit we all do for exactly these reasons" can be stated openly and plainly in a innocuous blog post, and posted to hacker news for people to hem and haw at.
Rarely does anyone even bother scratching at the fiction of our real life linguistic tricks. Because a very bland explainer of surface level phenomenon leads to outright denial, or develops into flamewars.
My mind is sort of constantly doing this in the background, because even in mid life it never stops being jarring to me and knocking me out of the flow of language-interpreting.
My favorite example has always been "senseless act of violence that took the lives of 20 innocent people."
1. Come on. The guy had a reason that would be comprehensible to most people, even if nobody considers it a justification.
2. What does it mean to call a group of people innocent? What were they innocent of? Telling lies? Emotionally abusing others on occasion? That's doubtful. Innocent of anything that would merit being executed by a concerned citizen? Since when do we endorse vigilantism at all? Was there some doubt as to whether all 20 people in the west wing of the elementary school were all chomos maybe? WHY DO THE VICTIMS ALWAYS HAVE TO BE EXONERATED OF NOTHING IN PARTICULAR
There's absolutely such a thing as self-defense. If a woman kills her potential rapist, she's killed a not-innocent person. We don't use the word "vigilantism" or "execution" for it, but it's a case of a person being killed by a concerned citizen where that person isn't innocent.
And even ignoring self-defense, "not innocent" doesn't mean "okay to kill them", it's more like "did something bad which increases the chance of getting killed". If a bank robber argues with another bank robber over the stolen money and gets shot, we don't call that the killing of an innocent person, even though it's not legal to shoot your partner in order to take his stolen money.
- https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/23/from-inboxing-t...
- https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/spread-of-corporate-speak.ht...
Along with a book I haven't read but have considered gifting to a bunch of people:
- https://smile.amazon.com/30-000-Pound-Gorilla-Room-Annoying/...
I think that this is why usage of stupid idioms and phrases flows downward in hierarchies. Have you ever noticed an executive use a corpspeak phrase in an all-hands meeting and then seen it crop up immediately afterward in e-mail and meetings from lower-level management? It can be fun to ask them what a new phrase means in real terms, too -- often they don't really know.
The way to usefully make both groups work with others is to use language that is devoid of meaning and, in particular, lacking value judgments. That way, you can say "Steve, can you explain the learnings from your recent project?" and mean either, "Steve, you fucked up, what are you not going to do again?" or "Steve, your project went great, what tips can you share?" That way, Steve can feel recognized for his achievements even when Steve did something that was really stupid. Steve's colleagues have an emotional barrier, too: they won't feel bad for Steve if you are calling out his failures, and they won't feel bad for themselves if you are saying that Steve did something exceptional.
It's really fucked up how we have created this sanitized dictionary, but it's too effective in a corporate context not to use it.
For anyone else still wondering "why" corpspeak still exists, this is it. America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.
I guess I'm just disappointed at the world I've inherited. Why are people so afraid of direct conversation? Why is hearing bad news "too much" for some people? I remember a quote from a comic strip saying "people would rather hear an outright lie than an uncomfortable truth". Which is true, but I wish American work culture didn't need to hide from the truth.
To me part of being a professional is being able to have direct, pragmatic conversations. You learn to keep your own emotions in check and focus on the discussion at hand. Look at the larger picture of the meeting / your work / whatever is being discussed.
What would it take to change work culture to be more pragmatic?
However, that is just not the culture, and it takes a very long time to change a culture. To make matters worse, the presence of the linguistic emotional barriers makes their removal a lot more painful. The people fighting against this oppressive language would be labeled "mean" (or worse, "non-inclusive"), and unfortunately that is a much worse label than "bad programmer."
I think this culture is dangerous, and normalizes both weasel-talk and lies. It has already infected media and politics. I just don't know how to stop it.
The bigger the screwup, the more people had a hand in it, and the less truthful it is to point to one person and say "you did it."
Let's say I merge a syntactically incorrect piece of code that brings down the entire system on the next release. Nobody notices for a few hours and the company loses a bunch of money. Did I screw up? Yes I did, but that's the tiniest piece of it.
* How did my change get merged? Who reviewed it? Did nobody test it or notice that it had no test coverage that would exercise my stupid change? Do we have any standards or accountability for review quality?
* How did it get released? Do we not have any automated tooling to stand up a candidate release in staging and do smoke tests?
* How did the downtime last so long? Do we have any operational monitoring? Was someone on call? Who is accountable for system uptime overall?
A bad boss would just throw the person closest to the cause of the failure -- me -- under the bus. But who among us has never committed bad code? That's why we build systems for code review, for automated test, for release QA, for operational monitoring. And if all those systems fail or are inadequate, it's not really the fault of any single developer who was essentially walking a tightrope without a net.
I specifically make a point to not ask the dreaded "what do you do?" question. In my experience, that question is an absolute energy killer. Most people do not like what they do for a living, so asking them to talk about it brings the mood down. Plus there's the whole "sizing up" aspect of that question that's very off-putting to me, as if we need to know how much money people make before we decide how we feel about them.
I'd much rather talk to people about their hobbies, travels, creative pursuits, kids, etc. - the things that people are actually excited to talk about.
I’m excited to talk about what I do too, so I enjoy when people ask me…
Yeah , this gets exciting only to people who can afford these things. It's possible that one only meet these types of people. In most context I have seen asking people what they do is not out of some deep interest in other's jobs/work but just the safe topic to broach with an adult.
Why is it unsafe to ask people about hobbies, even if they "can't afford these things"? They can just say that "I can't afford hobbies" and then you can talk about that.
People also might not have a job/work, so asking about that could get uncomfortable too, if you are not willing to hear negative answers.
This backfires when you have more hobbies or travels than the other party.
Also interests don't usually align (e.g "I spent last month looking for that one elusive comet from my DX-7512 telescope. here.. see this photo. What about you ? Umm. well nothing much")
It's better to gradually start with some topic where opinions are likely to align.
For small talk I do realize how important (and how easy once you've run this with 4-5 people) it is to find a hobby I enjoy, and pick sharable stories around it and back it up with some artifacts (like photos on my phone).
I think it would help to come up with clusters of topics that are well aligned. Pick a topic from one cluster and see how it works, if not pick one from the next. If it worked, pick another one from the same cluster.
People with kids dont tend to have deep hobbies and exciting travels. Thinking about it, most people without them dont have hobbies they are super invested in either. There are some people with those and it is interesting when they talk about it, but most of them splits time between work and familly, putting a movie on top of it here and there.
I have never related to something so much.
If I could magically fix it, I think I would be less interested in "make people more able to maintain emotional distance at work" and more in "make people more able to deal with emotions when they come up, in general".
Just my 2¢
Are there other societies where corpspeak does not exist- what are they?
That's pretty much the norm in Australia too and I would expect so even elsewhere. I'm not going to claim it's universal but I'd suggest at least widespread in the modern developed world (I was going to put in "Western", but even in Japan I'd say self-identification via career choice is largely the norm).
To what extent does corpspeak exist in other languages though?
I've seen a lot of organisations publish "learnings" as an artifact of the retrospective on a project that went pear-shaped, but IMHO they can only be classified as learnings once the org has internalised the error(s), developed strategies to mitigate against them, and demonstrated an ability to avoid them.
Until then, they're merely a set of recommendations (with a grammatically questionable name).
What kind of places do you mean- Can you give an example?
> To distinguish where employees receive high pay versus low pay, Company X organized the locations into three bins: discount, national, and premium. New York City, naturally, is a premium location. Detroit is a discount location. One of her friends works in Detroit, and something doesn’t sit right about her friend being a discount employee.
i prefer someone who is direct and straightforward, just tell me to my face what you think as long as you're professional and i respect you, it wont be an issue.
Also, a lot of the surrender to it I think just happens because people are tired and not always paying close attention so when they're put on the spot in meetings to respond it's much easier to just spit out some vague but related sounding jargon salad than to actually make an incisive point.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32564931
Simple (if not particularly potent) example I'm dealing with right now: "right to win"... my employer wants to use this wording in various strategy templates across all businesses and product. So every discussion is why do we think we have the "right to win" this or that market. In reality some products are differentiated in a way that serves a smaller segment (hence technically not "winning" the market) and perhaps deliver a higher IRR than an alternative strategy that is better boxed in this "must have a 'right to win'" perspective
I think the latter is the key to corpspeak as a whole and it has ramifications beyond just stripped emotion. It always erases causality from the communication. Everything is just "appearing" with no thought to how or why things are the way they are. Businesses are really, really bad about asking "Why?" at times and this kind of language reinforces that. There is no "Why?", things just materialize into existence and are and you (have to) deal with them.
The emotion part makes sense, because often the answer to a "Why?" is because someone has made a mistake or done something dumb and it provides cover. However, it also leads to rote, wasteful, inefficient behaviors. It doesn't necessitate that there is no reason "why" things are being done, but it does mean that a reason isn't required either.
"Why are we having this sync meeting?" "Well, to sync of course!"
"I have an ask for you" - is it my ask? Am I conveying somebody else's ask? Who knows? It's atemporal, acausal, you can choose to investigate by querying but there's a good chance the response is going to be a shrug and a small, apologetic smile accompanied by "ah - you know, the usual" at which point you'll sigh and respond with "yep - ok, let me see if I have the bandwidth and circle back to you on that".
As the Cluetrain Manifesto said, this stuff sounds literally inhuman. And we crave genuine human interaction, and corpspeak isn't it.
Saying "touching base" does sound stupid but whatever
For example: during one of our morning stand up, I remember bringing up a major production issue that I found with our website. Someone "important" uttered the phrase: "Let's take it offline". After the stand up, no one bothered to follow-up with me about it and I suppose, everyone in our team assumed some technical person would fix it anyway. So naturally I assumed that the "Let's take it offline" phrase meant "I don't want to talk about that now" or "Sounds scary! I hope that goes away" :-]
My question is: were some parts of Corpspeak invented to permit non-technical people to sound more sophisticated and/or intelligent than they actually are?
Feedback: it was your responsibility to bring it up later, since you owned the discussion in standup. The reason it was "moved offline" is because standup is not where you solve problems, it's meant to be a quick sync.
I eventually realised that the team "delivery lead" manager was 101% focused on delivering stories for our customer (a manager embedded in the team) and deprioritised/postponed anything not in the sprint objectives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RAMRukKqQg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvhC_RdIwQ
Because "bandwidth" isn't about having time to deal with an issue. It's about the mental capacity and effort necessary to process the issue. When you're working on complex multi-step issues, even if you have time between steps to handle another issue, you may not have the mental capacity to add that effort into what you're already doing without losing focus on the primary task. "Bandwidth" indicates the ability to recieve, process, and return information in a timely manner, not just the time itself.
At the same time I don't deny that fluently using the words is a way of signaling conformity or insiderness to the corp culture and that is distinct from the words' usefuleness. It's probably this part of them that rankles HN folks, but they are just wrong when they say the words are 100% signaling with no inherent value.
The part about how the language objectifies people or is anti-social strikes me as pure speculation by the way-- I don't find anything humans do to be particularly inhuman and definitely not corp-speak. It signals participation in what is an outgroup to some so they dislike it but shouldn't pat themself on the back for disliking it.
I think the author was just using that as a set-up for the rest of the article, and that the point was that the corp-speak version intentionally removes any implication by making it passive. The interpretation then becomes what you infer, not what was implied.