13 ms·

From inboxing to thought showers: how business bullshit took over

247 points by tomduncalf 9y ago

olivermarks 9y ago
Another seasonal article variant from the FT (paywall) Embrace failure and shoot for the moon — tech cliché bingo https://www.ft.com/content/c6509e8e-e6f5-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec https://www.ft.com/content/c6509e8e-e6f5-11e7-8b99-0191e4537...
alexasmyths 9y ago
The irony is that while the words are stupid (“alignment”, “intentionality” and “end-state visions”) - this pretty good actually. Most white collar jobs are full of 'waking sleep' - and if we focus on outcomes, and drive them forward with intentional work - we would be more productive. "Bullshit jobs" - if you doing anything to move the ball forward - like working a checkout or pumping gas - your job may feel meaningless, but it's not BS by any means. Middle management tends to be the most BC. And many gov. jobs. "US employee now spends 45% of their working day doing their real job. The other 55% is spent doing things such as wading through endless emails or attending pointless meetings." This is part of the job. Communicating is work, and we can't be 100% efficient at all times.
VectorLock 9y ago
This how I feel about most "Agile methods" going around like SCRUM.
- sli 9y ago
  I often see complaints about Agile and SCRUM met with, "You're just not using it correctly." In some circles, it's almost like a religion that you're not allowed to criticize. After all, it's The Process(TM), I guess. But from where I'm sitting, "correct" SCRUM looks like a whole lot of weird not-overhead-but-totally-overhead that seems difficult to manage across multiple projects. For example, what a "point" represents is constantly in flux. Instead, I actually prefer subsets of the methodology. When the company I work for was young, we all worked from home, and so daily standups were extremely effective at keeping us on task and productive while maintaining good balance (once you're done, you're done -- no creep). The board has been effective as organizing tasks and their progress. What would not have helped, or been in any way productive, would have been spending time trying to figure out how many "points" my tasks for the day are worth. I still don't see how that system is actually different from just using hours beyond philosophical arguments. Basically, I prefer a more focused and leaner version of the approaches.
  - virgilp 9y ago
    The basic idea behind points is not bad, the problem with it is humans and the fact that they are numeric/ called "points". Might as well call them "gold coins", since soon enough people all around will start to believe there's genuine value in having/collecting many "points". I like to believe that it'd be much more productive if the tasks were T-shirt size. Since that would prevent people from computing "productivity" or "velocity" or whatever - while still allowing you to do rough estimates, if you recorded this for long-enough. (actually, I think you need some sort of tshirt size for several dimensions - like, "dependencies/ how many people you need to communicate with for this feature"; or "uncertainty - how much is this 'just work'(implementing a known solution) versus 'exploration'/ trying to identify the solution first ")
  - User23 9y ago
    "You're just not using it correctly" is absolutely correct, by definition, in all cases where "Agile" is imposed as some kind of top-down corporate policy.
    - amorphid 9y ago
      A mentor once taught me that all actions taken by a company's people should be focused on making money, saving money, and saving time. This is mostly a sniff test for "does this thing we're doing make sense in some obvious way." When sniffing the value of any given team's Agile process, I usually find a notable lack of attempting to make money, save money, or save time. Often I found people are very good at spending money, wasting time, and being completely detached from how they actions contribute to making money in a meaningful way.
      - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
        This sounds common-sensical, but of course in practice it's almost impossibly hard to tell if any reasonable course of action really will make money, save money, or save time. Will refactoring help? How about a continuous integration system? A better bug tracker? In fact will fixing bugs make/save money/time at all? Customers seem to put up with them, and it's always easier/cheaper not to bother. Will customers leave if our product is shit? Often they won't. Sometimes they will, because a competitor's product eats our lunch. So what's the best course of action? One problem with Agile - and all management fads - is exactly this lack of prescience. Future outcomes are unknowable. They can sometimes be estimated, but given a huge field of possible actions, making optimal choices is incredibly hard, and there's always a trade-off between long-term and short-term rewards. The bigger problem is that corporations and businesses are very rarely primarily dedicated to making money. Internally, the true function of business processes is to highlight and maintain a political hierarchy which supports resource concentration for senior management and shareholders. Senior management and shareholders may know what's best for themselves, and that may well not be what's best for the long-term survival of the company - not even in terms of an apparently simple metric like "Does this make money?" Because you can't answer that question without also asking "For whom?" And it's not that unusual for senior management to choose actions that protect their status over actions that increase income.
- empath75 9y ago
  Try doing it in government.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Which is to say iterated waterfall with stand-up meetings tacked on.
  - sailfast 9y ago
    You're not doing it right :) I kid because I love, but I will say it depends on where you're attempting to do it, how much control you have over the process, whether you are a contractor or government employee, and how much your can convince your leadership of the good parts (these typically require actual risk-taking / change)
  - jacques_chester 9y ago
    It can be done. Not for everything. But for a lot of things. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal. Through Pivotal Labs we have various consulting engagements with the US government, including the DoD.
- dandersh 9y ago
  While this is a valid point, I've found the biggest issue with "Agile" to be that business thinks that this is the primary (or only) input that needs to be heard from the tech side. They think that because they're tossing us the "Agile" carrot they have carte blanche elsewhere and it is a "get out of jail free" card for their absolutely terrible decisions...like demanding the use of a CMS like AEM when building a dynamic RIA because they may feel the need to change the text of a button down the road. By being "Agile" the team can make up for the ignorant and time wasting technical decisions foisted upon by business.
- ozmbie 9y ago
  Read up on “cargo cults” and “cargo cult agile” and it makes a lot more sense. There are some genuinely good ideas in SCRUM and other development methodologies. But trying to codify those ideas into a set of rules for newcomers always leads to some degree of misinterpretation. I don’t know what the solution is, other than to ensure each team has constant input and support from somebody with authority and deep understanding of software development practices...and how often do you find people like that!
  - arwhatever 9y ago
    Keep the code in a buildable state. Demo early and frequently to get feedback. Skip the rest.
- clairity 9y ago
  it's not the terms "agile" and "SCRUM" that are bs, it's the application of them. agile just doesn't work in most top-down organizations, where bs tends to be highest, because at it's core, agile is about providing a thin layer of self-accountability to self-organizing teams that are fairly autonomous. most (bad) managers want to believe they know better than the underlings and won't give up that much control.
- lowbloodsugar 9y ago
  I feel the same way about "Representative Democracy". Sounds like a great idea, and if it worked as advertised, it'd be great way to run a country. Unfortunately, its far easier to say "We have a representative democracy" than to actually implement one, and its in the interest of everybody "in the system" to just take bribes and do whatever the fuck they like. Scrum (its not an acronym) is the same. If you can get a bunch of people together who know what the fuck they are doing and want to write software that works for the customer, then its a great process. But 90% of "Scrum" I've seen is wankword bingo.
arwhatever 9y ago
It really exploded when George Carlin passed.
- tossaway1 9y ago
  I thought he faded away... (?)
leepowers 9y ago
> After the meeting, I found myself wondering why otherwise smart people so easily slipped into this kind of business bullshit. How had this obfuscatory way of speaking become so successful? Because there's no solid link between inputs and outputs. For most management techniques it's almost impossible to measure the output of a given management function. It's unfalsifiable. Like any other domain of human endeavor when operating in an unfalsifiable space you can neither confirm nor debunk a particular technique. The only thing you can do is _assert_ and flit from one fad to the next. The paradox here is that while management seems to be required for corporate structures to function properly so much of it is fluff or outright BS. I have to wonder if a properly trained ML algorithm could replace 90% of management decisions by cutting out the cruft and ambiguity.
- jpk 9y ago
  > there's no solid link between inputs and outputs > a properly trained ML algorithm #ThinkingFaceEmoji
  - wwweston 9y ago
    OK, maybe an improperly trained ML algorithm?
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      NOOP? It would be really efficient, too...
- bomb199 9y ago
  If you want to get promoted, your managers need to approve of you. At the top, sometimes it's the CEO/Owner/Chairman needs to approve of you. Easiest way is to speak their language. Unfortunately their language is often gibberish. So now all these people in middle management have learned to speak gibberish so they can make more money and get closer to the real money at the top.
Crontab 9y ago
They were making us do some Six Sigma training at work a few months ago, and the entire time, it felt like nothing more than business porn.
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
I particularly enjoy 'calling bullshit' on my fellow mush-speak managers. Now, back to first principles.
touristtam 9y ago
https://twitter.com/thekitze/status/945677952091639809 https://twitter.com/thekitze/status/945677952091639809
borplk 9y ago
I'm trivialising it a bit but at its core the bullshit speak and the like gives hollow people a shield to hide behind.
cornholio 9y ago
This reads like an Adam Curtis piece: starts with an obscure historical reference, and builds it up to dramatic ripple efect on the world, usually by way of a cultural shift.
- vermooten 9y ago
  cones
personlurking 9y ago
As someone not in the corporate world, I'd love to see more examples of bullshit speak. What are some "favorites" from the HN crowd?
- serpix 9y ago
  all the words from scrum: Standups, sprint, dailies, retrospectives, epics, tasks..
- throwaway287391 9y ago
  "Learnings" makes me cringe. Why is it a thing? "Lessons" is a perfectly good word. (Edit: see HN examples at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=learnings&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=learnings&sort=byPopularity&pr...)
- 11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
  Many are mentioned in the article. One I particularly loathe is 'reaching out'. In my generation, 'reaching out' is what someone with a serious drug or alcohol dependency did when they hit rock bottom and it was either get help or die. I cringe, I cringe.... A few years ago, it was 'at the end of the day', which my boss said 42 times in one 60 minute meeting. Yes, 42. I counted.
  - phnofive 9y ago
    This one I struggled with. What's the alternative to 'reaching out' in the context of sending a message to a third party?
    - 11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
      Call, e-mail, text or otherwise contact them. 'Can you call Bob's surf shop and see if they carry Mr. Zog's Sex Wax?'
      - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
artellectual 9y ago
I see a pattern, based on this article and in my daily life. A lot of these processes and ridiculous terminologies are usually created by managers who have no real hard skill. Instead of doing any real work this is what they come up with in order to validate themselves. What does the delegator do when the work has all been delegated? Nothing absolutely nothing and that’s where all these ideas, terminologies mentioned in this article come from. IMO the best managers are the people who have hard skills and leadership skills as a combination. They are able to solve their own problems and help other people solve their problems, and are able to ensure everyone on their team comes out with a net positive on happiness.
- knolan 9y ago
  Thank you, you articulated my exact feelings. The stereotypical manager is often classified as the failed engineer. I’ve certainly seen it happen where managers are the smooth talking bullshitters who can’t cross the street without help while the more introverted types continue to do all the heavy lifting.
- pimmen 9y ago
  I don’t necessarily believe that managers need hard skills relevant to the business (and I say this as an engineer). However, they need to be crystal clear on what they manage (wether it’s just a team, department or entire company) is supposed to deliver and how it will be evaluated. If they don’t know this they can’t prioritize and they can’t ask the relevant questions to the experts to help them with that. This brings me to the second thing Managers really need; they need to be able to listen. The manager is there to manage, he or she is not there to build stuff and thus he or she has to acknowledge that they don’t know as mych about the problems facing the project as the experts. A manager needs the experts’ opinions to guide them towards the best decision. Plenty of managers can talk (that’s one of the readons they were noticed by their superiors) but few can listen and are thus oblivious to what should be prioritized above what (I work mainly on the backend, I had to basically force the issue of load testing before launch into meeting after meeting but my manager was very interested in the colors of the GUI) and which problems will take a lot of work and which could be fixed in 15 minutes. If you want a manager with hard skills as good as yours, wouldn’t you rather have them as a member of the team instead?
sailfast 9y ago
I found this article to be of little utility. Some random history about corporate management, crapping on an entire layer of the organization, because they are called "management" (there are good managers and they serve a purpose) and in the end not suggesting a single thing to help improve the clarity of one's own language. All to sell the author's book. Wish I had passed.
- projektir 9y ago
  Agreed, nothing really of substance here, which is impressive, given that there's plenty to say on the topic... and it's a much wider topic than management.
dawhizkid 9y ago
Management consulting has got to be the pinnacle of corporate bullshit...some favorites of mine are "synergies, deliverables, alignment, collaboration, circle back" Also this is fun: http://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html http://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html
- ucaetano 9y ago
  It only seems that way for those who don't understand it: - Synergy: savings due to economies of scale when joining organizations or due to vertical or horizontal integration - Deliverables: whatever product you agreed to deliver at the end of a project - Alignment: getting a bunch of higher ups to agree on something - Collaboration: duh - Circle back: when you're trying to get a lot of the higher ups to agree (sadly, through individual meetings), and one of them has big concerns, you have to relay that to the other higher-ups Programmer phrasing all sounds like bs to someone who doesn't know it. "Let's do our daily scrum standup and get the scrum master and the product owner to agree on the architecture for the data storage module".
  - virgilp 9y ago
    He's right though. The typical meaning of "bullshit" is "usage of jargon to exclude from the discussion those who aren't skilled in said jargon, and to make things look more complicated than they are to the outside observer". Many (not all) of those speaking the jargon when it's inappropriate do so knowingly, but there is indeed a significant percent of people who are so used to the jargon that they don't realize when it's inappropriate.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - sbov 9y ago
    "Scrum master", "daily scrum standup", and "product owner" aren't programmer phrasings, those are mangement phrasings in the field of software. There's plenty of other actual programmer phrases you could have put here, but it's somewhat telling to me that your sentence of programmer phrases actually has more management phrases.
strangeloops85 9y ago
Ahem, 'moonshots' anyone?
user68858788 9y ago
Does anyone have advice on how to resist this bullshit? Recently, I've been moved away from software into an operations role where my entire propose is to create bureaucracy and make numbers look good for managers' managers. I lack experience and data for my voice to be heard when I point out that we're obviously going backwards.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  One thought that I have it to refuse to use any neologism that substitutes for an already-existing word or phrase. The problem I have is that business BS has been going on for longer than I've been alive, so I don't have a good sense for old BS neologisms.
jacquesm 9y ago
My personal favorites: 'downsizing', 'to better serve you' and 'you are important to us'. There's nothing new about this though, at bank I worked for in the mid 80's (Chase Manhattan) there were plenty of such business bullshit words. I wished I had thought of cataloging them.
whilestanding 9y ago
Great article, until the very end when it sounds like he wants to come up with with some anti-bullshit bullshit. However I really did enjoy the read especially learning about the history of bullshit and how we got here. I think the fundamental problem he mentioned has to be solved - "As factories producing goods in the west have been dismantled, and their work outsourced or replaced with automation, large parts of western economies have been left with little to do" This is the key issue. There just isn't enough actual productive work to get done in many jobs and people can't just leave when the work is done due to being payed by the hour or being seen as lazy by their coworkers and bosses. I'm not smart enough to give solutions to big general issues like this but I certainly see it as a problem in my own life. I have no idea what people actually do in most jobs these days and therefor when trying to decide on my next career move, I have trouble estimating how competent I would be when considering a job. Also it seems hard to develop any real skills in most jobs these days other than learning how to fit in and bullshit. However, those skills do not transfer to a new position with a different 'culture'. I've mostly worked blue collar labor type jobs in my time and had a clear task to complete but you end up getting pushed around by management types and are at great risk of personal injury for very little compensation. In my last job at a warehouse I worked my way up from a temp labor grunt to getting pretty close to management but I couldn't handle it. The higher up I got the less there was to do other than bullshit consumption and production, by the end I wanted to just go back to working with the guys on the floor (but again you aren't making enough and risking injury every day). I hope to find a job that I can actually do things and gain clear skills over time, but if I can't figure that out I'll have to become another sellout bullshitter since I'm not getting any younger and my body isn't gonna be able to handle the hard labor in the long run.
hitekker 9y ago
Concluding that we need an "anti-bullshit movement" to get rid of bullshit is missing the forest for the trees. Bullshit is organizational self-deception. Comfortable statements intended to insulate leaders and followers from uncomfortable problems. In other words, bullshit isn't abnormal; it's natural. A reflex to maintain the status quo while the surrounding environment decays. And, the greater that decay, the more wool must be spun to pull over our eyes. It is said that, in North Korea, the only state organ that worked every single day during its great famine, was its propaganda department. In my view, calling upon employers to have the courage to be genuine, to think and talk in more authentic ways... will give birth to yet another management fad. A movement shouldn't center around some vaguery, nor should it rely on each individual's moral fiber. Instead, a better approach would be to determine what bullshit is the everyday kind versus the kind concealing systemic failures in our present and future society, e.g. "Bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income, or "Corporate Social Responsibility" -> Tax Avoidance . Finding and solving the latter would reduce the need for, and thereby existence of, the more unbearable bullshit. Attack the disease, not just its symptoms.
- sitkack 9y ago
  > Bullshit is organizational self-deception I have known companies that were entirely run on the stuff. C-levels and wannabe C-levels would spew it in every direction. It was simply a signaling mechanism that you were a company player. It was so patent that it could serve no other purpose. If one rotated it the correct way, it was not unlike a Monty Python sketch. At some point I had a list of banned words, because they had lost all meaning, turning only into rest stop on a Markov chain road-trip. It simply wasn't possible to think with them, the Sapir-Whorf-Frankfurt Hypothesis.
  - AlexCoventry 9y ago
    How did they convince their customers they we're worth paying?
    - sitkack 9y ago
      It was a mid-range casual gaming publisher. Most of the BS wasn't obviously customer facing.
laretluval 9y ago
How much of the hatred of business speak is driven by resentment of the fact that the business people usually make more money than the people they supervise?
- sidlls 9y ago
  A lot of it, and in the tech industry it's usually accompanied by resentment that their particular skills don't get them either the worship for intellectual prowess they so strongly believe they deserve or the money and prestige.
skybrian 9y ago
Many of us have strong reactions to some kinds of business jargon. But use a programming term metaphorically and we have no trouble with it, even though people who don't have the background won't get it. Perhaps this cringing at certain terms is not entirely rational?
vhold 9y ago
> Some Pacific Bell employees wrote to their congressmen about Kroning. Newspapers ran damning stories with headlines such as “Phone company dabbles in mysticism” https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/03/24/Phone-company-dabbles-in-mysticism/4737543560400/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/03/24/Phone-company-dabble... > "The Californian utility regulator launched a public inquiry, and eventually closed the training course, but not before $40m dollars had been spent." http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-30/business/fi-11672_1_pacific-bell http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-30/business/fi-11672_1_p...
c3534l 9y ago
First off, great article. I'm finishing up my accounting degree, a field which I honestly have no interest in pursuing. But, screw it, I didn't know I wanted to be a programmer when I started it and I have less than a year left. I take issue with the idea that business BS started in the 80s. If you read material from the 20s and 30s, it was likewise filled with meaningless jargon and memes. Motivational posters are very old and they're filled with vapid and empty sayings, with the belief that by some magic hanging a sign that says "work harder" will make employees work harder (whatever that means) and make you more money that way. What I've learned is that when you teach a soft skill, you get people teaching garbage. In an accounting class or a supply chain and logistics class, there can be some real meat to be learned, even when there's not science per se. But for most things, the books are full of arbitrary enumerations of "types of managers" and acronym to make it sound like we're being taught something. But, sadly, the attitude people have in business is that they want to be in charge of people and so they don't have to worry about the details. The details are for the expendable people you make money off of. The way you get rich in America is by being so awesome, because that's what the rich people told us is how they made their fortune. And the problem is that they're kinda right. At the top of the food chain, everything breaks down into politics. There's little to no way of evaluating quality, and so this self-serving culture of bullshit develops. Everyone thinks they're a great judge of character and that they have these ineffable skills that cannot be measured that justify why they've gotten to where they are. But it's all just marketing. They're doing their job, sure. But there's bullshit in business for the same reason there's bullshit in marketing and politics. You're selling something and the product is interchangeable with a thousand other ones.
- GuiA 9y ago
  I agree with your assessment, and came to realize these things when I did my first internship in a company, as my university requires this to graduate (that was almost 10 years ago now). At the time, I felt quite depressed by it. The person who was my boss's boss would regularly say completely technically incompetent things, and yet here she was running a dev team and making tons of money too. As I've moved forward in my career, I've slowly come to feel better about things. It might take a few painful failures, but over time you become good at spotting the people who are all talk and no skills/knowledge, and you know to avoid them. Conversely, you learn how to spot the people who know what they're talking about, and know to accept their job offer instead of the employer who gave you a higher offer but gave you a bad impression during the interviews. And because you are (hopefully) getting better at what you're doing, you have more options, and more leeway to say no. It's almost empowering to tell yourself that if these idiots can make bank, then all you have to do is learn their ways and bend them to your advantage. Good luck!
cobbzilla 9y ago
For one seeking to truly understand the origin of the "Dilbert" cartoons, this article nails it. down voters: the article includes a short anecdote on how Dilbert began, and it's humorous/entertaining/informative. please read/enjoy before flaming me.
crazygringo 9y ago
There's a Peter Drucker quote, I believe, that I can't manage to find, but goes something along these lines (totally paraphrasing): Businessmen tend to use fancy jargon for mundane things, which gives more exciting and important trappings to what is, in reality, a tremendously dull job. We should let them have it -- somewhat obfuscated language is a small price to pay to let them feel a little bit better about the boring tasks they accomplish day in and day out.
- tambienben 9y ago
  What about those whose jobs are boring & mundane under management positions? I understand the quote isn't yours, but what makes management so special?
Finnucane 9y ago
Orwell, of course, covered the political dimension of this in “Politics and the English Language.”
wcr3 9y ago
relatable, but not written coherently; by no means a failure for a personal piece - so why dilute that with a "call to action" at the end? it's painful irony at best.
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
Makes me wonder how the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor would have reacted. Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Eugene Kleiner... How much bullshit would they have tolerated in 1960? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor#/media/File:The_Traitorous_Eight.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor#/media...
vorg 9y ago
> During the course of an hour, I recorded 64 different nuggets of corporate claptrap. They included familiar favourites such as “doing a deep dive”, “reaching out”, and “thought leadership” With 64 nuggets, you could've created some 8 x 8 grids and put one nugget in each square. Photocopy them, pass them around the office, and next time there's a meeting called by management, play "Bullshit Bingo". First person to hear a line of 8 nuggets spoken, either vertically, horizontally or diagonally on their grid, wins the pool.
- paxy 9y ago
  But..if you photocopy them everyone in the meeting will have the same grid.
  - vorg 9y ago
    > First person to hear a line of 8 nuggets spoken It's so difficult to stay awake in these meetings that just taking in what you hear is an achievement. I've a theory Bullshit Bingo was actually invented by the managers themselves as a way to keep the attendees awake during such gatherings.
qubex 9y ago
I am essentially the highest ranking officer of my family's business (Business Unit Manager, overseeing 333 employees) here in Italy and I have to say that local (Italian) native corporate culture seems to have remained largely unaffected by the creep of such meaningless language into everyday intracompany discourse. It is on the rise in infracompany communication, however. I have an acute disdain for empty verbiage and what I like to think of as a very critical mode of thinking, so I spend my time nipping these things in the bud and doing what the organisational machinery beneath me cannot, by its very axioms, be relied upon to do: cut down on bureaucracy and eliminate pointless paperwork and/or circular processes whenever I come across them. Not to eliminate people, but to free them up to do what they actually are here to do (and presumably/hopefully enjoy doing). Lots of cogs in the transmission is not something that the company needs or can make use of.
lamby 9y ago
Prefer audio? This actually is available here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2017/dec/22/from-inboxing-to-thought-showers-how-business-bullshit-took-over-podcast https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2017/dec/22/from-inbo...

247 points by tomduncalf 9y ago

Another seasonal article variant from the FT (paywall) Embrace failure and shoot for the moon — tech cliché bingo https://www.ft.com/content/c6509e8e-e6f5-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec https://www.ft.com/content/c6509e8e-e6f5-11e7-8b99-0191e4537...

alexasmyths 9y ago

The irony is that while the words are stupid (“alignment”, “intentionality” and “end-state visions”) - this pretty good actually. Most white collar jobs are full of 'waking sleep' - and if we focus on outcomes, and drive them forward with intentional work - we would be more productive. "Bullshit jobs" - if you doing anything to move the ball forward - like working a checkout or pumping gas - your job may feel meaningless, but it's not BS by any means. Middle management tends to be the most BC. And many gov. jobs. "US employee now spends 45% of their working day doing their real job. The other 55% is spent doing things such as wading through endless emails or attending pointless meetings." This is part of the job. Communicating is work, and we can't be 100% efficient at all times.

VectorLock 9y ago

This how I feel about most "Agile methods" going around like SCRUM.

sli 9y ago
I often see complaints about Agile and SCRUM met with, "You're just not using it correctly." In some circles, it's almost like a religion that you're not allowed to criticize. After all, it's The Process(TM), I guess. But from where I'm sitting, "correct" SCRUM looks like a whole lot of weird not-overhead-but-totally-overhead that seems difficult to manage across multiple projects. For example, what a "point" represents is constantly in flux. Instead, I actually prefer subsets of the methodology. When the company I work for was young, we all worked from home, and so daily standups were extremely effective at keeping us on task and productive while maintaining good balance (once you're done, you're done -- no creep). The board has been effective as organizing tasks and their progress. What would not have helped, or been in any way productive, would have been spending time trying to figure out how many "points" my tasks for the day are worth. I still don't see how that system is actually different from just using hours beyond philosophical arguments. Basically, I prefer a more focused and leaner version of the approaches.
- virgilp 9y ago
  The basic idea behind points is not bad, the problem with it is humans and the fact that they are numeric/ called "points". Might as well call them "gold coins", since soon enough people all around will start to believe there's genuine value in having/collecting many "points". I like to believe that it'd be much more productive if the tasks were T-shirt size. Since that would prevent people from computing "productivity" or "velocity" or whatever - while still allowing you to do rough estimates, if you recorded this for long-enough. (actually, I think you need some sort of tshirt size for several dimensions - like, "dependencies/ how many people you need to communicate with for this feature"; or "uncertainty - how much is this 'just work'(implementing a known solution) versus 'exploration'/ trying to identify the solution first ")
- User23 9y ago
  "You're just not using it correctly" is absolutely correct, by definition, in all cases where "Agile" is imposed as some kind of top-down corporate policy.
  - amorphid 9y ago
    A mentor once taught me that all actions taken by a company's people should be focused on making money, saving money, and saving time. This is mostly a sniff test for "does this thing we're doing make sense in some obvious way." When sniffing the value of any given team's Agile process, I usually find a notable lack of attempting to make money, save money, or save time. Often I found people are very good at spending money, wasting time, and being completely detached from how they actions contribute to making money in a meaningful way.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      This sounds common-sensical, but of course in practice it's almost impossibly hard to tell if any reasonable course of action really will make money, save money, or save time. Will refactoring help? How about a continuous integration system? A better bug tracker? In fact will fixing bugs make/save money/time at all? Customers seem to put up with them, and it's always easier/cheaper not to bother. Will customers leave if our product is shit? Often they won't. Sometimes they will, because a competitor's product eats our lunch. So what's the best course of action? One problem with Agile - and all management fads - is exactly this lack of prescience. Future outcomes are unknowable. They can sometimes be estimated, but given a huge field of possible actions, making optimal choices is incredibly hard, and there's always a trade-off between long-term and short-term rewards. The bigger problem is that corporations and businesses are very rarely primarily dedicated to making money. Internally, the true function of business processes is to highlight and maintain a political hierarchy which supports resource concentration for senior management and shareholders. Senior management and shareholders may know what's best for themselves, and that may well not be what's best for the long-term survival of the company - not even in terms of an apparently simple metric like "Does this make money?" Because you can't answer that question without also asking "For whom?" And it's not that unusual for senior management to choose actions that protect their status over actions that increase income.
empath75 9y ago
Try doing it in government.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Which is to say iterated waterfall with stand-up meetings tacked on.
- sailfast 9y ago
  You're not doing it right :) I kid because I love, but I will say it depends on where you're attempting to do it, how much control you have over the process, whether you are a contractor or government employee, and how much your can convince your leadership of the good parts (these typically require actual risk-taking / change)
- jacques_chester 9y ago
  It can be done. Not for everything. But for a lot of things. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal. Through Pivotal Labs we have various consulting engagements with the US government, including the DoD.
dandersh 9y ago
While this is a valid point, I've found the biggest issue with "Agile" to be that business thinks that this is the primary (or only) input that needs to be heard from the tech side. They think that because they're tossing us the "Agile" carrot they have carte blanche elsewhere and it is a "get out of jail free" card for their absolutely terrible decisions...like demanding the use of a CMS like AEM when building a dynamic RIA because they may feel the need to change the text of a button down the road. By being "Agile" the team can make up for the ignorant and time wasting technical decisions foisted upon by business.
ozmbie 9y ago
Read up on “cargo cults” and “cargo cult agile” and it makes a lot more sense. There are some genuinely good ideas in SCRUM and other development methodologies. But trying to codify those ideas into a set of rules for newcomers always leads to some degree of misinterpretation. I don’t know what the solution is, other than to ensure each team has constant input and support from somebody with authority and deep understanding of software development practices...and how often do you find people like that!
- arwhatever 9y ago
  Keep the code in a buildable state. Demo early and frequently to get feedback. Skip the rest.
clairity 9y ago
it's not the terms "agile" and "SCRUM" that are bs, it's the application of them. agile just doesn't work in most top-down organizations, where bs tends to be highest, because at it's core, agile is about providing a thin layer of self-accountability to self-organizing teams that are fairly autonomous. most (bad) managers want to believe they know better than the underlings and won't give up that much control.
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
I feel the same way about "Representative Democracy". Sounds like a great idea, and if it worked as advertised, it'd be great way to run a country. Unfortunately, its far easier to say "We have a representative democracy" than to actually implement one, and its in the interest of everybody "in the system" to just take bribes and do whatever the fuck they like. Scrum (its not an acronym) is the same. If you can get a bunch of people together who know what the fuck they are doing and want to write software that works for the customer, then its a great process. But 90% of "Scrum" I've seen is wankword bingo.

arwhatever 9y ago

It really exploded when George Carlin passed.

tossaway1 9y ago
I thought he faded away... (?)

leepowers 9y ago

> After the meeting, I found myself wondering why otherwise smart people so easily slipped into this kind of business bullshit. How had this obfuscatory way of speaking become so successful? Because there's no solid link between inputs and outputs. For most management techniques it's almost impossible to measure the output of a given management function. It's unfalsifiable. Like any other domain of human endeavor when operating in an unfalsifiable space you can neither confirm nor debunk a particular technique. The only thing you can do is _assert_ and flit from one fad to the next. The paradox here is that while management seems to be required for corporate structures to function properly so much of it is fluff or outright BS. I have to wonder if a properly trained ML algorithm could replace 90% of management decisions by cutting out the cruft and ambiguity.

jpk 9y ago
> there's no solid link between inputs and outputs > a properly trained ML algorithm #ThinkingFaceEmoji
- wwweston 9y ago
  OK, maybe an improperly trained ML algorithm?
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    NOOP? It would be really efficient, too...
bomb199 9y ago
If you want to get promoted, your managers need to approve of you. At the top, sometimes it's the CEO/Owner/Chairman needs to approve of you. Easiest way is to speak their language. Unfortunately their language is often gibberish. So now all these people in middle management have learned to speak gibberish so they can make more money and get closer to the real money at the top.

Crontab 9y ago

They were making us do some Six Sigma training at work a few months ago, and the entire time, it felt like nothing more than business porn.

11thEarlOfMar 9y ago

I particularly enjoy 'calling bullshit' on my fellow mush-speak managers. Now, back to first principles.

touristtam 9y ago

https://twitter.com/thekitze/status/945677952091639809 https://twitter.com/thekitze/status/945677952091639809

borplk 9y ago

I'm trivialising it a bit but at its core the bullshit speak and the like gives hollow people a shield to hide behind.

cornholio 9y ago

This reads like an Adam Curtis piece: starts with an obscure historical reference, and builds it up to dramatic ripple efect on the world, usually by way of a cultural shift.

vermooten 9y ago
cones

personlurking 9y ago

As someone not in the corporate world, I'd love to see more examples of bullshit speak. What are some "favorites" from the HN crowd?

serpix 9y ago
all the words from scrum: Standups, sprint, dailies, retrospectives, epics, tasks..
throwaway287391 9y ago
"Learnings" makes me cringe. Why is it a thing? "Lessons" is a perfectly good word. (Edit: see HN examples at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=learnings&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=learnings&sort=byPopularity&pr...)
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
Many are mentioned in the article. One I particularly loathe is 'reaching out'. In my generation, 'reaching out' is what someone with a serious drug or alcohol dependency did when they hit rock bottom and it was either get help or die. I cringe, I cringe.... A few years ago, it was 'at the end of the day', which my boss said 42 times in one 60 minute meeting. Yes, 42. I counted.
- phnofive 9y ago
  This one I struggled with. What's the alternative to 'reaching out' in the context of sending a message to a third party?
  - 11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
    Call, e-mail, text or otherwise contact them. 'Can you call Bob's surf shop and see if they carry Mr. Zog's Sex Wax?'
    - albertgoeswoof 9y ago

artellectual 9y ago

I see a pattern, based on this article and in my daily life. A lot of these processes and ridiculous terminologies are usually created by managers who have no real hard skill. Instead of doing any real work this is what they come up with in order to validate themselves. What does the delegator do when the work has all been delegated? Nothing absolutely nothing and that’s where all these ideas, terminologies mentioned in this article come from. IMO the best managers are the people who have hard skills and leadership skills as a combination. They are able to solve their own problems and help other people solve their problems, and are able to ensure everyone on their team comes out with a net positive on happiness.

knolan 9y ago
Thank you, you articulated my exact feelings. The stereotypical manager is often classified as the failed engineer. I’ve certainly seen it happen where managers are the smooth talking bullshitters who can’t cross the street without help while the more introverted types continue to do all the heavy lifting.
pimmen 9y ago
I don’t necessarily believe that managers need hard skills relevant to the business (and I say this as an engineer). However, they need to be crystal clear on what they manage (wether it’s just a team, department or entire company) is supposed to deliver and how it will be evaluated. If they don’t know this they can’t prioritize and they can’t ask the relevant questions to the experts to help them with that. This brings me to the second thing Managers really need; they need to be able to listen. The manager is there to manage, he or she is not there to build stuff and thus he or she has to acknowledge that they don’t know as mych about the problems facing the project as the experts. A manager needs the experts’ opinions to guide them towards the best decision. Plenty of managers can talk (that’s one of the readons they were noticed by their superiors) but few can listen and are thus oblivious to what should be prioritized above what (I work mainly on the backend, I had to basically force the issue of load testing before launch into meeting after meeting but my manager was very interested in the colors of the GUI) and which problems will take a lot of work and which could be fixed in 15 minutes. If you want a manager with hard skills as good as yours, wouldn’t you rather have them as a member of the team instead?

sailfast 9y ago

I found this article to be of little utility. Some random history about corporate management, crapping on an entire layer of the organization, because they are called "management" (there are good managers and they serve a purpose) and in the end not suggesting a single thing to help improve the clarity of one's own language. All to sell the author's book. Wish I had passed.

projektir 9y ago
Agreed, nothing really of substance here, which is impressive, given that there's plenty to say on the topic... and it's a much wider topic than management.

dawhizkid 9y ago

Management consulting has got to be the pinnacle of corporate bullshit...some favorites of mine are "synergies, deliverables, alignment, collaboration, circle back" Also this is fun: http://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html http://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html

ucaetano 9y ago
It only seems that way for those who don't understand it: - Synergy: savings due to economies of scale when joining organizations or due to vertical or horizontal integration - Deliverables: whatever product you agreed to deliver at the end of a project - Alignment: getting a bunch of higher ups to agree on something - Collaboration: duh - Circle back: when you're trying to get a lot of the higher ups to agree (sadly, through individual meetings), and one of them has big concerns, you have to relay that to the other higher-ups Programmer phrasing all sounds like bs to someone who doesn't know it. "Let's do our daily scrum standup and get the scrum master and the product owner to agree on the architecture for the data storage module".
- virgilp 9y ago
  He's right though. The typical meaning of "bullshit" is "usage of jargon to exclude from the discussion those who aren't skilled in said jargon, and to make things look more complicated than they are to the outside observer". Many (not all) of those speaking the jargon when it's inappropriate do so knowingly, but there is indeed a significant percent of people who are so used to the jargon that they don't realize when it's inappropriate.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sbov 9y ago
  "Scrum master", "daily scrum standup", and "product owner" aren't programmer phrasings, those are mangement phrasings in the field of software. There's plenty of other actual programmer phrases you could have put here, but it's somewhat telling to me that your sentence of programmer phrases actually has more management phrases.

strangeloops85 9y ago

Ahem, 'moonshots' anyone?

user68858788 9y ago

Does anyone have advice on how to resist this bullshit? Recently, I've been moved away from software into an operations role where my entire propose is to create bureaucracy and make numbers look good for managers' managers. I lack experience and data for my voice to be heard when I point out that we're obviously going backwards.

Chaebixi 9y ago
One thought that I have it to refuse to use any neologism that substitutes for an already-existing word or phrase. The problem I have is that business BS has been going on for longer than I've been alive, so I don't have a good sense for old BS neologisms.

jacquesm 9y ago

My personal favorites: 'downsizing', 'to better serve you' and 'you are important to us'. There's nothing new about this though, at bank I worked for in the mid 80's (Chase Manhattan) there were plenty of such business bullshit words. I wished I had thought of cataloging them.

whilestanding 9y ago

Great article, until the very end when it sounds like he wants to come up with with some anti-bullshit bullshit. However I really did enjoy the read especially learning about the history of bullshit and how we got here. I think the fundamental problem he mentioned has to be solved - "As factories producing goods in the west have been dismantled, and their work outsourced or replaced with automation, large parts of western economies have been left with little to do" This is the key issue. There just isn't enough actual productive work to get done in many jobs and people can't just leave when the work is done due to being payed by the hour or being seen as lazy by their coworkers and bosses. I'm not smart enough to give solutions to big general issues like this but I certainly see it as a problem in my own life. I have no idea what people actually do in most jobs these days and therefor when trying to decide on my next career move, I have trouble estimating how competent I would be when considering a job. Also it seems hard to develop any real skills in most jobs these days other than learning how to fit in and bullshit. However, those skills do not transfer to a new position with a different 'culture'. I've mostly worked blue collar labor type jobs in my time and had a clear task to complete but you end up getting pushed around by management types and are at great risk of personal injury for very little compensation. In my last job at a warehouse I worked my way up from a temp labor grunt to getting pretty close to management but I couldn't handle it. The higher up I got the less there was to do other than bullshit consumption and production, by the end I wanted to just go back to working with the guys on the floor (but again you aren't making enough and risking injury every day). I hope to find a job that I can actually do things and gain clear skills over time, but if I can't figure that out I'll have to become another sellout bullshitter since I'm not getting any younger and my body isn't gonna be able to handle the hard labor in the long run.

hitekker 9y ago

Concluding that we need an "anti-bullshit movement" to get rid of bullshit is missing the forest for the trees. Bullshit is organizational self-deception. Comfortable statements intended to insulate leaders and followers from uncomfortable problems. In other words, bullshit isn't abnormal; it's natural. A reflex to maintain the status quo while the surrounding environment decays. And, the greater that decay, the more wool must be spun to pull over our eyes. It is said that, in North Korea, the only state organ that worked every single day during its great famine, was its propaganda department. In my view, calling upon employers to have the courage to be genuine, to think and talk in more authentic ways... will give birth to yet another management fad. A movement shouldn't center around some vaguery, nor should it rely on each individual's moral fiber. Instead, a better approach would be to determine what bullshit is the everyday kind versus the kind concealing systemic failures in our present and future society, e.g. "Bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income, or "Corporate Social Responsibility" -> Tax Avoidance . Finding and solving the latter would reduce the need for, and thereby existence of, the more unbearable bullshit. Attack the disease, not just its symptoms.

sitkack 9y ago
> Bullshit is organizational self-deception I have known companies that were entirely run on the stuff. C-levels and wannabe C-levels would spew it in every direction. It was simply a signaling mechanism that you were a company player. It was so patent that it could serve no other purpose. If one rotated it the correct way, it was not unlike a Monty Python sketch. At some point I had a list of banned words, because they had lost all meaning, turning only into rest stop on a Markov chain road-trip. It simply wasn't possible to think with them, the Sapir-Whorf-Frankfurt Hypothesis.
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
  How did they convince their customers they we're worth paying?
  - sitkack 9y ago
    It was a mid-range casual gaming publisher. Most of the BS wasn't obviously customer facing.

laretluval 9y ago

How much of the hatred of business speak is driven by resentment of the fact that the business people usually make more money than the people they supervise?

sidlls 9y ago
A lot of it, and in the tech industry it's usually accompanied by resentment that their particular skills don't get them either the worship for intellectual prowess they so strongly believe they deserve or the money and prestige.

skybrian 9y ago

Many of us have strong reactions to some kinds of business jargon. But use a programming term metaphorically and we have no trouble with it, even though people who don't have the background won't get it. Perhaps this cringing at certain terms is not entirely rational?

vhold 9y ago

> Some Pacific Bell employees wrote to their congressmen about Kroning. Newspapers ran damning stories with headlines such as “Phone company dabbles in mysticism” https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/03/24/Phone-company-dabbles-in-mysticism/4737543560400/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/03/24/Phone-company-dabble... > "The Californian utility regulator launched a public inquiry, and eventually closed the training course, but not before $40m dollars had been spent." http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-30/business/fi-11672_1_pacific-bell http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-30/business/fi-11672_1_p...

c3534l 9y ago

First off, great article. I'm finishing up my accounting degree, a field which I honestly have no interest in pursuing. But, screw it, I didn't know I wanted to be a programmer when I started it and I have less than a year left. I take issue with the idea that business BS started in the 80s. If you read material from the 20s and 30s, it was likewise filled with meaningless jargon and memes. Motivational posters are very old and they're filled with vapid and empty sayings, with the belief that by some magic hanging a sign that says "work harder" will make employees work harder (whatever that means) and make you more money that way. What I've learned is that when you teach a soft skill, you get people teaching garbage. In an accounting class or a supply chain and logistics class, there can be some real meat to be learned, even when there's not science per se. But for most things, the books are full of arbitrary enumerations of "types of managers" and acronym to make it sound like we're being taught something. But, sadly, the attitude people have in business is that they want to be in charge of people and so they don't have to worry about the details. The details are for the expendable people you make money off of. The way you get rich in America is by being so awesome, because that's what the rich people told us is how they made their fortune. And the problem is that they're kinda right. At the top of the food chain, everything breaks down into politics. There's little to no way of evaluating quality, and so this self-serving culture of bullshit develops. Everyone thinks they're a great judge of character and that they have these ineffable skills that cannot be measured that justify why they've gotten to where they are. But it's all just marketing. They're doing their job, sure. But there's bullshit in business for the same reason there's bullshit in marketing and politics. You're selling something and the product is interchangeable with a thousand other ones.

GuiA 9y ago
I agree with your assessment, and came to realize these things when I did my first internship in a company, as my university requires this to graduate (that was almost 10 years ago now). At the time, I felt quite depressed by it. The person who was my boss's boss would regularly say completely technically incompetent things, and yet here she was running a dev team and making tons of money too. As I've moved forward in my career, I've slowly come to feel better about things. It might take a few painful failures, but over time you become good at spotting the people who are all talk and no skills/knowledge, and you know to avoid them. Conversely, you learn how to spot the people who know what they're talking about, and know to accept their job offer instead of the employer who gave you a higher offer but gave you a bad impression during the interviews. And because you are (hopefully) getting better at what you're doing, you have more options, and more leeway to say no. It's almost empowering to tell yourself that if these idiots can make bank, then all you have to do is learn their ways and bend them to your advantage. Good luck!

cobbzilla 9y ago

For one seeking to truly understand the origin of the "Dilbert" cartoons, this article nails it. down voters: the article includes a short anecdote on how Dilbert began, and it's humorous/entertaining/informative. please read/enjoy before flaming me.

crazygringo 9y ago

There's a Peter Drucker quote, I believe, that I can't manage to find, but goes something along these lines (totally paraphrasing): Businessmen tend to use fancy jargon for mundane things, which gives more exciting and important trappings to what is, in reality, a tremendously dull job. We should let them have it -- somewhat obfuscated language is a small price to pay to let them feel a little bit better about the boring tasks they accomplish day in and day out.

tambienben 9y ago
What about those whose jobs are boring & mundane under management positions? I understand the quote isn't yours, but what makes management so special?

Finnucane 9y ago

Orwell, of course, covered the political dimension of this in “Politics and the English Language.”

wcr3 9y ago

relatable, but not written coherently; by no means a failure for a personal piece - so why dilute that with a "call to action" at the end? it's painful irony at best.

11thEarlOfMar 9y ago

Makes me wonder how the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor would have reacted. Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Eugene Kleiner... How much bullshit would they have tolerated in 1960? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor#/media/File:The_Traitorous_Eight.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor#/media...

vorg 9y ago

> During the course of an hour, I recorded 64 different nuggets of corporate claptrap. They included familiar favourites such as “doing a deep dive”, “reaching out”, and “thought leadership” With 64 nuggets, you could've created some 8 x 8 grids and put one nugget in each square. Photocopy them, pass them around the office, and next time there's a meeting called by management, play "Bullshit Bingo". First person to hear a line of 8 nuggets spoken, either vertically, horizontally or diagonally on their grid, wins the pool.

paxy 9y ago
But..if you photocopy them everyone in the meeting will have the same grid.
- vorg 9y ago
  > First person to hear a line of 8 nuggets spoken It's so difficult to stay awake in these meetings that just taking in what you hear is an achievement. I've a theory Bullshit Bingo was actually invented by the managers themselves as a way to keep the attendees awake during such gatherings.

qubex 9y ago

I am essentially the highest ranking officer of my family's business (Business Unit Manager, overseeing 333 employees) here in Italy and I have to say that local (Italian) native corporate culture seems to have remained largely unaffected by the creep of such meaningless language into everyday intracompany discourse. It is on the rise in infracompany communication, however. I have an acute disdain for empty verbiage and what I like to think of as a very critical mode of thinking, so I spend my time nipping these things in the bud and doing what the organisational machinery beneath me cannot, by its very axioms, be relied upon to do: cut down on bureaucracy and eliminate pointless paperwork and/or circular processes whenever I come across them. Not to eliminate people, but to free them up to do what they actually are here to do (and presumably/hopefully enjoy doing). Lots of cogs in the transmission is not something that the company needs or can make use of.

lamby 9y ago

Prefer audio? This actually is available here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2017/dec/22/from-inboxing-to-thought-showers-how-business-bullshit-took-over-podcast https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2017/dec/22/from-inbo...