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It's surprising to me that people don't consider these coded language. Sure, the junior manager might use them vaguely to mimic, but IMHO, when vague language

• PunchyHamster 7mo ago
  Do note that senior manager thinking the work is redundant also might be completely not aligned with reality. so "I think your work is redundant" is much closer to usual reality. And it's easy to be seen that as you pretty much also need to be a PR person for your own department, not just a manager, especially if department is doing necessary but not glorious tasks
• Muromec 7mo ago
  Its an interesting take, bit why is this coded ingroup messaging is communicated to outgroup then?
  • estimator7292 7mo ago
    To solidfy the in-ness of the in-group. To underscore that management is better than ICs and ICs are considered other
  • jvanderbot 7mo ago
    One example elaborated: You _want_ most ICs to ignore a negative message that doesn't involve them, and you _want_ to give middle / lower managers the discretion to address an ICs "nonsynergistic" contributions on their own time. It's a signal not a prescription. This allows a public person to make a public statement and set direction without prescribing actions so lower management and ICs can do their thing. Upper management becomes increasingly vibes-based, from what I can tell.
    • contubernio 7mo ago
      It would be a hell of a lot more functional to simply say directly what you want and mean. This sort of management is dysfunctional even in it's premises.
      • Muromec 7mo ago
        Saying exactly what you mean is generating the paper trail and accountability, which is a liability.
        • dsr_ 7mo ago
          In a sane system, it would not be a liability. QED.
          • Muromec 7mo ago
            Define sane
            • red-iron-pine 7mo ago
              best possible outcome for most people or even best possible outcomes for the shareholders. cuz most of this coded BS is to make some executive's life easier, not to keep the board happy. if they had a concrete plan they'd say it, and coded signals are only for certain audiences, who in most cases may not be most people, most shareholders, or more employees.
  • btilly 7mo ago
    For a somewhat cynical explanation of why that happens, I recommend https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-.... As with all forms of cynicism, it has a grain of truth. And a much larger grain of truth than is comfortable.
    • bananaflag 7mo ago
      Also see Scott Alexander's review https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-principle https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
      • geodel 7mo ago
        Yup, saw that review. My takeaway is if one has knowledge and training level of Scott Alexander then this book has nothing new to offer. But since most folks don't so this maybe a interesting read.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • wiseowise 7mo ago
    So you can mog primitives with your sacred order practices.
• thewebguyd 7mo ago
  Yeah, I agree. Language has always been a tool for tribal gatekeeping and in-group signaling, but also as a tool for precision. What's specifically interesting about corpo-speak though is it's one of the only version of this (at least that I know of) where it's main purpose is to be euphemistic. In most other fields, the coded language is meant to be more descriptive to the in-group. In management, the coded language is designed to be less descriptive on purpose to avoid the human cost of the decision. It's dystopian because it follows the same patterns as military language, and serves the same purpose to sanitize unpleasant realities. "Neutralize the target" in military lingo, "Right-size" in corpo-speak. In both cases, the human at the end is stripped of their humanity into a target or resource to be managed (or killed).
  • rebolek 7mo ago
    It's not like they're very subtle about this with their "human resources" horror speak.
    • gzread 7mo ago
      That's why they call them People Team now! I still call them HR, but they call themselves and management calls them The People Team. Can we go back to Personnel or Staffing? Those are nice and neutral by today's standards...
• geon 7mo ago
  For anyone else as confused as I was; apparently "IC" means Individual Contributor, as opposed to leadership or management.
  • jvanderbot 7mo ago
    Let's play "spot the manager"
    • SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
      I don't mean to shame anyone for learning new information, but even if you have no interest in management, your career will benefit greatly from knowing the terms and concepts that managers in your industry commonly use. There's a lot of people out there who are aggressively against learning "corporate jargon" and then find themselves lost trying to understand why their company's leaders talk and act the way they do.
      • shermantanktop 7mo ago
        A lot of the “I won’t learn it” people are young. The ones who aren’t young end up appearing naive and ignorant. The day the layoffs take your job (but not your officemate’s) might be a good day to learn how to read the corporate signals.
      • NikolaNovak 7mo ago
        Couldn't agree more. Early in my career, I hated, and I do mean despised people who used the term "value". And then, one day when my colleague suggested migrating all our servers from windows to Linux but couldn't for the life of them articulate what that would do for the business / client, it started clicking. A lot of us talk about effort, activities, tasks, accomplishments. I did this, Bob did that, Fatime did the other thing. At some level of management, "value" is the well understood shorthand for "when we follow the chain of benefits, what does this actually do for the client / business?". Its their job (when done well) to ensure technical tasks contribute to business value. And we could be upset that they are inventing weird jargon for no clear reason, but then spend a minute explaining "garbage collection" etc as a term of art, and realize that pots are calling kettle black and all that - nobody has weird jargon like IT techies :->
• btilly 7mo ago
  More precisely than "plausible deniability", it is plausible EMOTIONAL deniability. When you put enough bafflegab around it, you can almost ignore that you said something unpleasant. Because the part of our brains that processes for emotional content, doesn't process complex language very well. Hence the example with ten paragraphs of complexity to hide the pain of a major lay-off. After I noticed this, I found that I did this. I reliably use complex language when I don't like what I'm saying. So much so that I could use readability checkers to find discomfort that I was not aware that I had! And I'm not the only one to notice this. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVtJNv4ZNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVtJNv4ZNM for George Carlin's famous skit on how the honesty of the phrase "shell shock" over time got softened over time to "post-traumatic stress disorder". A phrase that can be understood, but no longer felt. Corporations have just developed their own special complex language for this. And you're right. It is emotionally dishonest. That's why they do it.
• deaux 7mo ago
  > it's pretty culturally inevitable, I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language. Pretty shocking belief when you're of courseing all "ICs". If it was inevitable than the amount and degree of corporate BS would've been stable over the last 5 decades, and across countries and languages. In reality, it has been anything but, instead showing massive differences across both.
• elzbardico 7mo ago
  There's CYA jargon, like layoffs, workforce rationalizations, letting someone go, challenging fiscal environment. And there's blatant bullshit, like paradigm shift, culture building, and so on. Two categories of execspeak.
  • jvanderbot 7mo ago
    I think those are just degree of difference in "context required to understand", not different categories.
    • johnisgood 7mo ago
      You think so, with a term such as "culture building"?
      • gzread 7mo ago
        Culture exists and can be built. Building it intentionally is basically impossible, but also an obvious thing to try to do if you don't know that.
        • johnisgood 7mo ago
          To me culture building does not imply creating culture from scratch intentionally (as you cannot intentionally force it), but rather influencing or guiding that natural process thoughtfully to encourage "positive" values and behaviors to encourage "positive" values and behaviors within a group.
• cushychicken 7mo ago
  it's usually coding something more precise in a sort of plausible deniability. Yep. I'm a director now. This is exactly how it is. A big part of being effective in this role is understanding how direct you can be in a given scenario. A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time. Option 1 is how I'd say it to a peer whose org is duplicating effort. You can give your advice, but at the end of the day: not my circus, not my clowns. Option 2 is a more-direct way of how I'd say it to someone in my own org. I'd rephrase to: "Someone else is already doing this; focus your efforts on something more impactful."
• jjk166 7mo ago
  In the test these weren't coded language, they were randomly generated phrases. The finding is that the people who don't know how to decipher the code are easily impressed by it and have poor analytical skills.
  • jvanderbot 7mo ago
    from TFA: > “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.” I'm taking issue with "semantically empty" and saying they're actually semantically rich, but they are coded signals. Coded signals become increasingly indistinguishable from noise.
    • oblio 7mo ago
      > Eventually they figured out that language served a different purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. Overpriced bonds were not "expensive" overpriced bonds were "rich," which almost made them sound like something you should buy. The floors of subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors--or anything else that might lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind--but tranches. The bottom tranche--the risky ground floor--was not called the ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium. A CDO composed of nothing but the riskiest, mezzanine layer of subprime mortgages was not called a subprime-backed CDO but a "structured finance CDO." "There was so much confusion about the different terms," said Charlie. "In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there's a reason why it doesn't quite make sense to us. It's because it doesn't quite make sense." The Big Short by Michael Lewis, page 101.
      • astrange 7mo ago
        I thought a mezzanine was when you go see a movie at noon.
• lukeschlather 7mo ago
  You're confusing bullshit with jargon, which is something they talk about in the paper. The word synergize has a bad reputation, but its mere presence in a sentence is merely a signal, it doesn't mean the sentence is bullshit. "We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" is an example from the article - you can't actualize a level, you can't renew a level either. And "cradle-to-grave credentialing" is at best a bad way to describe some real concept. It's word-salad from start to finish. It's not coded language, it's bullshit.
• alexjplant 7mo ago
  Synergy has a real meaning: 1+1=3. A cigar and a whiskey. Chocolate and peanut butter. Hall and Oates. Et cetera. Unfortunately it's one of those terms like "DevOps" or "jam band" or "martini" whose true meaning has been sullied by people trying to sound cooler than they are. On the rare occasions I've used it sincerely in meetings I've always caveated it with some variation of "the real meaning, not the BS one." This never seems to work so I've just dropped it from my verbal lexicon altogether.
  • fhd2 7mo ago
    That's the right move. If a word changes its colloquial meaning, better drop it and find a new one. Happens all the time. From stuff like "agile" in a software development context (pretty meaningless at this point, can mean anything from the original definition to the systematic micro management it got to be commonly associated with), to previously neutral words that became offensive (because they were commonly used as such). No individual holds power over connotations. Language just evolves.
    • atroon 7mo ago
      > No individual holds power over connotations. Language just evolves. Okay, but I still reserve the right to be pissed off at teenagers using 'out of pocket' when they mean 'off the wall' or 'out of bounds'.
      • bcrosby95 7mo ago
        This usage is probably older than you're thinking: some 80s and 90s hip hop songs used "out of pocket" like that.
      • fhd2 7mo ago
        Absolutely. I'm pro emotions :) Just also good to realise what battles are lost. I do sometimes rebelliously use words in their original connotation along with an unnecessarily lengthy explanation. Never anything that's now an insult, of course, those I just stay away from and am not mad about either.
• hyperman1 7mo ago
  There is also the signalling when a new, truly meaningless fragment pops up. The bigwig says it first, then his direct reports, then their underlings, etc. So by using such a phrase, underlings signal both how close they are to bigwigs by knowing such a phrase first, and also demonstrate a vote for alignement, by quoting some phrases more and others less. Bigwigs raise status of underlings by repeating and expressing interest in their new phrases. These phrases come and go in waves. Underlings laughing with them basically signal they are not worthy of attention in the political melee.
  • zippyman55 7mo ago
    At my final Job, I jokingly used the word SPITBALL… in no time, everyone was saying…. I’m just spitballing here…. So funny.
• sp1nningaway 7mo ago
  I think this also explains some of our political climate. Everything the current administration says sounds like gibberish and equivocation to me, but to its intended audience it is a clear communication about wielding power and grift. Conversely, when someone talks about "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices, to me it's a clear statement about who gets to define meaning and whose history counts, but to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.
  • oblio 7mo ago
    > "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices Can you expand on this?
    • sp1nningaway 7mo ago
      Those are just examples of academic/progressive jargon that I hear often in the Bay Area and in progressive circles. "Decolonizing," could mean for instance changing world history curriculum to cover non-western civilizations. "Centering" seems like maybe it just means focusing on, but there is a whole academic apparatus for designing curriculum around say, indigenous practices, and centering is the word used for that entire concept, which includes specific techniques. I think to get the full meaning of both, you'd need to be fairly steeped in a world that uses those words all the time AND it is often used to identify people who "get it" from those who don't.
      • hunterpayne 7mo ago
        What you write is true but it is also a bit dishonest. You are culling the questionable ideas being signaled out of your explanation. Really no different from MAGA folks who claim Trump is playing 4D chess or people who defended Hans Reiser because he wrote a really great filesystem. People don't tend to believe things that they don't want to be true (even if they are). Specifically, the fact that people who use this jargon actively oppose meritocracy (and thus aren't actually liberals) but instead want a demographically based quota system for all jobs and positions. This is why they abuse statistics and reasoning so badly in their analysis. If these people weren't able to influence local governmental policies, then it would be fine to leave out the details. However, they are and so leaving out the bad parts of the policies they push is just dishonest and why the other side's propaganda is working so well right now. The biggest problem with that is that it makes politics more extreme (in both directions) and this is generally bad for the rest of us. So next time, don't leave out the actual practical effects of this type of politics and its messaging.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• wnevets 7mo ago
  > I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language. Is it like when an executive or politician "retires" to spend more time with their friends & family?
• nostrademons 7mo ago
  > A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time. > A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players In my experience neither one of those are automatically a sign of impending layoffs. Rather, it's an executive doing their job (getting the organization moving in one direction) in the laziest way possible: by telling their directs to work out what that direction is amongst themselves and come back with a concrete proposal for review that they all agree on. The exec can then rubber-stamp it without seriously diving into the details, knowing that everyone relevant has had a hand in crafting the plan. And if it turns out those details are wrong, there's a ready fall guy to take the blame and save the exec's job, because they weren't the one who came up with it. Interestingly, this is also the most efficient way for the organization to work. The executive is usually the least informed person in the organization; you most definitely do not want them coming up with a plan. Instead, you want the plan to come from the people who will be most affected, and who actually do know the details. If the managers in question cannot agree or come up with a bad plan, then it's usually time for layoffs. A lot of this comes down to the manager having an intuitive sense of what the exec really wants, though, as well as good relationships and trust with their peers to align on a plan. The managers who usually navigate this most poorly (and get their whole team laid off in the process) are those who came from being a stellar IC and are still too thick in the details to compromise, the Clueless on the Gervais hierarchy.
• Waterluvian 7mo ago
  Unnecessary abstractions are bad. These feel like those. Which leads you to wondering why they exist. And oftentimes it’s just like why bad developers preserve those unnecessary abstractions: job preservation.
  • hunterpayne 7mo ago
    They are in-group signifiers. And when someone uses them and doesn't understand the lingo, they are clearly an interloper. Its amazing to me that people do this for benefit but anywhere they do, you are certainly in a business or institution that is dying (perhaps slowly but still dying).