Having spent a long time in the consulting world and adjacent (national security particularly) spaces, I think the most pernicious thing about "jargon" is not that it serves as a social in-group bonding signal (which is part of the problem), but that it specifically conflates actions and outcomes in a way that bypasses critical thought. The use and misuse of natsec shibboleths like "lethality" is a good example; "we're going to maximize lethality," first implies that whatever we're doing (kicking out minority groups, spending more time on PT, committing war crimes) will "maximize lethality," implies that we have a working definition of whatever "lethality" is, and, critically, implies that "lethality" is necessary for the fulfillment of whatever our actual goals are. "Lethality" is an adjective, not a goal, but the second you start sprinkling your PPT with the military adjectives du jour (lethality, resilience, survivability, full-spectrum anything) then your audience is already nodding along. These are good things! Who doesn't want to be more lethal, more survivable, more full-spectrum? But a billion dollars later, you can see that none of this actually amounted to a strategy beyond "massive transfer of taxpayer dollars to the prime-of-the-day."
The corporate world is, of course, even more prone to this; it's where the military got it from, after all. Slice out every jargonized adjective or verb from a proposal deck and see how little is often left, and how little it really addresses the user concerns.
I absolutely love corporate jargon. Not in an earnest way, but maybe more in the way people love terrible movies.
For example, I’ll inject corpo-bullshit into regular conversations. When someone asks me to do something, instead of saying “no thanks”, I’ll say something like “this ideation aligns poorly with our 10,000 foot goals on a go-forward basis. Let’s revisit in a few cycles.”
ah that reminds me of when small startup SUSE was acquired by Big Corporation Novell. German engineers saying "no" and "yes" and "the F word! in meetings!" met very polite Corporate Americans who had twenty supportive soundings ways of saying no.
like
"this is an interesting idea" -> no
"we need to discuss this further" -> no
"can you help me better understand?" -> no
the only yes was "I do it, by such and such date"
so the jargon created a culture clash which only accelerated the decline.
It's utterly maddening to me how much annoying doublespeak permeates through corporate American culture.
Even when management does something that seems objectively awful, they always feel a need to try and spin it into something aggressively positive (e.g. treating layoffs as an "opportunity to reorganize"). You can't speak candidly about anything because anything remotely negative will come off as a "bad attitude" or "not a team player".
After a job interview I'm expected to send an email about how I "appreciate the opportunity regardless of the outcome". I suppose that's not completely untrue, but to some extent if I don't get the job it really is a waste of time for both parties. I've been told you're supposed to send a thank you letter even if you're declined, which feels like a punch in the gut. You've already rejected me and decided I'm not good enough to work at your magnificent company, but you still expect me to grovel and suck up to you.
I've told this story before, but at a previous job at a BigCo I made the statement "we all do this for the money" [1]. I end up getting told by my manager that that was inappropriate and indicative of an attitude problem. It was candid, but is it untrue? I don't think so; you might do it for other reasons in addition to the money, but if the job stopped paying you then you would stop showing up, and that's totally fine.
I am sure there are studies saying that being overly candid and honest leads to worse outcomes in corporations, and fine, maybe it's "necessary", but I don't have to like it. I wish I could live in the a utopia where people say what they actually mean. I wish I could live in a society were I'm not expected to pretend that this isn't fucking weird.
"Weird" is the right word for it. It's weird that corporations seem to like being lied to. It's weird that everyone just goes along with it. It's weird that not everyone seems to think it's weird.
[1] To be clear, I didn't bring this up out of nowhere; people were criticizing a potential job candidate trying to negotiate his salary higher, which I thought was a little unfair.
I've actually applied and talked to a recruiter once, but never even got to a real interview. Finance is really hard to break into if you don't have a million degrees from an Ivy League, and probably not easy even then.
I've heard about it being a bit scary to say anything though, so I don't know if it would be a good fit.
> I am sure there are studies saying that being overly candid and honest leads to worse outcomes in corporations, and fine, maybe it's "necessary", but I don't have to like it. I wish I could live in the a utopia where people say what they actually mean. I wish I could live in a society were I'm not expected to pretend that this isn't fucking weird.
I've met a few genuinely atypical people who do wish this, and maybe that's you.
What's much more common, in my experience, is people who support the concept of "uncomfortable truths you shouldn't be too candid about" and don't realize that corporate speak serves as a lowest common denominator in that regard. To you and I "we all do this for the money" is a banal observation; to someone going through a midlife crisis, or someone in the middle of a fight with their spouse about how they missed their kid's big soccer game, it's a pretty sensitive topic.
I really don't think it's the midlife crisis people we're protecting with this language. It's management. Corpspeak comes down to protecting their feelings from their uncomfortable truths. Management didn't tell off tombert for their remark because it might upset a worker struggling with work/life balance. They did it because it upsets management, who is invested in the idea that people come to work for higher reasons, because it makes them feel good and because they want it to be true because it means they can get away with paying less.
When companies describe putting a bunch of people out of work as "restructuring" or whatever, who is that for? It's not for the people who lose their jobs, they know what it means. It's not for the people who remain, and who just saw a bunch of coworkers get the boot, they know too. It's ultimately for the people who put out the statement, because it lets them distance themselves from the reality of what they're doing.
The people with the power are the ones who set the tone, and they're going to set a tone that makes them happy.
I don't disagree with anything you said, and I expressed a sentiment not too dissimilar about a week ago [1]. People like the idea of being direct but not actual directness.
When I was younger I was more accepting of regular corporate bullshit, but after a certain number of being lied to by startups you end up being kind of inoculated to it. Now I really wish they'd just be upfront instead of making me decode what they actually mean.
> Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil.Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil.
oh come on.
jargon is incredibly useful. here on HN we know that very well. clanker, agent, +1, LGTM, these are extremely convenient jargon we use daily. and here, he's complaining about 'space' not 'AI'. AI is itself jargon. There's nothing "artificial" about it (just non-organic), and nothing "intelligent" either.
'enshittification' is jargon.
> I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler."
it's just descriptive (usefully so), not self-congratulatory.
and what's wrong with "thought leader"? it's a pejorative, not acclaim. even more so when the user takes themselves seriously.
he does go on to get to the point about "bullshit", and i would agree completely with the title, that there is a correlation. why lament and complain about it? i absolutely adored adobe flash -- ad blocking was oh so easy in those days. i would actually narrow the problem from "bullshit" to "doublespeak". i think that is where the real problem lies. bullshit is just bullshit, it's fine.
> Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad,"
I haven't actually seen much of this. What I have seen (and done myself) is applying the term to a situation where the incentives are (mis)aligned to make it so things stochastically get ever-worse for an effectively-captive audience. The term resonates because it captures the process dynamics we all feel, not merely thing being in a poor state.
While this differs from the original definition which involved three parties (users, customers, investors), the bulk of that difference is that the original usage simply had two separate enshittification dynamics (users->customers and customers->investors).
I think it's like any language. People pick it up when they are young and naive, and then it's just how people talk in that setting. Most probably don't even really think about it when they communicate in that style, it just flows naturally .
Discussion from 2 weeks ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274676
Having spent a long time in the consulting world and adjacent (national security particularly) spaces, I think the most pernicious thing about "jargon" is not that it serves as a social in-group bonding signal (which is part of the problem), but that it specifically conflates actions and outcomes in a way that bypasses critical thought. The use and misuse of natsec shibboleths like "lethality" is a good example; "we're going to maximize lethality," first implies that whatever we're doing (kicking out minority groups, spending more time on PT, committing war crimes) will "maximize lethality," implies that we have a working definition of whatever "lethality" is, and, critically, implies that "lethality" is necessary for the fulfillment of whatever our actual goals are. "Lethality" is an adjective, not a goal, but the second you start sprinkling your PPT with the military adjectives du jour (lethality, resilience, survivability, full-spectrum anything) then your audience is already nodding along. These are good things! Who doesn't want to be more lethal, more survivable, more full-spectrum? But a billion dollars later, you can see that none of this actually amounted to a strategy beyond "massive transfer of taxpayer dollars to the prime-of-the-day."
The corporate world is, of course, even more prone to this; it's where the military got it from, after all. Slice out every jargonized adjective or verb from a proposal deck and see how little is often left, and how little it really addresses the user concerns.
I use it for spotting dummies.
"Lethality" is a noun.
> kicking out minority groups
Huh? “Lethality” is used as a euphemism for this?
Justification, hypothetically, not euphemism
I absolutely love corporate jargon. Not in an earnest way, but maybe more in the way people love terrible movies.
For example, I’ll inject corpo-bullshit into regular conversations. When someone asks me to do something, instead of saying “no thanks”, I’ll say something like “this ideation aligns poorly with our 10,000 foot goals on a go-forward basis. Let’s revisit in a few cycles.”
ah that reminds me of when small startup SUSE was acquired by Big Corporation Novell. German engineers saying "no" and "yes" and "the F word! in meetings!" met very polite Corporate Americans who had twenty supportive soundings ways of saying no.
like
"this is an interesting idea" -> no
"we need to discuss this further" -> no
"can you help me better understand?" -> no
the only yes was "I do it, by such and such date"
so the jargon created a culture clash which only accelerated the decline.
And thanks to the recent Kagi Translate HN post, we have a tool to generate these more easily:
https://translate.kagi.com/?to=corporate-jargon&from=en&text...
Excellent, I'm going to cascade that outcome to my team.
Yeah, it's just fun to find creative ways to say common things!
Thanks for the much needed laugh in these times.
It's utterly maddening to me how much annoying doublespeak permeates through corporate American culture.
Even when management does something that seems objectively awful, they always feel a need to try and spin it into something aggressively positive (e.g. treating layoffs as an "opportunity to reorganize"). You can't speak candidly about anything because anything remotely negative will come off as a "bad attitude" or "not a team player".
After a job interview I'm expected to send an email about how I "appreciate the opportunity regardless of the outcome". I suppose that's not completely untrue, but to some extent if I don't get the job it really is a waste of time for both parties. I've been told you're supposed to send a thank you letter even if you're declined, which feels like a punch in the gut. You've already rejected me and decided I'm not good enough to work at your magnificent company, but you still expect me to grovel and suck up to you.
I've told this story before, but at a previous job at a BigCo I made the statement "we all do this for the money" [1]. I end up getting told by my manager that that was inappropriate and indicative of an attitude problem. It was candid, but is it untrue? I don't think so; you might do it for other reasons in addition to the money, but if the job stopped paying you then you would stop showing up, and that's totally fine.
I am sure there are studies saying that being overly candid and honest leads to worse outcomes in corporations, and fine, maybe it's "necessary", but I don't have to like it. I wish I could live in the a utopia where people say what they actually mean. I wish I could live in a society were I'm not expected to pretend that this isn't fucking weird.
"Weird" is the right word for it. It's weird that corporations seem to like being lied to. It's weird that everyone just goes along with it. It's weird that not everyone seems to think it's weird.
[1] To be clear, I didn't bring this up out of nowhere; people were criticizing a potential job candidate trying to negotiate his salary higher, which I thought was a little unfair.
Look into a job at Bridgewater https://www.businessinsider.com/what-its-like-to-work-at-ray...
I've actually applied and talked to a recruiter once, but never even got to a real interview. Finance is really hard to break into if you don't have a million degrees from an Ivy League, and probably not easy even then.
I've heard about it being a bit scary to say anything though, so I don't know if it would be a good fit.
The pay seems a bit low based on that article for that level of “performance expectation”
> I am sure there are studies saying that being overly candid and honest leads to worse outcomes in corporations, and fine, maybe it's "necessary", but I don't have to like it. I wish I could live in the a utopia where people say what they actually mean. I wish I could live in a society were I'm not expected to pretend that this isn't fucking weird.
I've met a few genuinely atypical people who do wish this, and maybe that's you.
What's much more common, in my experience, is people who support the concept of "uncomfortable truths you shouldn't be too candid about" and don't realize that corporate speak serves as a lowest common denominator in that regard. To you and I "we all do this for the money" is a banal observation; to someone going through a midlife crisis, or someone in the middle of a fight with their spouse about how they missed their kid's big soccer game, it's a pretty sensitive topic.
I really don't think it's the midlife crisis people we're protecting with this language. It's management. Corpspeak comes down to protecting their feelings from their uncomfortable truths. Management didn't tell off tombert for their remark because it might upset a worker struggling with work/life balance. They did it because it upsets management, who is invested in the idea that people come to work for higher reasons, because it makes them feel good and because they want it to be true because it means they can get away with paying less.
When companies describe putting a bunch of people out of work as "restructuring" or whatever, who is that for? It's not for the people who lose their jobs, they know what it means. It's not for the people who remain, and who just saw a bunch of coworkers get the boot, they know too. It's ultimately for the people who put out the statement, because it lets them distance themselves from the reality of what they're doing.
The people with the power are the ones who set the tone, and they're going to set a tone that makes them happy.
I don't disagree with anything you said, and I expressed a sentiment not too dissimilar about a week ago [1]. People like the idea of being direct but not actual directness.
When I was younger I was more accepting of regular corporate bullshit, but after a certain number of being lied to by startups you end up being kind of inoculated to it. Now I really wish they'd just be upfront instead of making me decode what they actually mean.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47373442
> Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil.Anytime someone refers to a sector as a "space" (as in "I'm really getting into the AI space") it's like they're making me chew tinfoil.
oh come on.
jargon is incredibly useful. here on HN we know that very well. clanker, agent, +1, LGTM, these are extremely convenient jargon we use daily. and here, he's complaining about 'space' not 'AI'. AI is itself jargon. There's nothing "artificial" about it (just non-organic), and nothing "intelligent" either.
'enshittification' is jargon.
> I steer clear of jargon used by firms to lionize themselves, like "hyperscaler."
it's just descriptive (usefully so), not self-congratulatory.
and what's wrong with "thought leader"? it's a pejorative, not acclaim. even more so when the user takes themselves seriously.
he does go on to get to the point about "bullshit", and i would agree completely with the title, that there is a correlation. why lament and complain about it? i absolutely adored adobe flash -- ad blocking was oh so easy in those days. i would actually narrow the problem from "bullshit" to "doublespeak". i think that is where the real problem lies. bullshit is just bullshit, it's fine.
> Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad,"
I haven't actually seen much of this. What I have seen (and done myself) is applying the term to a situation where the incentives are (mis)aligned to make it so things stochastically get ever-worse for an effectively-captive audience. The term resonates because it captures the process dynamics we all feel, not merely thing being in a poor state.
While this differs from the original definition which involved three parties (users, customers, investors), the bulk of that difference is that the original usage simply had two separate enshittification dynamics (users->customers and customers->investors).
[flagged]
I think it's like any language. People pick it up when they are young and naive, and then it's just how people talk in that setting. Most probably don't even really think about it when they communicate in that style, it just flows naturally .