On Corpspeak | Hacker News Reader

On Corpspeak

goodreason.substack.com

231 pointssigna11118 comments

I really hate this kind of language, but it is really useful in an American corporate context, as I have recently realized while doing an executive MBA program. A lot of Americans tie up a lot of their emotions in work success. A lot of other Americans don't care about their co-workers, and don't want to put in the effort to figure out how to actually respect people (calling cheap places to work "discount" is a good example of this). Sometimes, the same person is in both groups.

The way to usefully make both groups work with others is to use language that is devoid of meaning and, in particular, lacking value judgments. That way, you can say "Steve, can you explain the learnings from your recent project?" and mean either, "Steve, you fucked up, what are you not going to do again?" or "Steve, your project went great, what tips can you share?" That way, Steve can feel recognized for his achievements even when Steve did something that was really stupid. Steve's colleagues have an emotional barrier, too: they won't feel bad for Steve if you are calling out his failures, and they won't feel bad for themselves if you are saying that Steve did something exceptional.

It's really fucked up how we have created this sanitized dictionary, but it's too effective in a corporate context not to use it.

> A lot of Americans tie up a lot of their emotions in work success.

For anyone else still wondering "why" corpspeak still exists, this is it. America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.

I guess I'm just disappointed at the world I've inherited. Why are people so afraid of direct conversation? Why is hearing bad news "too much" for some people? I remember a quote from a comic strip saying "people would rather hear an outright lie than an uncomfortable truth". Which is true, but I wish American work culture didn't need to hide from the truth.

To me part of being a professional is being able to have direct, pragmatic conversations. You learn to keep your own emotions in check and focus on the discussion at hand. Look at the larger picture of the meeting / your work / whatever is being discussed.

What would it take to change work culture to be more pragmatic?

> America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.

I specifically make a point to not ask the dreaded "what do you do?" question. In my experience, that question is an absolute energy killer. Most people do not like what they do for a living, so asking them to talk about it brings the mood down. Plus there's the whole "sizing up" aspect of that question that's very off-putting to me, as if we need to know how much money people make before we decide how we feel about them.

I'd much rather talk to people about their hobbies, travels, creative pursuits, kids, etc. - the things that people are actually excited to talk about.

I enjoy discussing my work. If someone asked me about my hobbies, I'd stare blankly, wondering if they really want to hear that I go to the gym, or the hours I spend on obscure corners of Wikipedia, or doing math for fun. For small talk, stick with questions that folks are asked constantly, and that everyone has a ready and rehearsed answer for.

> If someone asked me about my hobbies, I’d stare blankly, wondering if they really want to hear that I go to the gym, or the hours I spend on obscure corners of Wikipedia, or doing math for fun.

I have never related to something so much.

> I'd much rather talk to people about their hobbies, travels, creative pursuits, kids, etc.

Yeah , this gets exciting only to people who can afford these things. It's possible that one only meet these types of people. In most context I have seen asking people what they do is not out of some deep interest in other's jobs/work but just the safe topic to broach with an adult.

> just the safe topic to broach with an adult

Why is it unsafe to ask people about hobbies, even if they "can't afford these things"? They can just say that "I can't afford hobbies" and then you can talk about that.

People also might not have a job/work, so asking about that could get uncomfortable too, if you are not willing to hear negative answers.

Safe in that there's a good chance that everyone has an answer for the question. It's the same thing like asking about the weather: it's easy to observe and most people will have some kind of, even minor, opinion about it. It's called "small talk" for a reason and is meant as a conversation starter and/or to avoid the awkward just-staring-at-each-other moments. Even a tiny human connection is still a connection.

Yep. I remember we had specific training at my company on not mentioning literally any of these things when interviewing candidates, in part for that reason.

> talk to people about their hobbies, travels, creative pursuits, kids, etc.

This backfires when you have more hobbies or travels than the other party.

Also interests don't usually align (e.g "I spent last month looking for that one elusive comet from my DX-7512 telescope. here.. see this photo. What about you ? Umm. well nothing much")

It's better to gradually start with some topic where opinions are likely to align.

For small talk I do realize how important (and how easy once you've run this with 4-5 people) it is to find a hobby I enjoy, and pick sharable stories around it and back it up with some artifacts (like photos on my phone).

I think it would help to come up with clusters of topics that are well aligned. Pick a topic from one cluster and see how it works, if not pick one from the next. If it worked, pick another one from the same cluster.

I find people of other profession talking about their professions genuinely interesting thing to listen about. It is topic they have deep knowledge about and I usually don't.

People with kids dont tend to have deep hobbies and exciting travels. Thinking about it, most people without them dont have hobbies they are super invested in either. There are some people with those and it is interesting when they talk about it, but most of them splits time between work and familly, putting a movie on top of it here and there.

I've started asking people "What do you do with your time?" It's an open enough question that people can answer with work, hobbies, or life, whichever they feel more comfortable enough to share with someone they just met. It also invites unprompted switching between the topics.

I was always taught growing up that asking that is rude! I still make a conscious effort not to do it straight off. It's a bit of a lazy conversation opener and with a bit more imagination (e.g. based on something interesting/strange that is happening in the moment) I often get better conversations. Or maybe people just think I'm weird

I’m usually interested to here what other people do as a selfish endeavor because people usually do or work for something at least moderately interesting. If someone doesn’t want to talk about it, there’s plenty of ways for them to steer the convo away from work.

I’m excited to talk about what I do too, so I enjoy when people ask me…

In my personal opinion, if we just stopped doing this, and people at work experienced their first "breakup" (in the form of being told "you screwed up" or having to say "I am sorry that I screwed up") we would all be able to be more honest with each other. Just like dating, some people would go through an emotional trauma, but everyone would learn to get over it. Similarly, each manager would learn how to say "this project went poorly" or "you screwed up" in an empathetic way.

However, that is just not the culture, and it takes a very long time to change a culture. To make matters worse, the presence of the linguistic emotional barriers makes their removal a lot more painful. The people fighting against this oppressive language would be labeled "mean" (or worse, "non-inclusive"), and unfortunately that is a much worse label than "bad programmer."

I think this culture is dangerous, and normalizes both weasel-talk and lies. It has already infected media and politics. I just don't know how to stop it.

"You screwed up" is a tricky one. Yes, individuals do screw up. But that's actually not very interesting; a true individual screwup (with no one else contributing) has a very small blast radius.

The bigger the screwup, the more people had a hand in it, and the less truthful it is to point to one person and say "you did it."

Let's say I merge a syntactically incorrect piece of code that brings down the entire system on the next release. Nobody notices for a few hours and the company loses a bunch of money. Did I screw up? Yes I did, but that's the tiniest piece of it.

* How did my change get merged? Who reviewed it? Did nobody test it or notice that it had no test coverage that would exercise my stupid change? Do we have any standards or accountability for review quality?

* How did it get released? Do we not have any automated tooling to stand up a candidate release in staging and do smoke tests?

* How did the downtime last so long? Do we have any operational monitoring? Was someone on call? Who is accountable for system uptime overall?

A bad boss would just throw the person closest to the cause of the failure -- me -- under the bus. But who among us has never committed bad code? That's why we build systems for code review, for automated test, for release QA, for operational monitoring. And if all those systems fail or are inadequate, it's not really the fault of any single developer who was essentially walking a tightrope without a net.

You basically nailed the problems with a non-blameless approach to business. Blamelessness has some very clear benefits, but I have also seen the pendulum swing too far (eg refusing to blame someone for gross negligence). I do think you can have blamelessness without corpspeak, but it takes a lot more humility and self-control.

this is basically why i got fired recently. now, idk what to do from here. being so "fake" (idk a better one, using that word feels like angsty teenager) just isn't in me. corporate life isn't for me maybe, but those paychecks...

>For anyone else still wondering "why" corpspeak still exists, this is it. America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.

Are there other societies where corpspeak does not exist- what are they?

> America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.

That's pretty much the norm in Australia too and I would expect so even elsewhere. I'm not going to claim it's universal but I'd suggest at least widespread in the modern developed world (I was going to put in "Western", but even in Japan I'd say self-identification via career choice is largely the norm).

To what extent does corpspeak exist in other languages though?

  >> A lot of Americans tie up a lot of their emotions in work success.
  > America has a very work-centric culture.
  > Why are people so afraid of direct conversation?

I feel like the "emotions" side is just as important as the "work" side, here. To be able to (1) be emotionally invested and (2) have those emotions hurt from time to time can be just fine, as long as you can also (3) process those emotions in a healthy way. I feel like a lot of Americans (and humans in general, to be fair) have trouble with (3).

If I could magically fix it, I think I would be less interested in "make people more able to maintain emotional distance at work" and more in "make people more able to deal with emotions when they come up, in general".

Just my 2¢

> can you explain the learnings from your recent project?

I've seen a lot of organisations publish "learnings" as an artifact of the retrospective on a project that went pear-shaped, but IMHO they can only be classified as learnings once the org has internalised the error(s), developed strategies to mitigate against them, and demonstrated an ability to avoid them.

Until then, they're merely a set of recommendations (with a grammatically questionable name).

Hence the distinction between lessons identified and lessons learned

And hence a reason why "learnings" is so powerful: it doesn't make it clear that you have actually learned your lesson.

working with americans, i found that they tend to use this kind of passive aggressive language but then in their actions they can be very cruel and sadistic...if they have power over you.

i prefer someone who is direct and straightforward, just tell me to my face what you think as long as you're professional and i respect you, it wont be an issue.

you can be neutral without corp speak. "Steve, what did you learn from your recent project?"

>calling cheap places to work "discount" is a good example of this

What kind of places do you mean- Can you give an example?

From the article:

> To distinguish where employees receive high pay versus low pay, Company X organized the locations into three bins: discount, national, and premium. New York City, naturally, is a premium location. Detroit is a discount location. One of her friends works in Detroit, and something doesn’t sit right about her friend being a discount employee.

I used Corpspeak pretty much exclusively for the year I spent as an entry-level analyst at a consulting firm, because--as a consequence of all the points mentioned in this article--it was cognitively easier. If writing is like creating a painting from scratch, Corpspeak is like a coloring book. Instead of mixing your own paint, you pick from a finite number of predefined crayons. Instead of needing to decide on a subject and composition, you just need to pick what image you want to fill in.

Corpspeak abounds in places that value "being in motion" over "getting results", since when you use Corpspeak, you don't actually have to think about what the best course of action is--the best course of action is always "organizing a connect with the relevant subject matter experts to draft action items for a discovery yada-yada-yada". This requires zero thought--it just requires knowing a list of buzzwords and being able to string them together. This is really easy to do! When promotion season came around, I was asked to write a report of why I deserved one, and I wrote 1200 words in a half hour--that's 40 wpm, about the average typing speed of someone just copying text! And I was complimented on the thoroughness and perspicacity of what I wrote. I got the promotion--just in time for me to find a better opportunity and bounce.

Nevertheless, I do believe there's value in Corpspeak. The reality at most companies (even ones you care about) is that a lot of the communicating you do is more-or-less inconsequential, and doesn't actually need to have a lot of care and thought put into it--and being able to let your eyes glaze over and engage in the conversational equivalent of cruise control saves cognitive resources for stuff that actually matters.

> Maybe it bothers me that using ask as a noun is passive voice, like the request is disembodied. I'm not asking, the ask just appeared there!

I think the latter is the key to corpspeak as a whole and it has ramifications beyond just stripped emotion. It always erases causality from the communication. Everything is just "appearing" with no thought to how or why things are the way they are. Businesses are really, really bad about asking "Why?" at times and this kind of language reinforces that. There is no "Why?", things just materialize into existence and are and you (have to) deal with them.

The emotion part makes sense, because often the answer to a "Why?" is because someone has made a mistake or done something dumb and it provides cover. However, it also leads to rote, wasteful, inefficient behaviors. It doesn't necessitate that there is no reason "why" things are being done, but it does mean that a reason isn't required either.

"Why are we having this sync meeting?" "Well, to sync of course!"

Completely agree! It's not even clear who is asking. Causality is erased, as you say.

"I have an ask for you" - is it my ask? Am I conveying somebody else's ask? Who knows? It's atemporal, acausal, you can choose to investigate by querying but there's a good chance the response is going to be a shrug and a small, apologetic smile accompanied by "ah - you know, the usual" at which point you'll sigh and respond with "yep - ok, let me see if I have the bandwidth and circle back to you on that".

You could just substitute "ask" with "request", and it's less corp speak but has all the same connotations. It looks more like tribal signaling.

   In the beginning was the DEMO Project. And the Project was
   without form. And darkness was upon the staff members 
   thereof. So they spake unto their Division Head, saying, "It 
   is a crock of shit, and it stinks."

   And the Division Head spake unto his Department Head, 
   saying, "It is a crock of excrement and none may abide the 
   odor thereof." Now, the Department Head spake unto his 
   Directorate Head, saying, "It is a container of excrement, 
   and is very strong, such that none may abide before it." And
   it came to pass that the Directorate Head spake unto
   the Assistant Technical Director, saying, "It is a vessel of
   fertilizer and none may abide by its strength."

   And the assistant Technical Director spake thus unto the
   Technical Director, saying, "It containeth that which aids 
   growth and it is very strong." And, Lo, the Technical 
   Director spake then unto the Captain, saying, "The powerful 
   new Project will help promote the growth of the 
   laboratories."

   And the Captain looked down upon the Project, and He saw 
   that it was Good!

(Source[0])

[0] https://www.anvari.org/fortune/Best_Fortunes/820_in-the-begi...

> Why did people have bandwidth instead of time?

Because "bandwidth" isn't about having time to deal with an issue. It's about the mental capacity and effort necessary to process the issue. When you're working on complex multi-step issues, even if you have time between steps to handle another issue, you may not have the mental capacity to add that effort into what you're already doing without losing focus on the primary task. "Bandwidth" indicates the ability to recieve, process, and return information in a timely manner, not just the time itself.

Agreed. I am an English speaker and fluent in the corp speak dialect and at least to me a lot of these terms (maybe all of them?) have different connotations than what the author thought was a totally equivalent English word (e.g. "let's meet" and "let's sync" convey very different implications, to me). And why would that be surprising? I'm doing and behaving in different ways at work than I do outside of it so new words to accurately capture that are sensible. When I play survival-crafting video games with friends that requires elaborate coordination I find myself slipping into corp speak for some things and it's because we are then doing the sort of communication that corp speak can render most clearly.

At the same time I don't deny that fluently using the words is a way of signaling conformity or insiderness to the corp culture and that is distinct from the words' usefuleness. It's probably this part of them that rankles HN folks, but they are just wrong when they say the words are 100% signaling with no inherent value.

The part about how the language objectifies people or is anti-social strikes me as pure speculation by the way-- I don't find anything humans do to be particularly inhuman and definitely not corp-speak. It signals participation in what is an outgroup to some so they dislike it but shouldn't pat themself on the back for disliking it.

> e.g. "let's meet" and "let's sync" convey very different implications, to me

I think the author was just using that as a set-up for the rest of the article, and that the point was that the corp-speak version intentionally removes any implication by making it passive. The interpretation then becomes what you infer, not what was implied.

They described the origin of all these phrases, which as most corporate behavior is about shedding responsibility and shifting blame.

In practice though, these phrases are all used mindlessly, by people who don't talk much outside the office, and see no problem in never thinking about the words they use all day. And that's what most people seem to take issue with: people that are operating on autopilot, without allowing themselves any time to reflect.

(I'm German, and for us it's anglicisms. If some middle manager's entire business vocab is in English and they mix it into their German sentences without giving it any thought, you can be certain that their mind is at capacity.)

Surely German has its own examples of Unternehmenskommunikation?

Pretty much American. Although ten years behind. People are still in the honeymoon phase with Scrum and related terms.

One thing you learn as you get older is just how much the entire world runs on the concept of plausible deniability. It's kind of a core basis for human interaction, and it gets especially sophisticated in complex organizations with power structures.

It goes back a very long way. Just google the phrase "meddlesome priest" for a particularly illustrative and amusing example.

Corporate speak is just a combination of that with the more prosaic concept of jargon.

Jargon, the part that doesn't involve purposeful obfuscation at least, is often highly useful for saving time because it allows people who engage in repeated interactions to be highly specific. The phrase "annual review" could mean a bunch of things, but a Y1-AAR could be a specific set of questions with a specific range of predetermined outcomes for a specific type of employee.

When jargon is done well it's just really effective, people within an org can communicate highly efficiently with extremely clear meaning. When corporate weasel words are used well they can be highly effective at communicating intent while obscuring meaning for those in an out group and creating plausible deniability.

For the uninitiated the fact that the two concepts live so closely side by side can be bewildering of course.

100% this. Your boss has a myriad of ways of communicating what they want w/o directly asking.

This is a big reason I've never wanted to go into management. At my level I can just pretend I don't understand the implied ask (heh) if I feel like it. I have a hard skill. Worst case scenario I can get another job. Your levers of power don't work on me.

There's a lot of focus on the corpspeak vocabulary, which is definitely ridiculous... My current employer incessantly refers to the recent layoff as "ETP" for, I guess, Employee Termination Program, and the laid off workers as "people affected by ETP".

But the thing that drives me insane is the tone of voice and cadence affected by people who are full-time corpspeakers. I can't quite describe it the way it deserves, but there's this singsong sort of rising and falling, yet monotone, sound to it that is so, so artificial and inhuman sounding.

Almost every sentence sounds like a question, in that there's an upward inflection at the end, except for the last sentence of each slide/paragraph which ends on a downward note. It's like they are intentionally sounding like they are reading a text that they don't fully understand -- except it's their own words!

> Office Space, Fight Club, American Beauty, and I Heart Huckabees satirized the dreary emptiness of white collar life. Didn’t my coworkers realize how ridiculous it sounds to use this jargon?

Fight Club had an enormous influence on me during my teenage years. It would kill the younger version of myself to learn the kind of white collar environment I operate in every day.

On one hand, Corpspeak is one of the most consistent forces of office life that beats the dying young punk voice that still whispers to me from time to time. Why don't we all just quit the tip-toeing and cut to the heart of each interaction? This way we would all be acting in our most authentic form. This would be a hardcore way to build something great together.

On the other hand, as the author describes, Corpspeak allows me to gloss over any bad feelings that may be felt or insinuated by myself or my colleagues. Although it feels inauthentic and may increase existential dread if pondered too closely, this "glossing over of feelings" makes the job less tiring, and enables me to show up for 40 hours, week after week. It also leaves me with tons of energy leftover to live the other 128 on my own terms — as long as I don't think too deeply about it all.

I think you’re ignoring that those 40 hours of corporate speak don’t allow you to live the other 128 on your own terms:

- they’re how we ended up with technology panopticon, authoritarianism, etc

- they’re how we ended up with Wall St looting the nation, executives committing open crimes, etc

- they’re how we ended up with ever worsening products, nutrient depleted foods, etc

CorpSpeak is the emotional balm to never consider you’re creating hell on Earth for yourself, your peers, and your children — to emotionally disconnect yourself as the cause of your own suffering.

That emotionally numb 25% of your life is why the other 75% sucks and is on a downward trend.

>Why don't we all just quit the tip-toeing and cut to the heart of each interaction?

I get your point. I don't "like" Corpspeak, but working in the public sector in IT infrastructure, I like indirect language which doesn't presuppose "finger-pointing". I don't want to hear anyone snap or get emotional on a Zoom meeting on a DNS resolver upgrade event at 4am.

In most English discussion, the bias is in favor of "who did what", which has its place. When troubleshooting with people, the indirect Corpspeak makes it easier to talk about "what's happening" and "what is needed". I want to focus on the fact or "the what" that packets are being dropped, because I know all the engineers I'm talking to are also focused on "the what".

This is something that has been on my mind a lot lately - just wanted to share a couple articles I came across and love:

- https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/23/from-inboxing-t...

- https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/spread-of-corporate-speak.ht...

Along with a book I haven't read but have considered gifting to a bunch of people:

- https://smile.amazon.com/30-000-Pound-Gorilla-Room-Annoying/...

That Vulture article was getting recirculated on Twitter yesterday, and I'm appreciative because I missed it the first time. What a masterpiece -- so well written, funny, and just spot-on.

What really bothers me is how this kind of language creeps into other areas of life besides work. It's nauseating listening to the pompous, obfuscating speech favored by a lot of American professionals.

Another disturbing phenomenon I've noticed is the use of more generic language on principle. A case in point is the phrase "sex worker" which seems like it's often used deliberately to blur the (many and important) distinctions between prostitutes, masseuses, bikini baristas, and what have you. And for what? Solidarity? Surely there are better ways of achieving that.

Alarmingly, this sort of thing has been showing up a lot in the discourse surrounding monkeypox. Spokespeople and journalists keep using the term "LGBT community," when surely the relevant group is specifically that of men who have sex with other men? Whatever purpose their wording serves, it sure isn't a public-health one.

I've always loved Jonathan Coulton's song (which was actually feature in Left 4 Dead 2), Re: Your Brains which is essentially an email sent to someone who is hiding behind a door from his coworkers who were turned into brain-eating zombies and the author of the email is using passive corporate speak to convince him to let them in so they can eat him.

It only got funnier when I got my first white-collar job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tmzjaN2DWc

> I've got another meeting, Tom, maybe we could wrap it up

> I know we'll get to common ground somehow

> Meanwhile, I'll report back to my colleagues

> Who were chewing on the doors

> I guess we'll table this for now

> I'm glad to see you take constructive criticism well

> Thank you for your time, I know we're all busy as hell

> And we'll put this thing to bed

> When I bash your head open

There is a difference between taking the emotion out of language and obfuscating the meaning.

"standard, national, and premium" instead of "discount, etc, etc" doesn't get to the point - cost of living adjustment buckets, which could be "low", "medium", "high" and both be devoid of the emotion/judgement but also effective in communicating the rationale.

Corpspeak allows middle tier employees (structure not performance) to neglect precision, but real business people hate people who speak it as it beats around the bush. That's posture talk to them.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...

Most of this stuff is extremely useful and intuitive. It's just interested in getting things done and being polite, while addressing specific dynamics you find when working with other people.

Let's take this offline for instance is one of the best linguistic inventions ever IMO. It's so useful to refocus meetings and curtail BS.

I would call most of this just "workspeak" over "corpspeak" (which seems to evoke the "evils" of the corporation). Corpspeak I would reserve for more PR and HR specific domains, which are often actually annoying to listen to.

I agree that it’s useful, but I have nonetheless made a concerted effort for my team to use “let’s take this outside” instead of offline. :)

(Similarly migrating from “one on ones” to “1v1s)

That’s awful.

In my enterprise (fr)Agile job, copious amounts of Corpspeak abound. I truly feel like "the inmates are running the asylum".

For example: during one of our morning stand up, I remember bringing up a major production issue that I found with our website. Someone "important" uttered the phrase: "Let's take it offline". After the stand up, no one bothered to follow-up with me about it and I suppose, everyone in our team assumed some technical person would fix it anyway. So naturally I assumed that the "Let's take it offline" phrase meant "I don't want to talk about that now" or "Sounds scary! I hope that goes away" :-]

My question is: were some parts of Corpspeak invented to permit non-technical people to sound more sophisticated and/or intelligent than they actually are?

> After the stand up, no one bothered to follow-up with me about it

Feedback: it was your responsibility to bring it up later, since you owned the discussion in standup. The reason it was "moved offline" is because standup is not where you solve problems, it's meant to be a quick sync.

That’s my interpretation, too. “We don’t have the time to go into this right now”

But that infuriates me - surely investigating a production issue takes priority over stand-up, and I'd actually wonder why the originator didn't bring it up sooner, unless they happened to find it just before the meeting started. Even then I'd probably excuse myself and ensure everyone relevant was involved in at least triaging the issue. I actually don't mind if stand-ups do end up being a more involved discussion providing what's being discussed is relevant to all present, if not, often the best solution is to let those who needn't be involved leave, then continue the same meeting, rather than wait for some unspecified time when people are "offline" (a term that really is especially silly in these days of zoom-only meetings). But there's often this crazy adherence to rules that says particular meetings must follow a set pattern and not go off course or extend themselves beyond an inflexible limit. I've had stand-ups that last 5 minutes and ones that last 45, and it's invariably the latter ones where anything of significant value takes place - and I'd even argue they're the main reason for having such daily meetings.

How can you have an issue with the term "offline"? It makes perfect sense to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RAMRukKqQg

You're absolutely right. Sorry I failed to mention that before stand up, I had actually brought it up several times in chat messages the previous night and I also created a User Story/Bug to capture it.

I eventually realised that the team "delivery lead" manager was 101% focused on delivering stories for our customer (a manager embedded in the team) and deprioritised/postponed anything not in the sprint objectives.

Taking it offline is a power move

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RAMRukKqQg

Beat me to it! Their other one on corp speak is also amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvhC_RdIwQ

Sounds like you were supposed to take the website down and wait for the screaming to start.

Hahhahhhahahhahahhahha I don't need to: our dodgy infrastructure will make sure of that!

Talking about the indirect meanings of 'corpspeak' is only interesting to me in the way we approach the topic.

Corpspeak isn't novel in being duplicitous language. Compared to deliberately vague, concealing, and/or loaded language from life outside work, the corporate lingo is easy mode.

But corpspeak has the property that in can be publicly discussed. "lol look at this dumb bullshit we all do for exactly these reasons" can be stated openly and plainly in a innocuous blog post, and posted to hacker news for people to hem and haw at.

Rarely does anyone even bother scratching at the fiction of our real life linguistic tricks. Because a very bland explainer of surface level phenomenon leads to outright denial, or develops into flamewars.

> Rarely does anyone even bother scratching at the fiction of our real life linguistic tricks

My mind is sort of constantly doing this in the background, because even in mid life it never stops being jarring to me and knocking me out of the flow of language-interpreting.

My favorite example has always been "senseless act of violence that took the lives of 20 innocent people."

1. Come on. The guy had a reason that would be comprehensible to most people, even if nobody considers it a justification.

2. What does it mean to call a group of people innocent? What were they innocent of? Telling lies? Emotionally abusing others on occasion? That's doubtful. Innocent of anything that would merit being executed by a concerned citizen? Since when do we endorse vigilantism at all? Was there some doubt as to whether all 20 people in the west wing of the elementary school were all chomos maybe? WHY DO THE VICTIMS ALWAYS HAVE TO BE EXONERATED OF NOTHING IN PARTICULAR

>Innocent of anything that would merit being executed by a concerned citizen? Since when do we endorse vigilantism at all?

There's absolutely such a thing as self-defense. If a woman kills her potential rapist, she's killed a not-innocent person. We don't use the word "vigilantism" or "execution" for it, but it's a case of a person being killed by a concerned citizen where that person isn't innocent.

And even ignoring self-defense, "not innocent" doesn't mean "okay to kill them", it's more like "did something bad which increases the chance of getting killed". If a bank robber argues with another bank robber over the stolen money and gets shot, we don't call that the killing of an innocent person, even though it's not legal to shoot your partner in order to take his stolen money.

I'm talking about mass killings. It wouldn't sound jarring to me in the contexts you're talking about.

This is a great post. Another reason why Corpspeak naturally arises is systemic: corporations bring together people from many different contexts. It is really important for everyone to be on the same page (another Corpspeak-ism!) when communicating and coordinating on work. The most effective way to do that is to settle on neutral phrases devoid of subjective value judgements.

Interesting tie-in with the excellent Gervais Principle series https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...

If any of you ever catch me using the word 'space' to mean anything other than actual space, just shoot me in the head.

I like and see the value of corpspeak. Take “bandwidth”, for example. It’s superior to “time”, because it implies that something else has already filled up all the available time. Plus, by definition, bandwidth = [unit of work] / time. So if I don’t have bandwidth for something, I imply that something else needs to be removed from my workload to be able to do the thing.

Having an arsenal of phrases is not a bad thing per se; as with technology, it depends how one uses it.

I think the author forgot that

> Let’s take things offline

May mean “I don’t want any paper trails on this”.

Oh dear, I hear that loaded phrase exchanged all the time in meetings, and it is usually when someone doesn't want to listen to a topic or idea anymore :-[

Yeah, I just mentally translate it to "Just shut up already and let's move on to stuff that matters."

I'm sure this is part of the deal with considered corp-speak, as in the stuff that ends up in formal documents. But honestly a big chunk of it is just the sort of specialized jargon that always develops in a specialized industry. It's not like doctors or plumbers or anyone else don't end up with little idiomatic expressions like this after a while. It's just that we all somewhat resent office work for being bullshit so we resent the signifiers associated with it. It's "cool" to not be corporate, so corporate behaviors become cringey.

Also, a lot of the surrender to it I think just happens because people are tired and not always paying close attention so when they're put on the spot in meetings to respond it's much easier to just spit out some vague but related sounding jargon salad than to actually make an incisive point.

In case author is reading this thread:

> When I told her the story, my girlfriend argued that HR should have found a term that conveyed the meaning of “discount” without its negative feeling.

> I think this is impossible. Employees in some locations are paid less than employees in other locations, and that kinda sucks for the lesser-paid employees to remember. Any word that accurately conveys the situation will also convey it kinda sucks.

An example of term you can use is ”high ROI location”.

Conveys HR-magical-thinking that the company invests in its employees (ha), and that the output from Detroit is better return on investment than the output from New York.*

Further, since ROI is the actual thinking that has — for instance — all the banks moving from New York to Houston and Tampa, so unlike much of corporate speak, it doesn’t bring that 1984 black-is-white dissonance if you understand what’s really going on.

Finally, well paid individuals from Brooklyn and San Jose are moving to e.g. Buffalo or Minneapolis for the ROI. The term “high ROI location” is a location classification that makes them feel clever, not bad.

*. There’s a better algo than median pay or cost of living for where to put your headquarters: (talent pool x domain learning opptys) per median salary rate. If you are doing knowledge work there’s no point in moving your HQ to discount low-cost towns without a vibrant ecosystem of similar domain firms and independent meetups for the crafts needed by the firm. This tends to surface not just Austin, Charlotte, or San Diego, but even more so, Kyiv or Minsk.

**. If you want to use an employee-centric term instead of a company-centric term, use “affordable” and the word “location”: https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/2022-most-affordable-sma...

Corpspeak is the worse for strategy and product because there's a lot of meaning in the precise wording of something but inveitably every slide gets wordsmithed to death and ends up a vague buzzword bingo sheet.

Simple (if not particularly potent) example I'm dealing with right now: "right to win"... my employer wants to use this wording in various strategy templates across all businesses and product. So every discussion is why do we think we have the "right to win" this or that market. In reality some products are differentiated in a way that serves a smaller segment (hence technically not "winning" the market) and perhaps deliver a higher IRR than an alternative strategy that is better boxed in this "must have a 'right to win'" perspective

One of our stakeholders just told my project manager (who was needlessly bugging the stakeholder over email) that "We may need to rethink our communication strategy", which is corpspeak for, "If you send me one more goddamn email about this I will gut you like a fish".

Corpspeak is super useful!

It lets you know early in the hiring process that this employer is probably not one you want to work for (:.

I was pleasantly surprised by this article.

I clicked it expecting generic kvetching about those dorky suits and walked away with a newfound appreciation for the art of emotionally neutralizing communication.

Could you tell whether any particular batch of corpspeak was generated by a GPT3? Or do you even need a GPT3? Could you tie a vocabulary list to a random number generator and just a little bit of logic, and create convincing corpspeak?

As the Cluetrain Manifesto said, this stuff sounds literally inhuman. And we crave genuine human interaction, and corpspeak isn't it.

https://lurkertech.com/corpspeak/

> Let’s take things offline could mean: [...] “If I have to talk about this with you for one more minute I’m gonna go apeshit in front of all these people.”

Couldn't help but be reminded of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RAMRukKqQg

“But goddammit, I don’t use ask as a noun.” Hallelujah!

About 20-years-ago, Ken Smith published a series of books call “Junk English” (see [1]), which may be of interest.

[1] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8355222M/Junk_English

Honestly "ask" as a noun, despite the hate, was one of the most useful corpwords they mentioned.

If I say "what's the ask here?" I mean the concrete part. I mean the "request" just described (by a middle-man) was so fluffy in its language I couldn't figure out what actual action we need to take to make the asker happy. It's a common situation in a corporate world, and imo deserves its own word.

One of my pet peeves but apparently it's not a new thing.

https://www.dailywritingtips.com/is-ask-a-noun/

One thing I always found confusing in corpspeak is the use of the phrase "speak to [something]" instead of "speak about [something]". It seems confusing and doesn't appear to have any benefit other than possibly somehow making it seem more professional somehow.

I love that corpspeak exists. It makes it possible for me to make a living.

I am not a native english speaker. I am doing ok, but often I have to google pre-made sentences when I feel that I sound off, but can't figure out the problem by myself. I also lack the natural talent for talking with people online. I am a graphic designer, so my primary skills are in the visual art stuff, and all the speaking and project management is a secondary skill at best. But I couldn't work as a freelancer without it.

Without corpspeak culture I would constantly sound like either a robot or a dummy, and it would hurt my career by a lot. Thanks god everyone in the corporate world already sounds like that. I can just follow this simple set of tropes and pre-made sentences and it all works out well.

every hn post has a relevant krazam: https://youtu.be/1RAMRukKqQg

I actually think that Bandwidth is an excellent term, especially when you're talking about team resources. When I'm working on team planning it is exactly like allocating bandwidth for the different things I want to pass down the pipeline. It makes less sense in the context of a single person, but when I'm thinking about a team it's a good choice.

Also regarding context - I actually use it in the original sense too - being new to my team I don't have enough context to understand the constraints of a decision I'm asked to evaluate, and it's not only knowledge - it's historical context as well. So again, might be misused but in the right situation it's the right word.

Oh nice, now I have something to point to as an example. I've been independently calling this "manager-speak" for a while, since co-workers seem to only pick it up when they switch from development to management.

Can I just say, I feel like the world has missed an incredible opportunity to colloquially refer to this sort of business lingo as “Blingo”?

Think about it, you could be playing Blingo Bingo in all your meetings!

Yesterday, during a bi-weekly sync, someone said that they would take an action item to research something and follow up offline.[1] There were three of us on the video chat, and we ended ten minutes early. After nearly three years away, I know I romanticize the office, but it seems like everything is taken offline nowadays.

[1]: Sure, this meeting could just be an email thread or Slack channel, but it's one of my few recurring meetings where everyone turns on video.

Won't dissagree, but it seems like a partial explanation.

Another reason for corporate language is attempting to make the ordinary sound exciting. Executives would much rather talk about their "vision" or "north star" than how many units they want shipped in the fourth quarter.

A lot of the language churn in corporate culture seems to stem from this. Eventually terms seem old and boring, so they have to come up with new ones.

What separates corpspeak from any other style of communication shared by a group of people in certain contexts?

I thought corpspeak was just a type of codeswitching. How is it different than me using different phrases when gaming, or in formal situations. If everyone just spoke literally all the time it would be boring.

Exactly this. Imo it's just a way of introducing new terms that can carry more subtle and nuanced meaning as the "corpspeak" evolves over time. "Bandwidth" doesn't just mean "time", it means time and energy and mental capacity. It conveys that you have a fixed amount of time/energy that you set aside for work.

Also, I was unconvinced from the examples about how vague and neutral corpspeak is.

> I’ll escalate this could mean:

> “I guess my manager should know about this.”

> OR

> “I’m telling.”

How is this different from just saying "I'll let the manager know". All phrases can have different meanings and connotations based on context.

Perhaps it can be said that corpspeak is used to purposefully distance professional conversations from the loaded terminology that is used in casual conversation. The article talks about this at the end too. But over time, language will always take on nuance based on usage.

So if the color of corpspeak is a neutral gray, it's because that is how we use it, and want it to be used.

How tied are these examples to the tech industry? When I see the word 'corpspeak,' I think more about the language of company memoes, materials, and press releases rather than the words used by managers.

I'm infected, what a gross realization. I need to bleach my vocabulary.

When I first heard the term "thought leader" I thought it was purely in jest. It seems so ridiculous and full of hubris that I'm amazed people can use it in serious conversations.

> Substack is experiencing technical problems. We are working to restore service. Thank you for your patience.

You can find up-to-date information on technical outages at status.substack.com

Whoa never seen this before

Am I alone in not finding many of these examples particularly hard to understand? Maybe in the context in the workplace they are easier to understand than in isolation on paper. All professions have lingo, for example, the Army has its own unique jargon. It seems like there is a trend you see in writing where the author has to exaggerate or feign the severity of a problem for dramatic effect to get the content viral. It's like how Dilbert is an exaggeration of the workplace, because it would not be funny otherwise.

Saying "touching base" does sound stupid but whatever

I think it is a good article, technically it is "speaking diplomatically[1]" rather than "corpspeak" per se. And it is very important, and the author almost gets there.

Emotions don't belong in the workplace. They are there, but they too often don't help get things done. And yet, communicating is critical in order to both set expectations and to understand intent. Further, at least according to some references I've read, thinking diplomatically makes it possible to keep your emotions from interfering with your reasoning ability.

So if you're a manager or a leader, and you need people to work together that think poorly of each other, then you need a way to talk to them that won't amplify their negative emotions in the hope that you can maximize their ability to get stuff done. And if you are artful with it, you can have discussions about touchy subjects without getting dumped into an angry argument.

Poor leaders and managers use this to talk "over" people, generally young people who have yet to realize that conversations can have layers where what is being said on one layer is very different than the words that are coming out of the conversant's mouths. It is also popular to snipe at their fellow managers in this way.

That said, organizations that engage in a lot of "speaking in code" are often quite political, and that comes right from the top, the CEO. One of the great things about NetApp when I was there was that Dan Warmenhoven really didn't approve of that sort of crap and put a stop to it. At Google it was highly valued, and the politics reflected it[2].

An interesting warning flag is that if you are asked to say something (or hear something) that is a "bad thing" but clearly phrased in enough code to be deniable. An example would be "we need to move these employees into organizations that are more culturally compatible with the way they work." where the commonality of "these employees" is they are part of some protected class. Or "you need to get your team more focused on these deliverables" when team members have been speaking out about poor working conditions or, heaven forbid, labor actions.

At the end of the day, if a non-ambiguous statement would inflame emotions, it is going to interfere with getting stuff done. And in places where we are forced to work with people we might not normally choose not to associate with that means keeping things "diplomatic."

[1] Definition of Diplomacy: Telling someone to go to hell such that they look forward to the trip.

[2] I made a number of enemies in upper management by "translating" what they were saying into things that people could understand.

Just an observation. The best managers I've had, all had a very flat, neutral affect. In some sense, they had no personality, and I mean that in the best possible way.

They weren't necessarily using corpspeak, but their phrasing was always very beige. I think it helped to create a perfectly bland atmosphere, like a starbucks, where nobody necessarily felt elated, but at the same time nobody took offence.

The worst managers I had were usually deceptively jovial or unnecessarily brusque.

The best managers I've had were none of these things. My favorite manager was one who genuinely listened to me and was also interested in helping me learn in ways that helped the company. He was an outstanding resource and help whenever I had a question about anything, especially if it was technical. He had a good bit of humor and sarcasm that poked through every now and then, but never in a mean way. He was Canadian and had the stereotypical Canadian niceness to him. I'd work for him again any day.

Agreed! For me, "fake joviality" is the WORST. I may or may not be anticipating today's work day but do not pretend that coming to work is "fun".

I’m curious how corpspeak became a monoculture. How did this spread so pervasively?

Humans are prone to cargo cult thinking. Presented with a successful or important person, we automatically copy their behavior, because their behavior must have made them successful or important.

I think that this is why usage of stupid idioms and phrases flows downward in hierarchies. Have you ever noticed an executive use a corpspeak phrase in an all-hands meeting and then seen it crop up immediately afterward in e-mail and meetings from lower-level management? It can be fun to ask them what a new phrase means in real terms, too -- often they don't really know.

For all the talk about American individualism, American corporate culture is actually extraordinarily collectivist. The pervasive groupthink at all levels of the hierarchy is an effective survival strategy. It's quite depressing to read accounts of individuals who lived under the boot of various collectivist regimes, particularly the modes of thought and expression so prevalent and necessary in such societies to keep your family from starving, only to realize that they are more or less replicated in American corporate environments, for more or less the same reasons.

When I was younger I spent some time in East Germany visiting relatives. From the inside most large corporations look like communist states with an planned economy. Tons of propaganda, a lot of phrases that mean exactly the opposite when used ("rightsizing" vs "layoffs"), refusal to name issues directly, appearances more important than facts, useless metrics, an emphasis on supervision instead of improving things and a leadership that pretends to talk for the underlings but is totally out of touch.

Promiscuous middle managers and C-Levels? I'm thinking they carry a heavy load, shed a lot, really get around, and frequently attend superspreader events.

People who work at companies tend to keep working at companies. You don't get as much movement going from McDonalds to Google, but tons of folks migrate among tech companies. So the culture naturally spreads.

This reminds me of people who think guns are the problem. Guns and language are tools.

If the people you work with are using language to engage in and win at zero sum games - that's a human problem, not a language problem.

I have an ask for corpspeak to be mandated by HN rules.

Heh its Lingua franca as many people within a company are from different trades.

This is how a business person can communicate with a software developer

It’s just jargon. Every profession has jargon. And the purpose of jargon is to demonstrate that you belong to the group.

The main purpose of jargon is to concisely communicate complex concepts using convenient labels - see [0]. If your workplace is using jargon merely to signal belonging to the group, then that's just sad.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32564931

Has anyone ever encountered someone that was good at corp speak, but not also a sociopath of middling intellect?

I mean: I’ve found it’s difficult for individual contributors to ramp up and be recognized for doing their best work without adequate context from their peers.

yoooo lmfao !!

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