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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I'm disturbed by the thought that screaming profanities is the only way to get a hearing for your ideas, and would like to discourage anything that takes us in that direction.

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That's just how corporate culture works. I am more disturbed by sitting in meetings where every 10 seconds I hear "that is great" or "good job" while in reality the product sucks, schedule is unrealistic, salespeople are poorly educated on what we actually do here and half of the engineering team are incompetent idiots and sluggish sales are clearly suggesting that's not my imagination.

I wish I had the luxury of hiring a contractor with nothing to lose, someone like Zed, to just bitch-slap these fake-smile wearing, strictly polite and always politically correct morons who are so full of this mandatory "positive attitude" that saying obvious things out loud had turned into a tabu. They use words like "good", "great" and "outstanding" so often that they lost any useful meaning. This is why you need to be Zed to be heard.

Word like "shit", "fucking", "morons" and "crap" are essential to every healthy business meeting because the world is full of these objects and ignoring them or using some kind of cryptic doublespeak isn't helping anyone.

I have been in enough meetings over the years where you hear all kinds of profanities, and you're right, the key to successful meetings is when people call it like it is. However, antagonism is not necessarily productive. Remember, you need to work with these teams, and even good teams roll our products that may not be good. I don't know the history here in its entirety so speaking generally, while it's good being a naysayer, there is a way to do it constructively. Reading what I have, I don't really see anything constructive here.

I think it's quite possible to keep discourse civilized, and at the same time honest.

> Word like "shit", "fucking", "morons" and "crap"

... are indicative of a limited vocabulary and lack of imagination. Yeah, once in a while they're useful for effect, but if you use them all the time, they lose their power to shock, and you just sound crude and uneducated.

your pusillanimous attitude towards expletives is copulatively ridiculous.

Your riposte would be witty were you to use words not merely for their syllable count, but that actually convey some semblance of coherent meaning. As it is, your attempt at language play is one that brings to mind a concentrated effort to put round pegs into square holes.

While I agree with you that the corporate world is full of doublespeak, the idea that politeness is inherently hypocritical and that swear words are necessary for straight talking is, well, stupid.

Yes, but if your point is that something's hypocritical and bad, it's much easier to say it rudely than it is so say it politely. Zed rants. I think if he were to write more civil-yet-critical posts, it would make for longer, less focused posts. Rudeness applies well in some situations.

My point exactly.

As much as I appreciate your sentiment, I would beg to disagree. It is possible to imply scatological sentiment without resorting to 'swear words' and is occasionally appropriate. Although it requires effort, constructing a sentence or phrase that is more precise on whatever topic is vastly more effective than either "good job" or "god damn fucking shit". The use of either is both lazy and frequently just plain ineffective.

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