If I have a terrible idea, or am over complicating things, just tell me. And tell me why, and maybe I’ll see it your way, or maybe I’ll convince you the complexity is essential, but we’ll be better for it either way.
In the absence of trust, one often needs to resort to passive, blameless, less direct language.
So I work on creating the trust and noting where it is impossible so I can adjust.
Who defaults to corporate speak is often an indication to how much they can be trusted.
Those who default to corporate speak are those who have no power to speak plainly. Sometimes they have no power because they cannot be trusted. But more often it's because whoever they report to cannot be trusted, and maybe also they don't trust whoever they are speaking to.
And to drill down into this a little further, the process of building trust is one where you each show the other person that the longer term relationship (personal or professional) is more important than any short term gains you might get by using their plain speaking against them. It is harder to do with a power imbalance, because one person isn't risking as much as the other.
The point is that little kids experience all kind of much nastier "non-professionall behavior" in school, yet when we say to adult "fuck you" all hell breaks loose. Pathetic.
Not everything in life is about utility, some people want to just feel nice and don’t deal with your negative energy and that is completely fine.
At work, it's about utility, not about being nice, looking good, making jokes.
At your home, you can feel nice and demand of others to do so.
> At work, it's about utility, not about being nice, looking good, making jokes.
At best your message sounds rude, at worst you sound like a jerk. And I say that as someone who used to think like you.
I care about the job being done correctly, efficiently. I care about the users. I don't care about poor IT developers, who have the worst life can offer (sarcasm). Get some perspective, man!
If you can't take "fuck you" or equivalent while passionately doing something, just move away, let the grown-ups do the thing, don't make this thing about you, your feelings or your morning sugar.
It's this type of prima dona type of engineer that I try to avoid at all cost.
If you can trust that someone will be direct with you whenever you're annoying them, it means that you don't have to spend time/effort trying to divine some hidden or subtle meaning in every normal/non-confrontational communication they send your way.
A lot of the suggestions on "How to professionally say" are not only more polite, but also more helpful than the original knee-jerk reply.
"This is not my problem" -> "I recommend directing this issue to <Name> as they have the proper expertise to best assist you"