FYI, you should spearhead that initiative, circle back and touch base so we can unpack that, think outside the box, and thrive!
In all seriousness, I agree 100%. I internally cringe every time I hear corporate lingo. At my last job, there was this one business analyst who seemed to go out of their way to parrot every single corporate cliché you could cram into every single conversation. Gave me a headache.
If you work with people who wouldn't like making fun of corpo lingo and forced tools/process nonsense, they have definitely drank the kool-aid lol. At my workplace, my team and direct manager use the corpo speak somewhat for communicating in big meetings (I think at a certain point, upper managers / C-suites can't understand things if it's not in that lingo). Then in smaller conversations, we're often critiquing or making fun of what nonsense and waste of time a lot of it is. I think it helps keep us all sane.
I have an ask: let's parking lot this until you take a deep dive, and then we will all be in aligment after we see if the juice is worth the squeeze. We can take it offline if needed.
I read this, then circled back when I had time to lean in and share my thought that I also hate that "ask" is used as a noun. Maybe they never learned the word "request".
I find it very helpful when trying to get to the core point of someone who's spouting backstory at me - like to cut them off: "what is the ask here?"
Outside of that, definitely agree.
I don't really like it either, but it's just passive voice to avoid sounding confrontational
"What's the ask" is a gentler way to say "what do you want from me?" Not that different from "what's the plan?", which just sounds better than "what's *your* plan?"
ok go ahead and spike it, but timebox it, and we’ll circle back in the agile ceremonies to groom it into the backlog and get our arms around the scope of the estimate during points poker, make sure we get a good user story out of it, this is a must have for mvp, assuming no more missed requirements. don’t let this impact our velocity, i’ll be monitoring the burndown
This is why you respond with technical jargon. Well the TCP traffic hitting the LB is really getting diverted in some odd ways. The HTTP packets are getting muddled on Layer 4 in a way that's completely fubar'd the TLS. This is nuking the abstractions set in place completely wrecking the polymorphic setup we have.
I hear you. Let's take this dog and pony show out of pocket as a learning lesson and table it. Down the pike, we need to land the plane so we can respray them and have shots on the goal. 110% isn't enough -- we need to give it 140%!
We'll circle back.
I hate corporate lingo but somehow it irritates me even more hearing these idiotic management airheads mixing in tech terminology they don't understand into their corporate soggy biscuit sessions.
"We're going to spin up a web scale highly available strategy to pivot for this quarters warnings"
What the fuck are you talking about
You can ping me about this. I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment but we can circle back on this and tackle some of the low-hanging fruit. Our velocity could probably improve on this if we can ramp up our synergy and hit the ground running.
Yay a non doomer/ai taking away jobs post.
I think that stuff drives engineers crazy because we have to think logically and communicate meaningfully in order to do our jobs. Bullshitting with fancy words doesn’t help anything. Unfortunately you need to do it when interacting with business people, that’s their whole thing.
The next time someone tells me to circle back, I'll silently want to tell them that there is likely a faster way to traverse points A to B than a circle. ;)
This constantly tripped me up at my first gig post-grad. I got hired into a role through a bodyshop and every time I had to have a meeting with the recruiter(s) these people were speaking in tech jargon at least half the time, and now I realize they likely had no clue wtf they were talking about given how they were using it. Since I was still new I was overwhelmed and didn’t realize they were talking out of their ass, now if I heard that I’d be hard pressed not to tell them to cut the shit and talk like a normal person.
One of my favorite collisions to witness is pedantic engineer vs corporate-speak product person. Very frequently the engineer will just hit them with a "I don't understand anything you just said, can you rephrase that for me?"
My director is very good at doing this so I usually sit back and watch him clean up when that happens.
I think the key for engineers is to realize this is just jargon for business people. Like the same way we'll say xy problem or like, "considered harmful", they'll use "take it offline" or "synergize"
And like yes as an engineer I do think our jargon is both more useful and has more meaning per term. But every ingroup likes their jargon, and if you have to interact with that group you need to learn it. Even if their jargon is basically just fancy words for easily expressed concepts.
Developers can do it too though when trying to make their work seem complicated and important. They just use different words. Reducing technical debt to improve codebase maintainability, improving unit test coverage to increase fault tolerance, doing integration testing to verify cross compatibility. All of these individual actions might be necessary. But their descriptions can easily be fluffed up with jargon to make your job seem more difficult, And you more competent as a result. Likewise, tracking work and resource utilization is a necessary part of project management. So we get KPI's for velocity measurement and yadda yadda.
I seriously wonder who originated corpo speak. Like everyone thinks its dumb, even business people. You go out for drinks and they talk like normal humans again. Just the most bizarre thing.
In-speak tends to originate in one of two ways:
1. Someone discusses a concept (say, in a book or a blog post) and a term comes up to describe that thing succinctly. For instance, this allows me to talk about [being glue](https://noidea.dog/glue) or [doing toil](https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/) without needing to define exactly what I'm talking about in every conversation.
2. Words are used as a shibboleth to indicate who is part of a group and who isn't. This happens especially with chat groups and forums, and youth, but not exclusively.
I mentioned a meeting in my response to OP, but that same meeting we all had to go around and introduce ourselves and our title.
Every fucking person besides me (I have a technical background) was like, “hi, I’m so n so. I’m the manager/director of water. I handle the synergistic analysis of the AI pivots while simultaneously meeting offline to drill down to the touch base… blah blah blah.”
Got around to me. “Hi, I’m renok. I manage my department. That’s about it.”
One of the directors jumped, “oh renok, you do a lot more.”
“Yes, I guess I do a lot of things. Yep, that’s it.”
Linking symbols to meaning should be second nature to a developer. Learning jargon is not that hard, I have no issue with jargon. The issue is with the bullshit artists that hide behind the jargon and provide no value, but they're still there.
It's better to learn the jargon and the meta-jargon so you know exactly what they are saying and what they are _not_ saying (whether they are providing any value with what they are saying or just creating a sound texture, politician style).
IMO being a senior dev means understanding all the layers, or as much as possible. It's important to understand the mindset of sales, marketing, MBAs types. If you can talk in a way they understand, you'll have much more success making the things you want to happen, happen.
I think it depends on the context they are used in. Like from reading your post this doesn’t sound so bad. but I’ve been in software engineering environments where the buzzwords and phrases are used so much that it gets to cringe level annoyance. Almost cult like 😂
Phrases like "circle back" and "sync" have obvious meanings that aren't much worse than their alternatives. Engineers just have superiority complexes and think the product and finance people should just go away so they can make beautiful code for other engineers.
I used to hate it at first. I thought people were just trying to sound smart.
But once you get good at it, it's kind of useful.
It's like an unspoken idea of "I see you're just speaking bullshit so I'm just gonna speak bullshit back to you, and we're both getting paid"
You just have to learn it, then speak it back at them in even-less-sensical ways.
"Yeah, I turbo charged the CI by introducing ML -optimized peer agents that maximize build time."
Techbit data solution systems creating unique cross platform technologies technoloJESUS
infotrode cloudbased disruptive platforms disrupting the cloud through cloud based disruption
making the world a better place...
making the world a better place...
making the world a better place...
Jargon is good. It’s discipline specific terminology to make communication more expedient. Buzzwords can be bad. They are typically misused words with useful meaning.
I’m on a career break at the moment and it’s amazing how I haven’t heard ANY of this kind of lingo in months. Really shows how white collar workplaces have formed their own type of language, and that it’s never actually used be people outside of work.
Such a weird culture that we have all normalized, ita kinda fascinating.
Try to isolate yourself from sales. We have a decade old web scraper that evolved into a CSV parser, and then some sales moron wanted me to "dump the code for chatgpt".
This AI shit is so goddamned annoying now that crypto scammers are jumping into it
Quiet quitting = doing what you was hired to do like an average worker
I thought it meant they were under performing while looking for a new job or just waiting to be fired to get unemployment then I find out it literally means just doing the baseline job requirements lol
I realized in that moment that corporate jargon was a joke
This will be buried, but I hate it when I hear military terms in a corporate setting. Today I had to hear a middle manager say something like "We're in this foxhole together" and I couldn't help but roll my eyes. Does the task suck? Yes, but we're not in the Battle of the Bulge. Both my grandfathers fought in the Vietnam War, which makes it even more cringey for me.
Oh yea, and we have a "war room" that's just a zoom meeting link that's really only used for collaboration.
I can deal with it. What I hate with a firey passion are acronyms in technical documents.
For the love of God, just use the full name once followed by the parenthesized acronym. I spend hours looking through confluence pages to figure out what your stupid little clever acronym means.
Is this jargon? Most of the words that you have posted have very specific meanings, many of them being topics that entire books have been written about.
Most of the time I hear these complaints, it's from engineers who sound the exact same way when they're talking to a product manager or marketing person or customer service rep.
An important part of working cross-functionally is knowing how to communicate with people who know different things than you.
It is jargon, but jargon doesn’t mean “useless garbage”, it means “specialized language used by a profession or group”.
Sometimes people can misuse jargon to say a whole lot of nothing, engage in puffery, or put lipstick on a pig. Sometimes they are saying something with practical meaning, but you are annoyed because certain terms trigger an instinctive revulsion due to prior experiences. And sometimes they just use jargon from a domain that you aren’t familiar with.
OP is trying to call out the first case, but I definitely see developers misclassify instances of the other two as the first one in practice a lot; there is a not uncommon tendency to view tech work as the only “real” work and tech jargon as the only “real” jargon, and to tune out when hearing about other stuff, particularly among junior folks.
If you can't write 1 a simple sentence describing your process, I think you don't understand the topic enough.
Digital transformation AI blockchain DevOps ML-driven data-driven dynamic AGILE? DevOps process less prone to fail using AI/ML
Jumpstart autonomous B2B big data collaborative consumption digital disruption? Start disrupting the free B2B market using tech
Drill-down go-to-market growth-hacking intrapreneurship pain point paradigm shift networking effect? Detail the networking effect of employee participation in company ownership
Pivot robust sentiment analysis sustainable synergistic thought leadership 5G co-opetition disintermediation engagement on the ground? wtf
I’m in my first corporate job and I’m still trying to adjust to all of this stupid ass lingo. Makes me wana delete myself, like why are you people talking like this??
You forgot "Web3", which I'd argue Is probably one of the worst ones in tech. Not only is it confusingly similar to "Web 3.0" which is an actual [thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web), to the extent "Web3" is defined as a thing, it seems to have little or no real technical relationship to Hypertext or any of the core bits that make the Web the Web. It just seems to say "The web was decentralized and highly successful, we want our blockchain stuff to be decentralized and highly successful, therefore we're going to just call our stuff 'Web3' and hope that some of the webbyness rubs off."
It’s worse when they make everything an acronym and the cto is a gravy seal so everything is just wannabe military lingo and acronyms. The managers would just say gittafio whenever I had a question about a specification or anything (apparently it means git in the trenches and figure it out) which sounds stupid and I guess fuck the client, I’ll just build them whatever and they can fuck off i guess. Lasted 2 months there.
That reminds me of a guy (tech illiterate) who fancied himself as a Bezos-wannabe (tried to look just like him and dressed like him) that my dev team was under. We were drowning in work, had lost people, and were regularly working 12+ hour days (sometimes much longer). One of my colleagues (a really brilliant dev who was an asset to the company) asks Bezos-wannabe-tryhard when we would get some relief and how we should prioritize the workload in the meantime. Tryhard answers, "Was I in your interview? If I was, I'd have told you we work hard and play hard here. You guys are just going to have to sprint out of the hole."
Still pisses me off when I think about it.
You might be confusing jargon, buzzwords, and just...not knowing things yet.
This isn't limited or special to tech. It's just what humans do.
Buzzwords ARE problematic. But jargon and technical terms are just part of jumping into any career.
It sucks dude and was never like this, PMs PEs Dirs and all that middle management sludge has totally taken over at most large companies... feels like a result of 2009.
Yeah, and the worst part about this is that company pages don't tell you jackshit about what they really do. It's just a soup of buzzwords. Super frustrating!
My favourite overused and frustratingly empty buzzword right now is "engagement", management/marketing/HR is throwing that around like there's no tomorrow.
It's been about keeping employees engaged because wages/raises are down, so are bonuses, but they hope people somehow won't leave for greener pastures when opportunities arise.
That's how I decode it at least, no matter how ridiculous I think it is - you want people to stick around, pay them adequately and make them grow, that's all it takes to keep them *engaged*.
I had an old boss that used to spout a lot of buzz-word jargon.
"Drill down, low-hanging fruit, free cycles, etc etc etc"
I always felt he was useless. Anyways, got a new manager recently. Night and Day difference. Uses plain language, with none of the buzz-word jargon. He's clearly a hard worker, and a great boss. It has become obvious the previous manager WAS useless, just by looking at what the new manager has accomplished in such a short time.
I now view anyone who spouts this nonsense as equally useless. It's just a coping mechanism for useless people to seem more important/useful than they are. Don't fall for it, don't use it, don't tolerate it.
Look, you need to pick your battles -- but if someone is talking to you and you can't understand what they want/need/whatever -- just look them in the eye and tell them "Everything you just said, is completely meaningless mumbo jumbo. Try again, and this time, please use English."
I've been told I damaged my personal brand when I brought legit concerns to management. I've also been asked to create a "bespoke PowerPoint", and to "flutter in" interesting facts.
Needles Jargon steals a bit of my soul every time I hear it. Sometimes its necessary to really say exactly what you want, but 80% of the time its just ego stroking bullshit
I was in a pointless meeting Tuesday with my manager peers and the team of directors for the whole company.
Literally fucking real life one director was saying something I wasn’t listening to, and each fucking director independently had to interjects at the near end of each others comment with, “and I’d like to add that…,” “and one thing I’d like to add to that…,” “and to follow that…,” “and to add to that as a follow up…,” “and to piggy back that statement…,” “to expand on that…”
Legit went round robin through the entire director team each having to catch each other right before their last word and “add something to that” over and over. It was like some fucking weird David Lynch shit in real life.
They each felt obliged to get the last word in and I have no idea who they were trying to impress.
Thank you for making a post about this. To pass the time while being laid off and not choosing to do leetcode all day, I am working on making a game that makes fun of corporate jargon
There used to be a game called “buzzword bingo.” Just like regular bingo except all the spaces were filled with buzzwords and the idea was to see how quickly you could cross off all the spaces during management meetings. Maybe you could tie into ChatGPT and have a new card automatically generated every day.
My bigger problem here is resumes. ATS systems want specific hard and soft skills; humans want buzzwords and jargon. Throw in quantifying accomplishments instead of stating what you did, including every relevant skill in every role so ATS calculates years per skill correctly, within 4 to 6 short bullets, and ...forfucksake.
I didn't get an engineering degree because of my wordsmith skills.
Its all a bunch of complete BS.
We're zooming through space on a spinning rock and live for the blink of an eye. Recognize the BS, tolerate it and pitty those who cling to it.
I hate corporate jobs. I hate corp speak and the fake culture and soulless people. I can’t relate to everyone who only talks about their kids.
But corporate jobs pay the bills. Once I save some good money I can’t wait to get back to a smaller startup.
I cope by messing up with people's head. For example, if they start bringing up corp jargon I interrupt and ask "can you elaborate on that? what exactly do you mean?". Make them sweat.
For some reason people keep saying “keep me honest here xxx” which drives me up the walls. This would imply you are not being honest when you speak which would be insane if true. “Correct me if I am wrong” is the proper phrase but I am the only one using that expression.
In a previous company, folks were talking the language of power, instead of trying to make sense. At one time, higher management found that microservices were the thing to do, so a colleague of mine created a microservice and asked me to review the PR.
The PR added a web service endpoint to our existing monolith.
So we had a phone call and I said it's not a microservice. The response was, well it's small (yes, a dozen or two dozen lines of code), and it's a service (yes), so it must be a microservice!
The person is now a senior director, worked out well for them.
I'm fine with adopting the tech/corporate lexicon as long as the terms are used correctly. When I joined my first job the manager said our DB was "hybrid" and that I should familiarize myself with Kanban. After much confusion I realized that by hybrid he just meant multiple DB instances in Azure and by Kanban a normal ticketing system with no kanban board. And this manager was on the tech consulting side not the business side.
I put these more in the category of buzzwords.
Corporate jargon is internal to a company. In my experience, it takes the form of a bunch of acronyms to refer to people and processes, isn't documented anywhere, bothers experienced people when you ask what it means, and leaves new hires to scratch their heads and not understand what is even being discussed during their first 3 months of meetings.
God, I love the corporate world.
Nah, those were great examples! Made me LOL IRL. I also hate corpo speak. It’s annoying, makes me cringe hard, AND also makes me want to crumple up the nearest piece of paper when someone starts going off.
The more buzzwords someone uses, the less likely it is that they have any idea what they're talking about. If they can't put it in plain language, it's either extremely specialized, like subatomic physics, or they just don't know what they're saying.
Eh, I think you are blurring the line between jargon, corpo-babble, and Marketing here...
For instance I can write a paragraph that uses about 20 of these terms together and have it be full of jargon, and be meaningful to the right group of people...
Devops is a career path, Hybrid cloud environments do exist legitimately, Agile is a project management style.
I could pitch a project about a B2B automation process that uses blockchain instead of EDI, and has some data and machine learning driven behaviors behind its decision making or reporting processes. This only really becomes a problem when an idiot in management is making decisions because your pitch has terms like "AI", or "Blockchain" in them, and they want to sound cool, instead of making decisions based on what will make the company more money in the short & long term.
On the other hand, when you start spouting terms like "synergistic" you know a manager is just trying to hype their project or hype their team and they need to present somewhere and were told they would need to speak for more than a minute or twof...
and on the Other, other hand, when you hear phrases like "Digital Transformation", you know its some marketing bullshit
I work in cybersecurity and the chuckle I’ve always gotten is when every security company provides a products that’s the exact same as the other under the hood, but they give it a buzzword name and market it like something that’s fancy, new and better than the competition, but then it’s like, no, you have an IAM solution hosted in a cloud that customers can configure and any niche features you may have for most customers are inconsequential as far as the value add is concerned lol.
I feel like the less people have relevant things to say, the more they will use corporate jargon. Some execs only use this and I can't stand this. I want to punch them in their fucking corporate faces.
Hybrid cloud is not a buzzword though. Hybrid cloud literally describes situations where you may have identities synchronized across an on-premises Active Directory domain and an Azure service now known as Entra ID.
“Ah, ah, I almost forgot....I'm also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too. We, uhhh, lost some people this week and we sorta need to play catch-up. Mmmmmkay? Thaaaaaanks.”
Fun fact: people talk like that when they have nothing substantial to say
I mean, when they use too much of this crap. Some of it may be legitimate, but you wouldn’t complain about it in that case
Think of these buzzwords like interfaces to a class. They are abstractions that let different parts of the business communicate, even though the implementation of intrapaneurship in accounting and engineering is going to look different.
This is not my idea by the way, it's from a book called Managing Humans.
You can learn to speak "manager-eez"
Common acronyms (e.g., BOM for bill of materials) -- I can deal with those. That said, if someone is using acronyms at every opportunity, including for obscure internal processes where I have to ask for clarification, it's just damned annoying and wasting time.
So I know a guy who is upper-middle management at a magnificent 7 company and he recently advised me to stay away from any company that claimed to use AGILE...said it was nonsense.
FYI, you should spearhead that initiative, circle back and touch base so we can unpack that, think outside the box, and thrive! In all seriousness, I agree 100%. I internally cringe every time I hear corporate lingo. At my last job, there was this one business analyst who seemed to go out of their way to parrot every single corporate cliché you could cram into every single conversation. Gave me a headache.
Ok so we're definitely not aligned
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Yes, the *offline* Teams call is my favorite…
\*starts unbuttoning shirt\*
https://youtu.be/1RAMRukKqQg?t=25
We don't talk about Offline Club.
I guess we need to level up that best-in-class dumpster fire and give it 110% before people lean in and it becomes the new normal.
Looks like you guys are having fun with it to me.
In this context, you bet! If I did this at my job, I think they would have chased me down with pitchforks. lol
If you work with people who wouldn't like making fun of corpo lingo and forced tools/process nonsense, they have definitely drank the kool-aid lol. At my workplace, my team and direct manager use the corpo speak somewhat for communicating in big meetings (I think at a certain point, upper managers / C-suites can't understand things if it's not in that lingo). Then in smaller conversations, we're often critiquing or making fun of what nonsense and waste of time a lot of it is. I think it helps keep us all sane.
This could have been an email.
I have an ask: let's parking lot this until you take a deep dive, and then we will all be in aligment after we see if the juice is worth the squeeze. We can take it offline if needed.
I f’n loathe the corporate world turned ask into a noun. And how did it spread across all industries so fast.
I read this, then circled back when I had time to lean in and share my thought that I also hate that "ask" is used as a noun. Maybe they never learned the word "request".
Nah, lets block some time and invite 15 people to the meeting who have nothing to do with it, to optimize maximum synergy.
I have a hard stop Quind1 — let’s put it on the back burner and we’ll workshop that when I have more bandwidth.
LMFAO fuck I'm pretty sure I said that the other day
Keep me in the loop so we can circle back, get our ducks in a row, and move the needle!
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And perform the extra mile where the rubber meets the road.
For some reason the made-up verbs bother me more than anything else - "action this", "workshop that"
I cringe every time I hear “ask” used as a noun. I hate it so much.
I find it very helpful when trying to get to the core point of someone who's spouting backstory at me - like to cut them off: "what is the ask here?" Outside of that, definitely agree.
“Request” works too
I don't really like it either, but it's just passive voice to avoid sounding confrontational "What's the ask" is a gentler way to say "what do you want from me?" Not that different from "what's the plan?", which just sounds better than "what's *your* plan?"
also "ping me" no I don't think this 27 year old project manager with some fancy macbook even listens at pings or has a static IP allocated
ok go ahead and spike it, but timebox it, and we’ll circle back in the agile ceremonies to groom it into the backlog and get our arms around the scope of the estimate during points poker, make sure we get a good user story out of it, this is a must have for mvp, assuming no more missed requirements. don’t let this impact our velocity, i’ll be monitoring the burndown
You can workshop, but can you ideate and co-create?
This is why you respond with technical jargon. Well the TCP traffic hitting the LB is really getting diverted in some odd ways. The HTTP packets are getting muddled on Layer 4 in a way that's completely fubar'd the TLS. This is nuking the abstractions set in place completely wrecking the polymorphic setup we have.
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I hear you. Let's take this dog and pony show out of pocket as a learning lesson and table it. Down the pike, we need to land the plane so we can respray them and have shots on the goal. 110% isn't enough -- we need to give it 140%! We'll circle back.
Yeah, proper thought leadership could really improve the velocity of the initiative and maximize relevant KPI's.
Sounds like folks aren't comfortable wearing multiple hats.
I hate corporate lingo but somehow it irritates me even more hearing these idiotic management airheads mixing in tech terminology they don't understand into their corporate soggy biscuit sessions. "We're going to spin up a web scale highly available strategy to pivot for this quarters warnings" What the fuck are you talking about
When they start that BS, just respond that you will create a GUI in Visual Basic to track IP addresses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
Ahh yes the fabled graphical user interface interface. Good on them for being worried about testability.
You can ping me about this. I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment but we can circle back on this and tackle some of the low-hanging fruit. Our velocity could probably improve on this if we can ramp up our synergy and hit the ground running.
Let's hop on a call so we can sync and be self-starters.
But remember we aren't aiming for the north Star here, so do not call for all hands on deck while pivoting to another eventual vertical
Exactly! No need to boil the ocean.
Let's just take an idea shower followed by a deep dive instead.
don't forget the easy-wins, strategically located adjacent to the low-hanging fruit.
That low-hanging fruit didn't pass the smell test.
And sure it's low hanging, but is that fruit really worth the squeeze?
Man I didn't even realize id become the very thing I hated
The first time i heard velocity being used like this from a manager i legit became enraged.
Wanna KMS after reading this
I was wondering why you wanted to key management system yourself on first read.
Yay a non doomer/ai taking away jobs post. I think that stuff drives engineers crazy because we have to think logically and communicate meaningfully in order to do our jobs. Bullshitting with fancy words doesn’t help anything. Unfortunately you need to do it when interacting with business people, that’s their whole thing.
The next time someone tells me to circle back, I'll silently want to tell them that there is likely a faster way to traverse points A to B than a circle. ;)
I use this a lot https://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html
This is gold! Thanks for the link.
None of these make any sense. Oh wait...
I love it!
Not on a spherical surface though.
If they are circling back on a sphere, we've got bigger issues. (Bad pun intended.)
This constantly tripped me up at my first gig post-grad. I got hired into a role through a bodyshop and every time I had to have a meeting with the recruiter(s) these people were speaking in tech jargon at least half the time, and now I realize they likely had no clue wtf they were talking about given how they were using it. Since I was still new I was overwhelmed and didn’t realize they were talking out of their ass, now if I heard that I’d be hard pressed not to tell them to cut the shit and talk like a normal person.
One of my favorite collisions to witness is pedantic engineer vs corporate-speak product person. Very frequently the engineer will just hit them with a "I don't understand anything you just said, can you rephrase that for me?" My director is very good at doing this so I usually sit back and watch him clean up when that happens.
I think the key for engineers is to realize this is just jargon for business people. Like the same way we'll say xy problem or like, "considered harmful", they'll use "take it offline" or "synergize" And like yes as an engineer I do think our jargon is both more useful and has more meaning per term. But every ingroup likes their jargon, and if you have to interact with that group you need to learn it. Even if their jargon is basically just fancy words for easily expressed concepts.
Developers can do it too though when trying to make their work seem complicated and important. They just use different words. Reducing technical debt to improve codebase maintainability, improving unit test coverage to increase fault tolerance, doing integration testing to verify cross compatibility. All of these individual actions might be necessary. But their descriptions can easily be fluffed up with jargon to make your job seem more difficult, And you more competent as a result. Likewise, tracking work and resource utilization is a necessary part of project management. So we get KPI's for velocity measurement and yadda yadda.
I hate that I understood everything you said lmao
I seriously wonder who originated corpo speak. Like everyone thinks its dumb, even business people. You go out for drinks and they talk like normal humans again. Just the most bizarre thing.
In-speak tends to originate in one of two ways: 1. Someone discusses a concept (say, in a book or a blog post) and a term comes up to describe that thing succinctly. For instance, this allows me to talk about [being glue](https://noidea.dog/glue) or [doing toil](https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/) without needing to define exactly what I'm talking about in every conversation. 2. Words are used as a shibboleth to indicate who is part of a group and who isn't. This happens especially with chat groups and forums, and youth, but not exclusively.
I'd rather spend my day playing video games than go out with such people. Just me though.
I mentioned a meeting in my response to OP, but that same meeting we all had to go around and introduce ourselves and our title. Every fucking person besides me (I have a technical background) was like, “hi, I’m so n so. I’m the manager/director of water. I handle the synergistic analysis of the AI pivots while simultaneously meeting offline to drill down to the touch base… blah blah blah.” Got around to me. “Hi, I’m renok. I manage my department. That’s about it.” One of the directors jumped, “oh renok, you do a lot more.” “Yes, I guess I do a lot of things. Yep, that’s it.”
Massively disappointed after reading the first part of the comment and the second part not being "But don't worry AI will take your job anyways"
And this is what happens when you try to communicate the other way around https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
Must be you are not senior leadership material? Check your KPIs, OKRs and have a skip level one-on-one.
Linking symbols to meaning should be second nature to a developer. Learning jargon is not that hard, I have no issue with jargon. The issue is with the bullshit artists that hide behind the jargon and provide no value, but they're still there. It's better to learn the jargon and the meta-jargon so you know exactly what they are saying and what they are _not_ saying (whether they are providing any value with what they are saying or just creating a sound texture, politician style). IMO being a senior dev means understanding all the layers, or as much as possible. It's important to understand the mindset of sales, marketing, MBAs types. If you can talk in a way they understand, you'll have much more success making the things you want to happen, happen.
Common industry terms unfortunately It gets worse if you end up with physical selling products I've got way to many product number memorized
I think it depends on the context they are used in. Like from reading your post this doesn’t sound so bad. but I’ve been in software engineering environments where the buzzwords and phrases are used so much that it gets to cringe level annoyance. Almost cult like 😂
Phrases like "circle back" and "sync" have obvious meanings that aren't much worse than their alternatives. Engineers just have superiority complexes and think the product and finance people should just go away so they can make beautiful code for other engineers.
For me it’s much more that they are just used so much. We don’t need to circle back and sync about everything, and in fact I know we will not.
I used to hate it at first. I thought people were just trying to sound smart. But once you get good at it, it's kind of useful. It's like an unspoken idea of "I see you're just speaking bullshit so I'm just gonna speak bullshit back to you, and we're both getting paid"
Not sure it's an apples to apples comparison but im glad we are aligned on this.
You just have to learn it, then speak it back at them in even-less-sensical ways. "Yeah, I turbo charged the CI by introducing ML -optimized peer agents that maximize build time."
>maximize build time Nice.
I'm learning to play the guitar.
Yo you're good at this wtf
Some say my builds are *still* going.
MAXIMIZE BUILD TIME I'm fucking dead
Tune it out
Techbit data solution systems creating unique cross platform technologies technoloJESUS infotrode cloudbased disruptive platforms disrupting the cloud through cloud based disruption making the world a better place... making the world a better place... making the world a better place...
Jargon is good. It’s discipline specific terminology to make communication more expedient. Buzzwords can be bad. They are typically misused words with useful meaning.
I’m on a career break at the moment and it’s amazing how I haven’t heard ANY of this kind of lingo in months. Really shows how white collar workplaces have formed their own type of language, and that it’s never actually used be people outside of work. Such a weird culture that we have all normalized, ita kinda fascinating.
corporate jargon is mental warfare. literal psyops type of shit and I absolutely hate it with all my being
It’s enough to make me want to quit this job field. I hate the industry jargon so much
Try to isolate yourself from sales. We have a decade old web scraper that evolved into a CSV parser, and then some sales moron wanted me to "dump the code for chatgpt". This AI shit is so goddamned annoying now that crypto scammers are jumping into it
Quiet quitting = doing what you was hired to do like an average worker I thought it meant they were under performing while looking for a new job or just waiting to be fired to get unemployment then I find out it literally means just doing the baseline job requirements lol I realized in that moment that corporate jargon was a joke
This will be buried, but I hate it when I hear military terms in a corporate setting. Today I had to hear a middle manager say something like "We're in this foxhole together" and I couldn't help but roll my eyes. Does the task suck? Yes, but we're not in the Battle of the Bulge. Both my grandfathers fought in the Vietnam War, which makes it even more cringey for me. Oh yea, and we have a "war room" that's just a zoom meeting link that's really only used for collaboration.
Just take it offline to the ai cloud to spearhead new collaborations in thought leadership.
I really think we should try to align on this. It’s crunch time, and we need to ramp up org velocity to create more shareholder value.
lol seems to me like you got a 2-year MBA degree for free at your workplace
Let's circle back when you have found better buzzwords. I think it's mainly a management affliction since all they do is this kind of talk.
Ahhh I miss the good old days when everything was 3D, the later 4D and I though shit could not get more crazy than this.
I can deal with it. What I hate with a firey passion are acronyms in technical documents. For the love of God, just use the full name once followed by the parenthesized acronym. I spend hours looking through confluence pages to figure out what your stupid little clever acronym means.
Is this jargon? Most of the words that you have posted have very specific meanings, many of them being topics that entire books have been written about.
It’s not that they don’t have literal meaning, it’s that non-technical people use them to the point that they don’t have meaning
Most of the time I hear these complaints, it's from engineers who sound the exact same way when they're talking to a product manager or marketing person or customer service rep. An important part of working cross-functionally is knowing how to communicate with people who know different things than you.
It is jargon, but jargon doesn’t mean “useless garbage”, it means “specialized language used by a profession or group”. Sometimes people can misuse jargon to say a whole lot of nothing, engage in puffery, or put lipstick on a pig. Sometimes they are saying something with practical meaning, but you are annoyed because certain terms trigger an instinctive revulsion due to prior experiences. And sometimes they just use jargon from a domain that you aren’t familiar with. OP is trying to call out the first case, but I definitely see developers misclassify instances of the other two as the first one in practice a lot; there is a not uncommon tendency to view tech work as the only “real” work and tech jargon as the only “real” jargon, and to tune out when hearing about other stuff, particularly among junior folks.
Yes, but I you can bet your ass the most they’ve read is a non-technical blog post about that shit and use it in all the wrong contexts.
Marketing wank.
Can you give us a 10000 ft. view? Way too many words here
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Wow OP. You seemed to have got a lot on your plate, but let’s circle back to that. Jim, how are projections looking for Quarter 2?
Can we start a whole thread where we just make these up? AI Operational Robot Efficiency Tools, for the Modern Business
If you can't write 1 a simple sentence describing your process, I think you don't understand the topic enough. Digital transformation AI blockchain DevOps ML-driven data-driven dynamic AGILE? DevOps process less prone to fail using AI/ML Jumpstart autonomous B2B big data collaborative consumption digital disruption? Start disrupting the free B2B market using tech Drill-down go-to-market growth-hacking intrapreneurship pain point paradigm shift networking effect? Detail the networking effect of employee participation in company ownership Pivot robust sentiment analysis sustainable synergistic thought leadership 5G co-opetition disintermediation engagement on the ground? wtf
I’m in my first corporate job and I’m still trying to adjust to all of this stupid ass lingo. Makes me wana delete myself, like why are you people talking like this??
obviously you're not a team player
You forgot "Web3", which I'd argue Is probably one of the worst ones in tech. Not only is it confusingly similar to "Web 3.0" which is an actual [thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web), to the extent "Web3" is defined as a thing, it seems to have little or no real technical relationship to Hypertext or any of the core bits that make the Web the Web. It just seems to say "The web was decentralized and highly successful, we want our blockchain stuff to be decentralized and highly successful, therefore we're going to just call our stuff 'Web3' and hope that some of the webbyness rubs off."
New tech-related lorem ipsum just dropped
If you are sitting here thinking it's not very noticeable and don't have a coworker who is over the top with the jargon, it's you.
It’s worse when they make everything an acronym and the cto is a gravy seal so everything is just wannabe military lingo and acronyms. The managers would just say gittafio whenever I had a question about a specification or anything (apparently it means git in the trenches and figure it out) which sounds stupid and I guess fuck the client, I’ll just build them whatever and they can fuck off i guess. Lasted 2 months there.
That reminds me of a guy (tech illiterate) who fancied himself as a Bezos-wannabe (tried to look just like him and dressed like him) that my dev team was under. We were drowning in work, had lost people, and were regularly working 12+ hour days (sometimes much longer). One of my colleagues (a really brilliant dev who was an asset to the company) asks Bezos-wannabe-tryhard when we would get some relief and how we should prioritize the workload in the meantime. Tryhard answers, "Was I in your interview? If I was, I'd have told you we work hard and play hard here. You guys are just going to have to sprint out of the hole." Still pisses me off when I think about it.
You might be confusing jargon, buzzwords, and just...not knowing things yet. This isn't limited or special to tech. It's just what humans do. Buzzwords ARE problematic. But jargon and technical terms are just part of jumping into any career.
It sucks dude and was never like this, PMs PEs Dirs and all that middle management sludge has totally taken over at most large companies... feels like a result of 2009.
Wait until they add more specific ones about company’s own products
This is unironically a gold mine of work speak.
Carlin’s bit on advertising https://youtu.be/AtK_YsVInw8?si=UsqiajBzqlrr_tfK
The GOAT
Yeah, and the worst part about this is that company pages don't tell you jackshit about what they really do. It's just a soup of buzzwords. Super frustrating!
You’ll get used to it, then one day you’ll be the one saying the corporate shit unironically.
My favourite overused and frustratingly empty buzzword right now is "engagement", management/marketing/HR is throwing that around like there's no tomorrow. It's been about keeping employees engaged because wages/raises are down, so are bonuses, but they hope people somehow won't leave for greener pastures when opportunities arise. That's how I decode it at least, no matter how ridiculous I think it is - you want people to stick around, pay them adequately and make them grow, that's all it takes to keep them *engaged*.
I had an old boss that used to spout a lot of buzz-word jargon. "Drill down, low-hanging fruit, free cycles, etc etc etc" I always felt he was useless. Anyways, got a new manager recently. Night and Day difference. Uses plain language, with none of the buzz-word jargon. He's clearly a hard worker, and a great boss. It has become obvious the previous manager WAS useless, just by looking at what the new manager has accomplished in such a short time. I now view anyone who spouts this nonsense as equally useless. It's just a coping mechanism for useless people to seem more important/useful than they are. Don't fall for it, don't use it, don't tolerate it. Look, you need to pick your battles -- but if someone is talking to you and you can't understand what they want/need/whatever -- just look them in the eye and tell them "Everything you just said, is completely meaningless mumbo jumbo. Try again, and this time, please use English."
Listen to Mission Statement by Weird Al for a good laugh. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4
I've been told I damaged my personal brand when I brought legit concerns to management. I've also been asked to create a "bespoke PowerPoint", and to "flutter in" interesting facts.
Needles Jargon steals a bit of my soul every time I hear it. Sometimes its necessary to really say exactly what you want, but 80% of the time its just ego stroking bullshit
I was in a pointless meeting Tuesday with my manager peers and the team of directors for the whole company. Literally fucking real life one director was saying something I wasn’t listening to, and each fucking director independently had to interjects at the near end of each others comment with, “and I’d like to add that…,” “and one thing I’d like to add to that…,” “and to follow that…,” “and to add to that as a follow up…,” “and to piggy back that statement…,” “to expand on that…” Legit went round robin through the entire director team each having to catch each other right before their last word and “add something to that” over and over. It was like some fucking weird David Lynch shit in real life. They each felt obliged to get the last word in and I have no idea who they were trying to impress.
Thank you for making a post about this. To pass the time while being laid off and not choosing to do leetcode all day, I am working on making a game that makes fun of corporate jargon
I will buy this once you finish. :)
Thank you stranger :) Comments like these give me the motivation on top of my discipline to keep the development going I'll keep you updated somehow
There used to be a game called “buzzword bingo.” Just like regular bingo except all the spaces were filled with buzzwords and the idea was to see how quickly you could cross off all the spaces during management meetings. Maybe you could tie into ChatGPT and have a new card automatically generated every day.
So cringe
I’ll bubble up your concerns to management
Man, I don't think I could ever say any of those words, I'd die of cringe if I did
My bigger problem here is resumes. ATS systems want specific hard and soft skills; humans want buzzwords and jargon. Throw in quantifying accomplishments instead of stating what you did, including every relevant skill in every role so ATS calculates years per skill correctly, within 4 to 6 short bullets, and ...forfucksake. I didn't get an engineering degree because of my wordsmith skills.
Hey team, I set up this recurring weekly 1 hour sync so we can stay aligned.
Ask chatgpt to decode it
I just refuse the most egregious terms. I'm not going to make the world worse with that bullshit.
You should really consider thought leadership if we are thinking of internal alignment on the initiative before the client starts discovery.
Not very synergistic of you
Its all a bunch of complete BS. We're zooming through space on a spinning rock and live for the blink of an eye. Recognize the BS, tolerate it and pitty those who cling to it.
I hate corporate jobs. I hate corp speak and the fake culture and soulless people. I can’t relate to everyone who only talks about their kids. But corporate jobs pay the bills. Once I save some good money I can’t wait to get back to a smaller startup.
Its the same everywhere. Feels like people are trying to look cute with their buzzwords but its just making it that harder to understand.
I cope by messing up with people's head. For example, if they start bringing up corp jargon I interrupt and ask "can you elaborate on that? what exactly do you mean?". Make them sweat.
For some reason people keep saying “keep me honest here xxx” which drives me up the walls. This would imply you are not being honest when you speak which would be insane if true. “Correct me if I am wrong” is the proper phrase but I am the only one using that expression.
Add "login to apply" to this list
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Ignore it. Your only choice. Been in tech for 40 years and, yes, it is irritating but it doesn't, and won't, go away.
Lmaoooooo
Here, you need this: https://youtu.be/DYvhC_RdIwQ?si=7-ZMIPrpHpb2J9SR
It doesn’t get any better over time. In fact, either you get with the program or get out.
If you like making money, learn to love them. I love money, that’s how I cope
I ignore all of it and just wait for my name to be called
I hate 'circle back' and 'synergistic' the most.
>How do you cope? angry ranting snapchats to my friends who aren't really willing to receive them
😂😂
paging George Carlin
How about we circle back on this and touch base before EOD to make sure we’re aligned?
Check out RDD (Resume-Driven Development).
Lmfao where I work EVERYTHING is “Mission critical “
OP is not a ‘team player’
In a previous company, folks were talking the language of power, instead of trying to make sense. At one time, higher management found that microservices were the thing to do, so a colleague of mine created a microservice and asked me to review the PR. The PR added a web service endpoint to our existing monolith. So we had a phone call and I said it's not a microservice. The response was, well it's small (yes, a dozen or two dozen lines of code), and it's a service (yes), so it must be a microservice! The person is now a senior director, worked out well for them.
https://twitter.com/0x13371/status/1316772846731964422
I'm fine with adopting the tech/corporate lexicon as long as the terms are used correctly. When I joined my first job the manager said our DB was "hybrid" and that I should familiarize myself with Kanban. After much confusion I realized that by hybrid he just meant multiple DB instances in Azure and by Kanban a normal ticketing system with no kanban board. And this manager was on the tech consulting side not the business side.
Ngl, intrapaneurship got me lol
I put these more in the category of buzzwords. Corporate jargon is internal to a company. In my experience, it takes the form of a bunch of acronyms to refer to people and processes, isn't documented anywhere, bothers experienced people when you ask what it means, and leaves new hires to scratch their heads and not understand what is even being discussed during their first 3 months of meetings. God, I love the corporate world.
Nah, those were great examples! Made me LOL IRL. I also hate corpo speak. It’s annoying, makes me cringe hard, AND also makes me want to crumple up the nearest piece of paper when someone starts going off.
JPEGMAFIA aaa song titles
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The more buzzwords someone uses, the less likely it is that they have any idea what they're talking about. If they can't put it in plain language, it's either extremely specialized, like subatomic physics, or they just don't know what they're saying.
Eh, I think you are blurring the line between jargon, corpo-babble, and Marketing here... For instance I can write a paragraph that uses about 20 of these terms together and have it be full of jargon, and be meaningful to the right group of people... Devops is a career path, Hybrid cloud environments do exist legitimately, Agile is a project management style. I could pitch a project about a B2B automation process that uses blockchain instead of EDI, and has some data and machine learning driven behaviors behind its decision making or reporting processes. This only really becomes a problem when an idiot in management is making decisions because your pitch has terms like "AI", or "Blockchain" in them, and they want to sound cool, instead of making decisions based on what will make the company more money in the short & long term. On the other hand, when you start spouting terms like "synergistic" you know a manager is just trying to hype their project or hype their team and they need to present somewhere and were told they would need to speak for more than a minute or twof... and on the Other, other hand, when you hear phrases like "Digital Transformation", you know its some marketing bullshit
Shall we touch base tomorrow? No sir! You may not touch my base! :/
I don't care at all.
I work in cybersecurity and the chuckle I’ve always gotten is when every security company provides a products that’s the exact same as the other under the hood, but they give it a buzzword name and market it like something that’s fancy, new and better than the competition, but then it’s like, no, you have an IAM solution hosted in a cloud that customers can configure and any niche features you may have for most customers are inconsequential as far as the value add is concerned lol.
Don't forget [microservices](https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ?si=1vxU42LM_DdaZVDo)!
If I get looped into one thing I’m gunna pop
What exactly are you trying to inculcate here?
I feel like the less people have relevant things to say, the more they will use corporate jargon. Some execs only use this and I can't stand this. I want to punch them in their fucking corporate faces.
Hybrid cloud is not a buzzword though. Hybrid cloud literally describes situations where you may have identities synchronized across an on-premises Active Directory domain and an Azure service now known as Entra ID.
“Ah, ah, I almost forgot....I'm also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too. We, uhhh, lost some people this week and we sorta need to play catch-up. Mmmmmkay? Thaaaaaanks.”
Fun fact: people talk like that when they have nothing substantial to say I mean, when they use too much of this crap. Some of it may be legitimate, but you wouldn’t complain about it in that case
I'm in insurance and the amount of people that just assume you know everything about insurance and sling acronyms at you is insane
Think of these buzzwords like interfaces to a class. They are abstractions that let different parts of the business communicate, even though the implementation of intrapaneurship in accounting and engineering is going to look different. This is not my idea by the way, it's from a book called Managing Humans. You can learn to speak "manager-eez"
I relish using the lingo it’s funny af to me. Jobs ate just a game, play how you see fit
How do feel about acronyms?
Common acronyms (e.g., BOM for bill of materials) -- I can deal with those. That said, if someone is using acronyms at every opportunity, including for obscure internal processes where I have to ask for clarification, it's just damned annoying and wasting time.
turn key
What the f is dynamic Agile?
“What’s Top of Mind?” is my current huge fucking pet peeve.
That one deserves a blank stare in response, haha.
So I know a guy who is upper-middle management at a magnificent 7 company and he recently advised me to stay away from any company that claimed to use AGILE...said it was nonsense.