alt Hacker NewsWorkers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs
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If anyone wants a chuckle, I vibe-coded an endless supply of "synergizing paradigm" terms as a slideshow for a fake corporation. It's fun to put on in the background on a tv somewhere to see if anyone notices.
https://brightpath-global-solutions.com/
Edit: repo link: https://github.com/chronick/global-business-solutions
I suspect this is why formal languages exist; as a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay, and a system for turning bullshit into parse errors.
We are undoing much of this progress by now insisting everything be expressed in natural language for a machine to translate on our behalf, like a tour guide.
The natives will continue to speak amongst themselves in their mother tongue.
Last time I worked corporate, we were acquired and I was asked what my job was by somebody on the other side. I said “My job is to make you feel good about whatever it is that I may or may not be doing around this place.”
Despite it being a joke, I think there’s a lot of truth in there that explains corp-tongue -- from being visible in endless meetings to in-group parlance to cutthroat promotion tracks, a lot of corporate America boils down to narrative, storytelling and performance more than booking sensible profit and delivering the very best to client and user. This type of language and expression is a major tool for making people feel good about your actual, contestable value in an organization.
It’s both kabuki and kayfabe lol
The headline says these workers "might be bad at their jobs," but considered in the context of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" thesis - that a huge chunk of white-collar work is pointless make-work for surplus labor - then in a hierarchy that rewards BS-fluency (which Littrell speculates), they are actually _good_ at their jobs.
The study measures analytic thinking as a proxy for performance, but that is only the right metric if the organization rewards individuals on the basis of their ability to make good decisions. Which anyone who has spent time in a corporate setting will know is often far from the route to success in such a setting, regardless of what the organization would say.
If your role has no concrete output and your organization rewards BS-fluency, you need a jargon that performs productivity without being too specific - so this argot isn't useless, it maintains a hierarchy that the BS-fluent can be promoted through. Not so much a rising tide but a blocked toilet backing up through the org chart. And BS-receptive workers are more satisfied with their jobs, because by their organization's actual values (versus whatever might be written in the mission statement), they're succeeding.
The BS-intolerant and analytically competent are less satisfied because they're the ones running into the blockers that the BS is covering for - or working through them only to discover that there's no tangible work to do under all the jargon.
The takeaway for me is: if you're interviewing somewhere and the hiring manager starts talking about "actualizing synergistic paradigms" instead of telling you concretely what the team shipped last quarter, it is likely one of those organizations. Places that can tell you plainly what they do are the places where your work will matter.
In a discussion yesterday about a large and complex physical system that is hard to optimise further without more work for it to do (lots of excess capacity), the VP suggested we should 'consider how emergent technologies could be leveraged to decrease overhead'. It is a clever way to say, I have no ideas either, but if a better machine that hasn't been invented yet becomes available we should use that'. I say 'clever', because the other execs nodded in approval, and agreed. From other conversations I have had with him I was just glad he didn't say 'AI' as per usual, although I am in two minds as to whether he did actually mean AI, but thought he had said it too many times in the last week. I'm not popular because I ask difficult things like, what kind of AI?
A good takeaway line from the article:
> Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”
and a link to the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400597536_The_Corpo...
How was this a surprise to anyone with more than three braincells?
But I guess it is good to have this study to point to in your workplace, instead of just seeing that it is self evident.
"synergistic leadership" or "growth-hacking paradigms" are, in my opinion, what my teenage son refers to as "brain rot". I don't know where these people come from who make up these terms, or what childhood trauma has done this to them, but I absolutely cannot tolerate any of it, it makes my skin crawl.
This is what offices exist for. In fields where efficiency matters, you end up with contractors, working remotely, getting paid by the project, and not being tied to one company. This is how lots of engineering and architecture works as well as many other fields.
In a work environment dominated by office social situations, language plays a key role in establishing social status, but there are other forms of posturing, with promotions generally based more on social status than job performance, reinforcing the social hierarchy. Technical buzzwords aren't even the only kind of jargon used in this manor, there's often an entire litany of language used outside of the job functions themselves. For example, human resources has its own language rules.
The author has come across this phenomenon and is attributing it to language alone, but there is far more involved here.
There does exist some purpose for corp-speak: it is a shared language for people in disparate parts of a large organization to communicate with. It is a tool, mostly for managers.
Managers use it with peers because their job is coordination and communication.
Managers shouldn’t talk to their reports in corp-speak, but think of it like a shared protocol for all messages in the corporate message bus.
Corporate jargon is a relatively recent development in business history.[1] It wasn't seen much until the 1950s and 1960s, when "organization development" and management consulting became an industry. Peter Drucker seems to have popularized it in the 1980s.
Then came PowerPoint.
Before that it was more of a political and religious style of communication. In those areas, speeches and texts designed to be popular but not commit to much dominate. Religious texts are notorious for their ambiguity.
The point seems to be to express authority without taking responsibility.
[1] https://www.rivier.edu/academics/blog-posts/circling-back-on...
> “By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.”
That's what she said.
Note that this isn't a study of actual workplaces, it's based on cognitive tests, so "bad at their jobs" may be a stretch. For example, "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic abilities" may be good for business, e.g. when dealing with US government contracts in 2026.
Reminds me of how a Plumbus is made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMGd_rzRdY
I always thought one of the best promises of AI was to be able to feed it a 'jargon heavy' document (business contract, corporate policy, congressional bill, etc.), and have it spit out the real meaning in plain language.
"Don't sign this because you are screwed if x, y, or z happens!" would be a good summation in many cases.
Has anyone had much success with this kind of AI interaction?
Corporate BS is the topic I want to study if I ever pursue a PhD. Not only BS that is directed from the top down, but also BS from the bottom and laterally. I'm curious what in corporate culture allows it to grow and what slows it. I also wonder if it's always bad or if it's beneficial in small amounts.
Anecdotally I have seen BS used to delay or avoid making commitments. BS can mask someone's lack of knowledge, or lack of execution. Middle managers seem to be the position to squash or spread BS. They often have a hard time detecting BS because they are too far from the work. When I think back to the best Directors and skip-level managers I have had in my career, they were all great BS detectors. They didn't let smooth talkers in their organization rise based on BS alone. They didn't let dependencies wriggle out of their commitments based on BS.
George Orwell wrote about this 80 years ago: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Seems to be hugged to death. Link from The Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260302211051/https://news.corn...
Based on how they conducted the test: - used an IQ / analytical test - correlated that to whether people cared about flowery language
Generally speaking, analytical people care more about numbers than words, so isn't this more of an 'expected result'?
Silence data driven decisions maker. A vibes guy is talking.
The Simpsons helped popularize this theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk8grGedzAw
Isn't this the premise behind Dilbert?
This has been proven out again and again in my experience. Going as far back as being a student advisor in college. Any time I would run into someone using these words (in advising sessions, interviews, casual conversation), the speaker had no further depth when pressed on the topic they were trying to wave at.
To analyse the impact of this study I recommend that we set up an interdepartmental committee with fairly broad terms of reference so that at the end of the day we'll be in the position to think through the various implications and arrive at a decision based on long-term considerations rather than rush prematurely into precipitate and possibly ill-conceived action which might well have unforeseen repercussions.
Isn't this just the obvious conclusion you would expect going in? Corporate bullshit is meant to sound impressive whilst simultaneously either saying nothing, or hiding the real meaning.
Synergy is a great example - what the person saying it hopes you understand is that Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros have a complimentary set of skills that when put together will be more profitable. What they actually mean is that when we merge these two companies we're going to have two sets of sales teams, two sets of marketing teams, two production teams, two sets of HR, accounts, back office etc. And so we're going to be more efficient because everyone I just mentioned is going to be fired.
So yeah of course, the intent is to trick you and the likelihood of success is (inversely) proportional to how smart you are and it turns out if you're smart you probably also do other parts of your job well.
No love for Erving Goffman here at all?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Ev...
The original buzzword generator for palmOS. I used it extensively: https://archive.org/details/palm3_buzzword
I feel like this study is very naive about how corporate status and power works. Consider this part:
> Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it
The rank and file don't elevate leaders, it's decided by higher-ups, and the higher you go the more they care about actual non-bullshit results. Where bullshit thrives is because higher level business strategy is actually hard and ambiguous, so there's a continuum of bullshit where you are expected to at least say credible things, but it's couched in bullshit terminology to broaden the range of success they can claim, and leave room and plausable deniability for failures. Strong leaders are keenly aware of this nuance, and therefore leaders are judged on reputation and outcomes over time, because any given thing they say may be wrong, but the track record is undeniable. This is why you never hear a bad word about leaders while they are there, they are just fired (or more likely "resign") one day seemingly out of the blue.
What this article misses is that to survive in a corporate environment everyone needs to put up and nod along to bullshit. Most of the time whether it's right or wrong and the level of bullshit doesn't really matter to most of the employees, they're just incentivized to play along and not express negativity. Within the rank and file, obviously some are more susceptible to bullshit than others, but I don't think this study necessarily gets at that, as a lot of people will act agreeable just to survive in corporate life, and their disposition will be largely independent of their true understanding and feelings about whatever bullshit they are presented with day to day.
“Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop.
Technically that's a positive feedback loop, or reinforcing feedback loop. The author is probably using "negative" in to mean undesirable. Gotta get your jargon right!
I thought tfa would say seeking synergy is a sign one is struggling with ones own deliverables so one tries to add value elsewhere in the organization. Is synergy really such a poorly defined term that it's synonymous with corporate bullshit?
I read the article and thought it was referring to combining paradigms from different fields to create synergistic effects and was disheartened to hear that wasn't a useful thing to do.
Workers who spend all day posting on LinkedIn might be bad at their jobs...
There is a grotesquely pulsing layer of overconfident dumbasses in business (and society in general) and this is the language they speak. My job at any company, as far as I can see it, is to make sure my local orbit is cleared of these wackos. They are parasitic extractors of value and soul.
Actually disagree. Based on the last 20 years of my experience in corporate America, “practical decision-making” was never part of the job at any level of leadership.
Engineers, I am so sorry. They are still going to be your bosses.
Twaddling and puffery!
In hypnosis terms, this is confusion induction.
I found this title amusing, since I'm actually synergizing paradigms, i.e. trying to find the commonalities between different models of human behavior.
(There are dozens of us!)
In summary, employees who are impressed by corporate bullshit do badly on tests of analytic intelligence. This is very unsurprising.
Happy to see that the term "bullshit" has established itself in the scientific literature.
What does it mean to be "impressed" by such terms?
On the bright side, it's nice that a significant number of these folks self-select by moving to Dubai.
When you can't convince, confuse is how you sum up corporate speak.
> “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”
Modern politics by a different name. The parallels are obvious, along with the Peter Principle and so on.
Lots of people on here saying 'that's not me', but probably say 'ping me back' or 'learnings' which is very much one end of the spectrum of corporate bullshit that infects everyone. Some of it is stupidity (the English language has a word: 'lessons'), some of it is natural language evolution, and some of it is 'global' English: 'please revert', and some of it is very intentional management waffle. As the (unviersity) saying goes, 'if you can't blind 'em with science, baffle them with bullshit'.
Doesn’t your brain tune out those words?
It's surprising to me that people don't consider these coded language.
Sure, the junior manager might use them vaguely to mimic, but IMHO, when vague language comes up at decision tables, it's usually coding something more precise in a sort of plausible deniability.
A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.
A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players
etc etc.
If my impressions are correct, of course ICs are going to balk at these statements - they seem disconnected from reality and are magically disconnected from the effects on purpose. Yes, this is bad management to the ICs, but it's pretty culturally inevitable, I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language.
A good manager takes this direction in front of all their ICs, laughs it off as corpo speak, but was given the signal to have a private talk with one of their group who triggered the problem... I dunno maybe my time in management was particularly distopian, but this seemed obvious once I saw it.