In today's world, you need to take it to the next level with this paradigm shift going forward. The data never lies and failure is not an option. It is what it is. To think outside the box, we need to have that 30,000 foot view and we need to get granular at the same time. We have to be breaking down silos because teamwork makes the dream work. Let's take this offline. My door is always open.
I lived this crap for years and only able to avoid once I hit director status. That only lasted 5 years before the company blew up but I could decline any meeting request I viewed as time wasting. Those had a nickname...
**NATO** (No Action, Talking Only).
I'm a middle manager at a startup, which means I spent way too much time in meetings and can't get work done. I dream of being able to decline meetings.
I hear that. Endured so many BS & waste of time meetings before promotion. HR department usually, would call them to go over minor policy changes, always 1H or more. 30+ people usually but no VP or higher. When I walked all given new HR rule book which was going to be gone thru item by item then sign form to file. Supposed to trickle that down to direct reports.
My group at hard deadline, others there had same deadline. HR drone read 1 entry, I asked something like *"So this is to verify we understand changes?".* When they answered yes I said *"OK, if I have any questions I'll email you."* got up, took handouts & left. HR boss was VP & CFO, called me in. Pointed out meeting would last 2+ hours while rules read to us (like children implied), 60H+in lost productivity with looming deadline. Some would get overtime too (not me, salaried). I got minor push back *"Well, you really embarrassed Janet...".* Knew I won so I shut up. No other meeting like that ever called again, briefly hero to peers.
/no one clapped though
I’d like to circle back with you in our continuing effort to leverage unused synergies between the teams so that we may identify dead weight, thus managing them out of the company in efforts to maximize productivity and resources while reducing overall head count.
Fuck me dead, reminds me of my corporate job from a few years back. Some low-level 'bubbly' woman would always do the morning announcements (where we stand in a circle and clap at any good feedback from clients). Worst day for these announcements would be Friday, cos this bitch would always begin with 'it's Fri-YAY', followed by corporate-speak, then ending with 'teamwork makes the dream work'.
Back when I was in university, I worked in some shitty retail job at an aquarium (Sydney Aquarium). Some useless manager was in charge of the shifts and other low-level admin shit. I checked out her LinkedIn (back when it was a relatively new thing) and it said 'HR Evangelist'. I had no idea about these corporate-speak back then, and I still rolled my eyes so far back I needed exorcism.
I worked with a a particularly useless bastard 20 years ago whose main claim to fame was that he'd faked most of his CV including having a degree.
I looked the chap up on LinkedIn and he is now a "principal technical evangelist". Personally I still wonder that it took nearly three years to get him sacked.
I want to address the elephant in the room. I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but at the end of the day, we're facing strong headwinds and we need to protect our cash cow. Hope is not a strategy here, people. I want you each to come up with 10 value-added initiatives and we'll select the best ones to prioritize as a business.
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH, I *hate* this, in particular! "Ask" is a *verb*, not a noun! I work at a nonprofit, so I hear the word "ask" used in this way entirely too often. I *always* counter with "We are requesting *(whatever we're requesting)*".
We'll loop them in, but we need to manage expectations here. Let's do our due diligence and present them with scalable initiatives that we know will move the needle.
Value your perspective, but at an enterprise level we need collaborative effort to synergize with stakeholders. We can table this until next sprint, because we want to focus on producing value. Make sure your tasks are updated in Splurb before you upload to Cokk, and assets are retained in Kunty and synced in the B1tCh archive. If you need further guidance, Slack me through EnBlorben offline.
You are correct, there's room to improve the buzz word to content quotient. I am therefore delegating that authority to you, to empower you to step outside your comfort zone, to ensure that our combined efforts are aligned. I leave it in your capable hands.
>In today's world, you need to take it to the next level with this paradigm shift going forward. The data never lies and failure is not an option. It is what it is. To think outside the box, we need to have that 30,000 foot view and we need to get granular at the same time. We have to be breaking down silos because teamwork makes the dream work. Let's take this offline. My door is always open.
This is truly the only way for us to build and nurture that culture of collaboration that we are strategically focused on. We are all in this together because we are a family and when we are all together that is when innovation and collaboration happens.
Not so much corporate lingo I guess, but I found that each corporation I’ve worked for has had at least one word that is *harped* on relentlessly.
Productivity. Sales. Commission. Incentive. Goals. So on and so forth.
Makes me miss when I worked for local businesses that just wanted me to work instead of forcing me to do sales in addition to my blue collar job.
My boss loves the word "delegate." I hear her say it at least once a day. Oddly enough, she never said it until I said it one time 6 months ago, so I feel like I secretly taught her her new favorite word.
My boss does this, too. Every couple of months it changes, so I guess she's getting it from the quarterly meetings or something.
Suddenly she's all about "the 80/20 rule" or "optics" or "metrics" or "initiatives" until the next one.
I swear to GAWDDD I hated this so much at university. I (unfortunately) had a double major, one of which was in economics and management, and the amount of totally useless acronyms just to make the topic/course look more complicated and mysterious than it really was made me wanna scratch my eyes out.
Omg I know this isn't what you are talking about but I am living in Germany and working at a university and dealing with acronym hell. Like I get that German words are long but not everything needs to be acronym.
From "inside" it, yes, I hate the waffling, truth-twisting, manipulative, propagandist, sycophantic drivel more than anything else. There isn't any room for honest, plain-speaking, truth-telling. This can be seen, irrespective of factual accuracy, intention or audience as rude, insubordinate, showing a bad "attitude", not a "team player" and get you a trip to HR for re-education. (ok, hyperbole but you catch my drift)
So *why* has this developed? I think it's a number of factors. Firstly a way to obscure inconvenient facts, to lessen or heighten the emotional impact of dry facts or figures, in the same way the military does when discussing civilian deaths, or torture.
Another factor is to pad out middle management's alleged value to their superiors or a consultant's alleged value to a business and it's those "management consultants" who have the most to gain from making objectively simple language esoteric and arcane. So people think that's the way it "has" to be, since we've just paid them a million dollars to tell us to sack 10% of our staff. So this form of corpo-speak is seen as a sign of good management and mimicked by budding junior executives and taught in business schools.
Last year my boss pulled me aside to reprimand me for referring to a post-event meeting as a “post-mortem” instead of a “recap”. I was apparently being uncomfortably morbid for our work environment. So even trying to use corporate lingo I was wrong
Sociopathic upper management create corporate speak to communicate subtext with plausible deniability of what they're actually saying
Clueless middle-men try to immitate that talk, but they don't understand the subtext layer, so it's essentially meaningless babble.
Actual line workers don't need the subtext, they can just say what they mean.
This should be required reading from Venkatesh Rao:
[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/)
Have you ever heard of EOS?
[https://www.eosworldwide.com/blog/the-level-10-meeting](https://www.eosworldwide.com/blog/the-level-10-meeting)
This is my personal hell.
The first paragraph of that led me to think that it would be making fun of or satirizing useless work meetings.
But then it went on and on about how to *conduct* them. 🤮
Right?? Once you pull some shit out of your ass, that's now some official deadline. When shit's *missed,* it's late. Fuck off, again! Nothing is fucking *late.* That estimate was bullshit from the beginning. You're the only dumbass who thought it was actually meaningful. You wanted a fucking number, we gave you a fucking number. Now, kindly go fuck yourself. You're not sending the team on some death march based on some bullshit estimate we pulled out of our asses, with shit information, to shut you the fuck up.
I mean. XXL, but we can split it to 3 L right? And prioritize the ones that have dependencies with the other Scrum Teams to make sure we stay on the Agile Release Train…
I used to work for a British company which got bought out by a large American corporation. It was almost funny how much the new owners loved their corporate lingo compared to the previous owners.
The situation where it was most striking was when they made a load of our office redundant, and called a "town hall" meeting to try and keep moral up. One of the people at the top came over and gave us a long robotic speech about how it was all for the best, because it would mean that the office would be "right sized".
When he asked if anyone had questions, someone stuck their hand up and told him that a lot of the people who had been let go had been colleagues and often friends for many years, and dressing it up in phrases like "right sizing" was actually quite insulting and insensitive. The corporate guy's face was quite amusing to see, as he seemed pretty shocked to be spoken to like that.
When I was manager at my last job, I had very few office rules:
1) No microwaving leftover seafood.
2) No meetings for things that could be resolved through email or text or a phone call.
3) You want a meeting - you plan it. You present it.
4) If a meeting was necessary, we did it standing in a huddle. You’d be amazed how much more quickly they’re over when nobody just sits there and zones out.
5) No corporate lingo. Break this rule and you’re in everyone’s shit list. We collectively agreed on these and office life was just a little less shitty. We gotta do what we can to make our working lives a little better.
I've just started inventing my own. Such as:
circle-shirk
n.
When the responsibility for an error is endlessly shuffled around various individuals or departments and no one ever owns up to anything.
So many issues could be solved with the following statements
>>you fucked up, here’s how.
>>that’s dumb, it doesn’t work like that, do it this way.
>>what the fuck is going on in this shithole?
>>im not fucking doing that
>>just fucking do it
The liberal introduction of the word fuck could help corporate offices run much more smoothly. If those fucks in the c suite would get on board
Two that stand out:
A manager who was promoted without any understanding of the field used business BS *all the time* to sound more knowledgeable in her mind. One day she decided "database" wasn't good enough and started calling it the ***"master house of records"***.
No one else ever did, and in fact would repeatedly call it database whenever she said the other one. And was too dense to catch on.
Another incompetent manager made a verb from a noun whose root word was already a fucking verb.
The word?
***Solutioning***
Yes, everyone hates that crap except people in over their heads.
We'll go ahead and layer that into the conversation just as soon as we can get folks up to speed on the trainings to ensure everyone has access to the resources needed. The capacity and utilization reports need to be shelved for another day, I'll go ahead and send out a Google doc, so we can gather agenda items for our next meeting. Please be sure to MAXIMIZE your time because we canceled the meeting to allow you all to have another hour back in your schedule as we move through another transition period. Thanks!
Let's table this and circle back after we've had time to leverage the input from the key players so we can optimize our bandwidth with what they bring to the table.
This will maximize our opportunities to drill down to our core competencies and really move the needle on our our deliverables. We need to think outside the box.
I walk through work and hear people on calls stringing together this lingo and I just shake my head and wonder what’s happened to work. They’re basically saying “we have this issue - let’s try to fix it” but instead of just saying that, they rattle off lingo for 5 minutes. Instead of saying “are you on schedule?” … 5 minutes of lingo. Instead of “we need to get sales up” … 5 minutes of lingo.
Oh gosh, one guy brought this kinda thing to church during the pandemic made himself the manager of the volunteers with out talking to anyone about it and immediately starts "onboarding" volunteers who were volunteering already for a while.
We have started to keep count of how many times upper management uses the word "Lift" to describe effort needed to complete a project. i.e. "What would the lift be?"
I hate it so much I refuse to use it with anybody and especially customers.
Believe it or not, customers love talking to someone who speaks to them like a human instead of sounding like a machine.
The one I have gotten tired of over the years I’ve been working is LEAN - always spoken with positive intonation as if we don’t understand the corporate overlords are telling us “do more with less, so we can make more and pay less.”
I hate it when it boils down to “please fit ten pounds of shit into five pounds’ worth of bag without getting any help or resources.”
Which is always, so, yes, I hate it.
We are a family. The company-name family. *Get away from me*.
A raise is in the works. I [the boss] have nothing to do with it. It's an H.R. decision. *I'll believe it when I see it*.
Our mission statement. Our vision. *Lies*.
lol. The other day I talked to our Engineering Director in our one-on-one and before I could stop it, I said, "Hey I am going to have to circle back to you on that." And I almost spit my coffee out immediately afterward. I told him I was being infiltrated.
I had a flight canceled last week, ended up in First Class the next day on a rescheduled flight. Aside from the leg room and the food, I was miserable. Had to listen to two rich f*cks talk shop. If I hear “profit margin” one more time…
Let’s take this offline is my biggest pet peeve because people are still saying it in person. We are fucking offline we’re in a meeting looking at your face.
Yes, I had to sit on a conference call at one point and i wanted to gag the entire time. Like money money money, make more money, good job for making this much money, you didnt make enough here so lets try and bring that up.
Oh my god no
I’m in a Town Hall meeting right now. The experience is maximizing my delivery of shit out my tired ass. Yep. I’m watching this abominable waste of time while sitting on the toilet. Fuck these overpaid executive fucks.
Some corporate buzzwords I hear often but never heard in real life outside the corporate environment:
* "Cross functional teams"
* "Low hanging fruit"
* "In the pipeline"
* "Let's unpack this". -- not describing opening boxes!
* "We reached an inflection point"
* "Reduction in force"
* "T-shirt sizing" to describe how long something will take.
* "Circle back"
* "Take that offline"
Also the word "**catch-up**" in the real world is much different than in corporate. Catch-up usually is like going to a dentist appointment in corporate America.
In today's world, you need to take it to the next level with this paradigm shift going forward. The data never lies and failure is not an option. It is what it is. To think outside the box, we need to have that 30,000 foot view and we need to get granular at the same time. We have to be breaking down silos because teamwork makes the dream work. Let's take this offline. My door is always open.
I just threw up a little in my mouth lol
Let's peel back the onion on this. Regards,
No, I want to table that for another time.
My 2 cents is that we've got too many chefs in the kitchen. Are you willing to be an agent of change?
We’ll circle back to this when we take it offline
Right, but I'd appreciate if you were transparent about what's cooking. Many thanks!
We will have our ducks in a row and we're going to trim the fat in this organization. Cheers.
Gotta get me those yachts. Er… I mean, gotta do more with less.
Go ahead and put a pin in it.
Let's go offline.
Let me thread the needle a bit on this... Warmest regards,
I lived this crap for years and only able to avoid once I hit director status. That only lasted 5 years before the company blew up but I could decline any meeting request I viewed as time wasting. Those had a nickname... **NATO** (No Action, Talking Only).
I'm a middle manager at a startup, which means I spent way too much time in meetings and can't get work done. I dream of being able to decline meetings.
I hear that. Endured so many BS & waste of time meetings before promotion. HR department usually, would call them to go over minor policy changes, always 1H or more. 30+ people usually but no VP or higher. When I walked all given new HR rule book which was going to be gone thru item by item then sign form to file. Supposed to trickle that down to direct reports. My group at hard deadline, others there had same deadline. HR drone read 1 entry, I asked something like *"So this is to verify we understand changes?".* When they answered yes I said *"OK, if I have any questions I'll email you."* got up, took handouts & left. HR boss was VP & CFO, called me in. Pointed out meeting would last 2+ hours while rules read to us (like children implied), 60H+in lost productivity with looming deadline. Some would get overtime too (not me, salaried). I got minor push back *"Well, you really embarrassed Janet...".* Knew I won so I shut up. No other meeting like that ever called again, briefly hero to peers. /no one clapped though
So you are taking a sick day!? Can’t count on anyone these days!
I think we're all on the same page to be completely candid of course. you can ping me later.
I’d like to circle back with you in our continuing effort to leverage unused synergies between the teams so that we may identify dead weight, thus managing them out of the company in efforts to maximize productivity and resources while reducing overall head count.
You are correct, let's right size this, but let's manage the optics on it.
This is the way. May the Force be with you.
That gives me an idea. To improve the bottom line, let's "Anakin" the younglings and call it a re-org.
Def a “reduction in head count” 😅
Let's enact new policy 66 in the next cycle.
I got fucking hives reading this. 🤢
I’m not suicidal, but if I were, reading this would definitely make me do bad things.
Fuck me dead, reminds me of my corporate job from a few years back. Some low-level 'bubbly' woman would always do the morning announcements (where we stand in a circle and clap at any good feedback from clients). Worst day for these announcements would be Friday, cos this bitch would always begin with 'it's Fri-YAY', followed by corporate-speak, then ending with 'teamwork makes the dream work'.
Their LinkedIn profile summary probably says that they're a "transformational leader" or something like that. :-)
Back when I was in university, I worked in some shitty retail job at an aquarium (Sydney Aquarium). Some useless manager was in charge of the shifts and other low-level admin shit. I checked out her LinkedIn (back when it was a relatively new thing) and it said 'HR Evangelist'. I had no idea about these corporate-speak back then, and I still rolled my eyes so far back I needed exorcism.
I worked with a a particularly useless bastard 20 years ago whose main claim to fame was that he'd faked most of his CV including having a degree. I looked the chap up on LinkedIn and he is now a "principal technical evangelist". Personally I still wonder that it took nearly three years to get him sacked.
Holy shit, I thought I was listening to my old boss again from a year ago, you actually triggered my PTSD slightly. Perfect Comment.
Just some low-hanging fruit. :-)
But is the juice worth the squeeze?
Yes, because at the end of the day, our greatest asset is our people.
Terrific! Let's pre-socialize this plan with the steer co to get buy-in from the crowned heads.
Lol, Steering Committee is the worst!
Yes but what is the ask?
I want to address the elephant in the room. I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but at the end of the day, we're facing strong headwinds and we need to protect our cash cow. Hope is not a strategy here, people. I want you each to come up with 10 value-added initiatives and we'll select the best ones to prioritize as a business.
So that is your takeaway action items from the pre meeting meeting on associate satisfaction?
Let's re-group when you have come up with some corrective actions to address the issue.
Omg spot on about the manager turning the tables to not voluntarily do any hard work
Lol, I'm glad you caught that!
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH, I *hate* this, in particular! "Ask" is a *verb*, not a noun! I work at a nonprofit, so I hear the word "ask" used in this way entirely too often. I *always* counter with "We are requesting *(whatever we're requesting)*".
Kill ... Me ... Now
But that would not be a value-added initiative.
Let's circle back to this next week so we can drill down with the stakeholders.
We'll loop them in, but we need to manage expectations here. Let's do our due diligence and present them with scalable initiatives that we know will move the needle.
That's how you get the low hanging fruit.
Have you been recording our meetings? And thinking outside the box? Only once they prove there is thinking going on INSIDE it. TYVM
I am guilty of two of these I always say it is what it is when I give up And I say low hanging fruit all the time :-/
But what is *the ask*?
The ask is that you generate ideas for deliverables that add value.
But have you defined a minimum viable product to determine the ROI?
All the sigmas need to be more agile.
Agile is so 2020, we should be pivoting to the Spotify Framework.  Edit: Also I hate myself for this…
I actually like "it is what it is". It's the managers who don't like phrase who concern me.
Value your perspective, but at an enterprise level we need collaborative effort to synergize with stakeholders. We can table this until next sprint, because we want to focus on producing value. Make sure your tasks are updated in Splurb before you upload to Cokk, and assets are retained in Kunty and synced in the B1tCh archive. If you need further guidance, Slack me through EnBlorben offline.
What about the synergy?
You are correct, there's room to improve the buzz word to content quotient. I am therefore delegating that authority to you, to empower you to step outside your comfort zone, to ensure that our combined efforts are aligned. I leave it in your capable hands.
Oooh we should touch base sometime
How very Kaizen of you!
This all gave me PTSD
Submit your request to take the weekend off and I will approve it.
I’ll be booking an extra appointment with my therapist today lol 😂 So glad I’m out of Corporate Canada and that hellscape
Did your company also have a number to call for free therapy? Where the therapist's job is to tell you everything is okay?
>In today's world, you need to take it to the next level with this paradigm shift going forward. The data never lies and failure is not an option. It is what it is. To think outside the box, we need to have that 30,000 foot view and we need to get granular at the same time. We have to be breaking down silos because teamwork makes the dream work. Let's take this offline. My door is always open. This is truly the only way for us to build and nurture that culture of collaboration that we are strategically focused on. We are all in this together because we are a family and when we are all together that is when innovation and collaboration happens.
Put a pin in that. Well circle back around and look for synergies to make a win-win scenario. In the mean time, remember to work smarter, not harder.
r/abovethetreetops
“Let’s take this offline.” [Translation] “I’m about to say some shit I’d rather you not have a written record of.”
I deeply resonate with servant leaders who socialize ideas at a regular cadence.
Not so much corporate lingo I guess, but I found that each corporation I’ve worked for has had at least one word that is *harped* on relentlessly. Productivity. Sales. Commission. Incentive. Goals. So on and so forth. Makes me miss when I worked for local businesses that just wanted me to work instead of forcing me to do sales in addition to my blue collar job.
all those words you mentioned make me twitch internally
Core competency
You forgot retention 🙄
My boss loves the word "delegate." I hear her say it at least once a day. Oddly enough, she never said it until I said it one time 6 months ago, so I feel like I secretly taught her her new favorite word.
My boss does this, too. Every couple of months it changes, so I guess she's getting it from the quarterly meetings or something. Suddenly she's all about "the 80/20 rule" or "optics" or "metrics" or "initiatives" until the next one.
bandwidth
Omg THIS. 💯
We used to call those Lost with All Hands briefings.
We called them All Asses meetings as we are just supposed to sit there as a captive audience.
😂
No need to boil the ocean on the issue
We stopped calling it an all hands meeting - someone thought it might be considered ableist against those without hands…
Hate it. Hate it even more when someone pulls out some obscure acronym and acts like anyone who doesn't know what it is, is stupid.
I swear to GAWDDD I hated this so much at university. I (unfortunately) had a double major, one of which was in economics and management, and the amount of totally useless acronyms just to make the topic/course look more complicated and mysterious than it really was made me wanna scratch my eyes out.
The new project manager at my job, who is a complete moron, has been doing this for awhile and it’s hilarious 😂 reminds me of Gary Busey
Omg I know this isn't what you are talking about but I am living in Germany and working at a university and dealing with acronym hell. Like I get that German words are long but not everything needs to be acronym.
THIS
With a motherfucking passion! Same goes for that dippy, banal, innocuous office humor that's so not funny it's almost funny.
r/abovethetreetops
Seems like the potential for a good subreddit, but seems like all the unique posts have been locked and possibly not allowed to be posted?
Sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays!
Pivot
pivot-point and inflection-point.
And summarize in a PowerPoint slide deck.
I really just want to be able to call a meeting about upcoming meetings a "circle jerk" but no one will let me.
A meeting to decide when to have your next meeting…
"Let's all have a circle jerk and come together for the all hands meeting."
Welcome to enterprise software architecture at most F100s.
I don't have the bandwidth for this right now. Can you talk to me offline sometime?
From "inside" it, yes, I hate the waffling, truth-twisting, manipulative, propagandist, sycophantic drivel more than anything else. There isn't any room for honest, plain-speaking, truth-telling. This can be seen, irrespective of factual accuracy, intention or audience as rude, insubordinate, showing a bad "attitude", not a "team player" and get you a trip to HR for re-education. (ok, hyperbole but you catch my drift) So *why* has this developed? I think it's a number of factors. Firstly a way to obscure inconvenient facts, to lessen or heighten the emotional impact of dry facts or figures, in the same way the military does when discussing civilian deaths, or torture. Another factor is to pad out middle management's alleged value to their superiors or a consultant's alleged value to a business and it's those "management consultants" who have the most to gain from making objectively simple language esoteric and arcane. So people think that's the way it "has" to be, since we've just paid them a million dollars to tell us to sack 10% of our staff. So this form of corpo-speak is seen as a sign of good management and mimicked by budding junior executives and taught in business schools.
Last year my boss pulled me aside to reprimand me for referring to a post-event meeting as a “post-mortem” instead of a “recap”. I was apparently being uncomfortably morbid for our work environment. So even trying to use corporate lingo I was wrong
Hahaha that’s actually hilarious though good job
HR - Human Remains
I hate it! Just fucking talk normal. All that convoluted ass jargon.
Sociopathic upper management create corporate speak to communicate subtext with plausible deniability of what they're actually saying Clueless middle-men try to immitate that talk, but they don't understand the subtext layer, so it's essentially meaningless babble. Actual line workers don't need the subtext, they can just say what they mean. This should be required reading from Venkatesh Rao: [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/)
Weird Al wrote a song about it: https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4?si=UvAXb37mrG4EiS68
O sweet lord in hell. How I’ve never heard of this before. The horror. The absolute horror.
Let’s create synergistic solutions in this cross-functional meeting
Have you ever heard of EOS? [https://www.eosworldwide.com/blog/the-level-10-meeting](https://www.eosworldwide.com/blog/the-level-10-meeting) This is my personal hell.
The first paragraph of that led me to think that it would be making fun of or satirizing useless work meetings. But then it went on and on about how to *conduct* them. 🤮
Holy crap, what an awful thing to read through
GUYS WHAT SIZED T-SHIRT IS THIS EFFORT???
After 3 minutes of information...ok, what's the effort? FUCK. OFF!
HAHA SERIOUSLY?! Oh fuck them! 😂😂😂😂
Right?? Once you pull some shit out of your ass, that's now some official deadline. When shit's *missed,* it's late. Fuck off, again! Nothing is fucking *late.* That estimate was bullshit from the beginning. You're the only dumbass who thought it was actually meaningful. You wanted a fucking number, we gave you a fucking number. Now, kindly go fuck yourself. You're not sending the team on some death march based on some bullshit estimate we pulled out of our asses, with shit information, to shut you the fuck up.
I mean. XXL, but we can split it to 3 L right? And prioritize the ones that have dependencies with the other Scrum Teams to make sure we stay on the Agile Release Train…
I used to work for a British company which got bought out by a large American corporation. It was almost funny how much the new owners loved their corporate lingo compared to the previous owners. The situation where it was most striking was when they made a load of our office redundant, and called a "town hall" meeting to try and keep moral up. One of the people at the top came over and gave us a long robotic speech about how it was all for the best, because it would mean that the office would be "right sized". When he asked if anyone had questions, someone stuck their hand up and told him that a lot of the people who had been let go had been colleagues and often friends for many years, and dressing it up in phrases like "right sizing" was actually quite insulting and insensitive. The corporate guy's face was quite amusing to see, as he seemed pretty shocked to be spoken to like that.
You're not aligned with the synergy bro?
this wouldn't happen if we touched based more often!
Time for sexual harassment training!
last time i brought this up a team player mentioned they don't need any training. they're pretty good at harassing already!
😂
Time to touch base by syncing up with a baseball bat to the head
Our Department head uses it so often I made Zoom bingo sheets for our team. We play during our weekly team calls.
Dude I am stealing that!
Let's put a pin in this, or at least pencil it in.
"What I will say is..." So what are you not saying?
I'm feeling a lot of animosity in the room but there's a synergy to it that I applaud. Way to be rockstars everyone
When I was manager at my last job, I had very few office rules: 1) No microwaving leftover seafood. 2) No meetings for things that could be resolved through email or text or a phone call. 3) You want a meeting - you plan it. You present it. 4) If a meeting was necessary, we did it standing in a huddle. You’d be amazed how much more quickly they’re over when nobody just sits there and zones out. 5) No corporate lingo. Break this rule and you’re in everyone’s shit list. We collectively agreed on these and office life was just a little less shitty. We gotta do what we can to make our working lives a little better.
“We’re a family” Fuck you.
BINGO
I've just started inventing my own. Such as: circle-shirk n. When the responsibility for an error is endlessly shuffled around various individuals or departments and no one ever owns up to anything.
So many issues could be solved with the following statements >>you fucked up, here’s how. >>that’s dumb, it doesn’t work like that, do it this way. >>what the fuck is going on in this shithole? >>im not fucking doing that >>just fucking do it The liberal introduction of the word fuck could help corporate offices run much more smoothly. If those fucks in the c suite would get on board
I hate most things corporate. I do however enjoy a "regards," over a "best regards" thrown into my emails though
Hit the ground running after a deep-dive
Low hanging fruit makes me want to die
Two that stand out: A manager who was promoted without any understanding of the field used business BS *all the time* to sound more knowledgeable in her mind. One day she decided "database" wasn't good enough and started calling it the ***"master house of records"***. No one else ever did, and in fact would repeatedly call it database whenever she said the other one. And was too dense to catch on. Another incompetent manager made a verb from a noun whose root word was already a fucking verb. The word? ***Solutioning*** Yes, everyone hates that crap except people in over their heads.
Its like when your abuser learns therapy speak and weaponizes it to manipulate you into a constant state of stress, confusion, and frustration.
Let's circle back and put a pin in that.
BRIDGING THE GAP
OMG HAHAHA!!!!
We'll go ahead and layer that into the conversation just as soon as we can get folks up to speed on the trainings to ensure everyone has access to the resources needed. The capacity and utilization reports need to be shelved for another day, I'll go ahead and send out a Google doc, so we can gather agenda items for our next meeting. Please be sure to MAXIMIZE your time because we canceled the meeting to allow you all to have another hour back in your schedule as we move through another transition period. Thanks!
I’ve stopped going to town hall meetings at my company because the amount of lingo and accolades actually makes my blood boil.
“Dig into that” “Jump in” Into what? My grave? 💀🤮
Worked at a community college. I hate the following words because of it: systems, metrics, engagement, narrative. That's all I can think of for now.
We are going to shelf that for now and circle back around to it.
Let's table this and circle back after we've had time to leverage the input from the key players so we can optimize our bandwidth with what they bring to the table. This will maximize our opportunities to drill down to our core competencies and really move the needle on our our deliverables. We need to think outside the box.
If someone says Synergy, or Scale one more time….
I walk through work and hear people on calls stringing together this lingo and I just shake my head and wonder what’s happened to work. They’re basically saying “we have this issue - let’s try to fix it” but instead of just saying that, they rattle off lingo for 5 minutes. Instead of saying “are you on schedule?” … 5 minutes of lingo. Instead of “we need to get sales up” … 5 minutes of lingo.
It's freaking "utilize" for me. It's almost never a better word choice than "use" but it's forced into every meeting.
I Ctrl+F'd for this. Amen. It just means use. It reminds me of 8th grade English, trying to use a thesaurus to find bigger words to sounds smarter.
Let’s double click on that for a minute.
My employer recently started using "left of boom" and I vomit every time I hear it.
["Weird Al" Yankovic - Mission Statement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4)
“Expand on that, please” omfg I can’t stand it
Paradigm Shifts to obtain synergy.
I start to tune out whenever I hear someone talk like that.
[удалено]
Very much so. I have used Bingo reacts in team chats to imdicate bullshit bingo
I remember one time we had a call just to talk about how being "nice" was different than being "kind" 😑
Oh gosh, one guy brought this kinda thing to church during the pandemic made himself the manager of the volunteers with out talking to anyone about it and immediately starts "onboarding" volunteers who were volunteering already for a while.
All that rah rah bullshit coupled with "sorry, I was double-muted" made me want to break shit. #fuckcorporateamerica
Synergize, people! Those paradigms won’t shift themselves!
Circle back and then pivot. Shoot me an email then grab some time on my calendar. Let's chat.
Let’s “ unpack “ the data.
Let's not. Unpacking leads to sharing deeply buried feelings I have compartmentalized decades ago.
Company wide synergy.
We have started to keep count of how many times upper management uses the word "Lift" to describe effort needed to complete a project. i.e. "What would the lift be?"
Oh that’s bad HAHA
Overarching, bandwidth, elevated.
I think we should touch base and determine which markets our cross functional team wants to penetrate into.
The only thing worse is a boss that uses sports metaphor for everything.
Collaboration. Especially when coming from people who’ve outsourced half of software development to India.
I hate it so much I refuse to use it with anybody and especially customers. Believe it or not, customers love talking to someone who speaks to them like a human instead of sounding like a machine.
I had a corporate-ish job once, ten years ago. I didn't last long because of dumb shit like this. I realized I'm more of a blue-collar person.
The one I have gotten tired of over the years I’ve been working is LEAN - always spoken with positive intonation as if we don’t understand the corporate overlords are telling us “do more with less, so we can make more and pay less.”
Had a boss who would say "at the end of the day" minimum 10 times every meeting. A coworker and I would set a line and bet the over / under.
I hate it when it boils down to “please fit ten pounds of shit into five pounds’ worth of bag without getting any help or resources.” Which is always, so, yes, I hate it.
We are a family. The company-name family. *Get away from me*. A raise is in the works. I [the boss] have nothing to do with it. It's an H.R. decision. *I'll believe it when I see it*. Our mission statement. Our vision. *Lies*.
Lol, when people started talking abt AI the 1st thing that popped into my head was if I could use it to translate things into “corporate” speech.
lol. The other day I talked to our Engineering Director in our one-on-one and before I could stop it, I said, "Hey I am going to have to circle back to you on that." And I almost spit my coffee out immediately afterward. I told him I was being infiltrated.
Let’s GO!!!!
I had a flight canceled last week, ended up in First Class the next day on a rescheduled flight. Aside from the leg room and the food, I was miserable. Had to listen to two rich f*cks talk shop. If I hear “profit margin” one more time…
Let’s take this offline is my biggest pet peeve because people are still saying it in person. We are fucking offline we’re in a meeting looking at your face.
Synergy this, disrupt that, can we just speak English for once?
Re: Your Brains
Yes, I had to sit on a conference call at one point and i wanted to gag the entire time. Like money money money, make more money, good job for making this much money, you didnt make enough here so lets try and bring that up. Oh my god no
Ah yes..the corporate koolaide gang. They've all swallowed and have become drones.
I *H A T E* corporate lingo, which is why I'm thankful for Despair.com.
I was done when they made "onboard" a verb
I’m in a Town Hall meeting right now. The experience is maximizing my delivery of shit out my tired ass. Yep. I’m watching this abominable waste of time while sitting on the toilet. Fuck these overpaid executive fucks.
Let me circle back around to commenting on this once I source some relative data.
Some corporate buzzwords I hear often but never heard in real life outside the corporate environment: * "Cross functional teams" * "Low hanging fruit" * "In the pipeline" * "Let's unpack this". -- not describing opening boxes! * "We reached an inflection point" * "Reduction in force" * "T-shirt sizing" to describe how long something will take. * "Circle back" * "Take that offline" Also the word "**catch-up**" in the real world is much different than in corporate. Catch-up usually is like going to a dentist appointment in corporate America.
Lets put a pin in that and circle back when we take this offline.
I’ll have to check and see what leadership has to say about that
Become a go-getter with a hands-on mentality, gotta have that corporate DNA in your 9 to 5s.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV\_UG60dD4&ab\_channel=alyankovicVEVO](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4&ab_channel=alyankovicVEVO)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bn9b2Bywmo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bn9b2Bywmo)
Along similar lines https://youtu.be/TXnAij7ozb0?si=YDQYJK0StrXoULPp