Here’s a new one on me: Optics. As in, how this will look.
“We have to think about the optics of of this solution”.
mmm
Should have been in the OP: “We thank you for your patience”
Well, you don’t know that I am patient. I am raging inside because of your incompetence. I am not patient at all. I am screaming. Don’t assume my thoughts and passively aggressively thank me.
Same way 20 years ago: Thank you for not smoking. Well, I was going to smoke, but you could ask or tell me not to. Just don’t thank me in advance in case I was.
I admit that most corporate speak doesn’t bother me. Most of it. But I am bothered when someone describes the company culture as a family. I like my employer, I like my coworkers, I even like most of the people throughout the company. But if business goes south or positions are no longer needed we will terminated employment. Sure, we’ll give people a decent severance package and we’ll see if we can’t retrain and transfer them to other departments, but we don’t keep people around just because we love 'em. You generally don’t fire people from your family (though sometimes you do).
I’ve never heard aperture used as corporate speak and would be reluctant to guess what is meant. On the other hand, I do know that biological apertures are called sphincters.
The term “rockstar” in reference to an employee or candidate. Like “we are looking to hire a rockstar for this role!”. Like sure, I have a friend with a big ego who likes to wake up at noon and do coke all day. Is that what you have in mind?
It’s such a vague and stupid term. If the person is such a “rockstar” at what they are doing, they don’t need some recruiter who has to blast the request across their LinkedIn network. And half the time the presumption seems to be that such a person is a rockstar at everything they do because they almost never describe what the role is. Plus what makes you think a rockstar would want to work for your company / client?
To me it just seems like part of the current corporate trend where you have a bunch of arrogant, overpaid morons in positions of authority and power and they hire people to do everything for them from highly technical problem solving to determining their overall strategy and vision to retroactively fixing all their fuckups.
“Narrative”. Right there that tells me you are crafting some bullshit story about what you are doing and why.
“Disruption”. Ever since someone figured you could get billions for a web site that approximates the livery car, apartment sublet, or temporary commercial office space business and gets around all that pesky existing regulatory requirements, people have been making careers talking about industry disruption.
I hate that “corporate culture” bullshit too. My current company is obsessed with it. Every time I meet someone new, they ask me “what do you think of our culture?” At my 3 month check-in with HR, all they wanted to know was “what do you think of our culture”.
What the F do you want me to tell you? I have no idea what our “culture” is besides “overhyped tech unicorn startup”. I’ve only met my coworkers on zoom. Every project lead I speak with seems to be overwhelmed and understaffed and their projects are out of control. For all our funding, I have no mechanism of tracking the hours of people who work on my projects and I can barely get staff to work on them. No one really seems to know what they are doing, where there job ends and mine begins or ever really how a software professional services organization should run. But we seem like we have a lot of great LGBTQ initiatives, so that’s cool I guess.
What do I think? I think our company is trying really really really hard to be thought of as a “great place with a great corporate culture”
Onboarding a new employee: maybe it shouldn’t get under my skin, but it does. You could just say “we’re bringing in a new person.”
I understand the logic of ‘stakeholders’ but the term always makes me think of a bunch of people holding wooden stakes.
When you gave this missive to HR, what did they say? Besides just blinking like a deer in your headlights?
I know you didn’t really tell them that, but it would have been epic if you had. 
I first heard the term “onboarding” last summer when I was hired to work for the Census, something that didn’t last very long for me no thanks to the messed-up computer programs.
In my office you can’t get through a meeting without someone saying “Let’s stand up a conversation about that.” It means: let’s consider having a meeting on that topic in the vague future, but definitely not right now. I suppose people love the clunky phrasing because it sounds rather important.
I think “disrupt” is actually a relatively useful term, even though it’s definitely overused and misunderstood. I definitely think it’s a pretty common pattern that older entrenched companies will get lazy and accept inefficiencies, while a smaller, younger company can throw out assumptions about how cheap/fast/good a product can be. It seems like a lot of the chatter about “disruption” ignores that it accomplishes nothing on it’s own. You have to have a reason to exist after you disrupt an industry - otherwise the older companies will just wait until you prove that a new approach can work, and then do it better than you with the power of their greater resources.
That would have been funny.
Especially since the original meaning of “stakeholder” was the exact opposite of what it now means.
A “stakeholder” was originally a disinterested person who could be trusted to hold the stakes in a bet until the bet was resolved, precisely because they had no interest in the outcome. Now, it’s used to mean someone who has an interest in the discussion / debate etc.
As my posts in this and the other thread show, I’m willing to accept changes in the language, but it does bother me when a change introduces ambiguity, by giving one word opposite meanings.
I hate corporate speak. I’m a technical writer/instructional designer and I get to experience a lot of it.
What the heck is a pre-planning meeting? Planning to plan?
World-class is a way to avoid saying that you are not providing first class experiences, you cheap momser.
Company culture only works for small companies. You want me to believe United Health Group or WalMart only has a single culture. That’s a mighty big petri dish.
"Your call is important to us." I realize that call volume is a tricky thing to manage but if every single time I call, I get routed to the automated system that can’t answer my question, my call is not important. Don’t lie to me.
"That was a toxic response." Since when is the truth toxic? If it is toxic, your company might want to know about it so they can change it.
which brings us to
"No problems without solutions" Look, I don’t have a solution, that’s why I asked you to this meeting - to help my team find a solution.
It’s not really bullshit though because organizations have cultures. Some work environments are very hierarchical with management saying “my way or the highway” while in others management strives for consensus. I work in an environment where the company makes a concerted effort to make sure their employees like working there which is great. But many of our employees have a sense of entitlement that actually pisses me off sometimes.
If that’s the truth, hopefully that’s what they want to hear. I’m not in the tech industry though, and from what I’ve heard I should be happy about that.
I agree it’s an awkward choice of words I think. But I use it simply because it’s part of the jargon.
You’ll also hear about micro-cultures as well. The culture of HR at my company is certainly different from customer service and information security.
I always envisage someone strapped to a backboard, wheeled in on upright dolly by a couple of delivery men: “Sign here, please, and initial here. Workers comp insurance begins from the moment we unstrap him.”
I love this metaphor.
Q: Tell me about the company culture.
A: Necrotizing and anthropophagous.
True. Many years ago, I took a job with a company where I fit the qualifications for the position perfectly. But they didn’t tell me that they had a very athletic culture–on lunch breaks, many (if not most) employees would hit a local gym for aerobics; or hit the local racquet club for a game of squash; or after work, participate in league hockey.
Me, I hit the lunchroom at lunch, for coffee and the newspaper; and after work, I went home instead of to a hockey rink. This did not go over well with my co-workers. It quickly became apparent that no matter how qualified I was for the position, I did not fit the corporate culture of “work + sports = one of our employees,” and by mutual agreement, I left and got another job.