Let’s have a lunch and learn!
Referring to people, staff as resources. Nice and dehumanizing.
There are many but I find “let’s double-click on that” particularly grating
I always reply with, “Or we could right-click on that to see our options”.
I’ve never heard that one. What does that mean?
It means let’s take a closer look at a problem or project. Sounds like a Microsoftism
I heard “rightsizing” for the first time last year.
I have no idea what knucklehead PR dumbass came up with that but it made the following layoffs even more unpalatable.
The only time I hear rightsizing is for cloud resources. I’ve never heard of it in human resources. That sucks.
“Good catch!”
Usually said when you bring up something that needs fixing, and said as a way to puff you up and not actually follow up on the problem.
Alright, team, let’s circle back and ensure we’re fully aligned on our north star objectives. We need to leverage synergy, engage in blue-sky thinking, and touch base on our pain points to drive mission-critical outcomes. But let’s not boil the ocean with unnecessary jargon - at the end of the day, we need to optimize our bandwidth for real, value-driven impact. If we keep moving the needle with this kind of thought leadership theater, we risk losing sight of our core competencies and drowning in a sea of meaningless buzzwords. Let’s pivot toward clear, actionable insights and sunset the overuse of strategic messaging before it becomes a blocker to true innovation. Instead of just playing the fast-follow game with every trending framework, let’s focus on original, high-impact execution that actually drives results.
Thoughts?Chris, do you have any builds?No?
Good. Then let’s action this and drive it across the finish line!
Jesus fucking Christ. This was excellently written and horribly real.
Thanks. It hit close to home. I hate it.
Perfect except for ‘Thoughts?’ Instead of that it should be an appeal to the speaker’s boss: ‘Chris, do you have any builds?’
Done. 😁
I threw up in my mouth a little bit.
Lol
Synergy
Mostly because I have never heard it used correctly in the context of a copprate speech/talk.
Bio break.
I don’t think I have to elaborate on that one.
I work at a school and that one gets used sometimes. A lady that helps us develop programming said it quite often and my colleagues picked it up, I don’t use it myself.
I heard teachers use that term. 🤷♂️
This is a gamer term. I’ve never heard it in a business environment. Even as a IT engineer.
Lucky you, it’s all over my company.
I like it because it’s so vague.
A nap is pretty biological! And nobody will ask why your bio break was an hour long.
Thats not so much a corpo thing as a gamer thing IMO.
“AFK, Bio break” is much quicker to type.
Quicker than “brb, bathroom”?
“brb”
I never heard a gamer use “bio break” lol
Uh. It’s been used for YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAARS in MMOs.
Makes sense! I haven’t played a real-time MMO since RuneScape was new! Haha
^ usually just “brb bio” or “afk bio”, or just “bio”.
Its seriously old, like, “woot” or “LFG” levels of old.
Huh. I literally only know this from the context of mmo games.
TIL where that is from
fuck. i hate this one the most.
just say “break.” let everyone else decide for themselves if it needs to be biological in nature.
AI
But specifically “How could we use AI?”. If you dont know you don’t need it. Also looking st you big tech.
- Ideate
- Ask (noun)
- Table
Does “tabling” mean putting a subject on the table or taking it off?
“That’s a big ask” drives me crazy. I’ve been hearing it everywhere lately. When did ‘ask’ become a noun?
A huge ask. The biggliest ask. Sir Mixalot dreams about this ask.
Tabling means to save for later. You put it in the table to deal with it another time.
So tabling it means it’s off the table?
Think of it as you’re holding a bag of groceries. You are going to put things away in the bag, but maybe some things need to go somewhere else so you pull it out of the bag and put it on the table to put it away later.
You’ve tabled it.
Is this different from putting it in the parking lot?
Yup
- Alignment
- Scalable
- Circle back
If you use these regularly I KNOW the meeting you just booked me into should have been an email.
Touch base too
FUCK touching base that one’s the worst.
Huh why scalable? I feel like that applies to a lot of things, not just the corporate world.
I can’t remember last time I heard someone use it in a normal conversation, but in the corporate world I find it gets incredibly overused.
It’s fine is used properly, but management tends to use it to mean “magically gooder.”
I guess it doesn’t bug me so much because it’s not so cringe and actually clearly communicates the point. We do in-house video editing at the company I work at, and when we talk about scaling we’re talking about making sure our processes hold when we add more and more people and increase our volume. It’s a growing company so I have to constantly talk about anticipating and buying things to make sure we don’t run into a wall with our growth.
I guess this is less pushing back and more asking what word you would rather see?
I always hated “circle back” but I did get into using it ironically for a while.
I wouldn’t actually mind “circle back” if it wasn’t just used as cover to kick the can down the road.
“let’s just put a pin in that, and circle back to it later”
Every meeting should be a fucking email.
I always want to do things by email instead of a meeting, but have to admit the meeting is often necessary. Of course it wouldn’t be if people could actually read and comprehend a detailed email and if they could also actually communicate information into writing without expecting you to be their minds enough to make sense of the incomplete vague phases they hurriedly type.
I spend more time in meetings talking about the work I’m going to do, than doing the actual fucking work.
Bro I have my first “big company” job after working smaller places for over a decade. This feels so real. I’m dying.
Unless there is a need for faster communication or because it covers a topic that people have strong emotions about and need to see how others respond so they don’t assume the other person’s feelings about something. There are some cases where humans, being social animals, do need some interaction beyond words to accomplish coordinated tasks.
The vast majority of meetings should be emails though. Just wish people actually read emails…
“Tribal knowledge.”
- image: We, clan. Together, strong.
- reality: Ask Tommy if he remembers how to reset the printer
Though, I actually like this one. It’s a pretty cool phrase you can use anywhere.
This isn’t strictly corpo-speak, but upper mgmt type people do this a lot:
Misuse of the word “myself.” Like, “if you have any questions, talk to Joe or myself.”
Nice one dumb-ass–you tried to sound smarter by adding syllables but it didn’t work, did it!I’ll take “myself” over using “I” as a direct object any day of the week.
“I” as an object gets used way too often and way too many people argue that it’s correct.
It’s appalling to I.
People saying something needs to be flushed out when they really want it fleshed out.
Lmao!
I’d ask if they want me to get rid of it.
I also have a colleague who refers to Apple computers as MAC, and has at least once asked for MAC addresses of some devices when what she meant was IP addresses last associated with the devices.
“Lean and nimble”
“Moving with a sense of purpose”
“We’re like a family”
“Synergy”
We’re like family is a HUGE red flag for me. I had a boss use that as a selling feature to get me to work there. I had come from a place that really was like a family, a nice one, where we all really cared about each other. Turns out she meant it in the unpaid slave labour way. You can’t make a group of people a “family”, it has to grow that way Crystal. And not through pain and suffering!
“High energy multitasker”
“Detail oriented”
“Fast paced environment”
Translates to: “You will be simultaneously micromanaged and expected to know everything with no prior documentation, and you will be underpaid for your efforts. We also have no organization whatsoever :)))”
“Fast paced environment” is the one that always gets me, because that’s just explicitly admitting that their organization is a total clusterfuck but somehow this inevitably gets put in the bullet points list because some bozo apparently thinks this is a positive thing that will make people want to work wherever-it-is.
All it means is that you’d better show up wearing roller skates because management is going to expect you to be in three places at once all the time.
Growth.
