Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study into “corporate BS”…
Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.
Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, research by cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric.
“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.”
Although people anywhere can BS each other – that is, share dubious information that’s misleadingly impressive or engaging – the workplace not only rewards but structurally protects it, Littrell said. In a work setting where corporate jargon is already the norm, it’s easy for ambitious employees to use corporate BS to appear more competent or accomplished, accelerating their climb up the corporate ladder of workplace influence.
Corporate BS seems to be ubiquitous – but Littrell wondered if it is actually harmful. To test this, he created a “corporate bullshit generator” that churns out meaningless but impressive-sounding sentences like, "We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing” and “By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.”
He then asked more than 1,000 office workers to rate the “business savvy” of these computer-generated BS statements alongside real quotes from Fortune 500 leaders. Divided into four distinct studies, the research verified the scale as a statistically reliable measure of individual differences in receptivity to corporate bullshit, then, through use of established cognitive tests, made connections between receptivity to BS and analytic thinking skills known to be essential to workplace performance.
The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary,” but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.
The study found that being more receptive to corporate bullshit was also positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements. Moreover, those who were more likely to fall for corporate BS were also more likely to spread it.
Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by “visionary” corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.
“This creates a concerning cycle,” Littrell said. “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. 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.”
When BS goes too far or gets called out, real reputational or financial damage can occur, Littrell said. For instance, a leaked 2009 Pepsi marketing presentation with language such as “The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations…our proposition is the establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a transactional experience to an invitational expression …” led to widespread ridicule in various news outlets.
And in 2014, a memo from the former executive vice president of Microsoft Devices Group to employees, later dubbed in the press “the worst email ever,” opened with 10 paragraphs of jargon, including “Our device strategy must reflect Microsoft’s strategy and must be accomplished within an appropriate financial envelope,” burying the real news in paragraph 11 – that 12,500 employees were going to lose their jobs.
Overall, the findings suggest that while “synergizing cross-collateralization” might sound impressive in a boardroom, this functionally misleading language can create an informational blindfold in corporate cultures that can expose companies to reputational and financial harm.
Littrell’s scale offers practical applications and could someday provide insights into job candidates' analytic thinking and decision-making tendencies. More work needs to be done, but for now, it’s a promising tool for researchers, Littrell said.
Researching BS also points out the importance of critical thinking for everyone, inside the workplace and out.
“Most of us, in the right situation, can get taken in by language that sounds sophisticated but isn’t,” Littrell said. “That’s why, whether you’re an employee or a consumer, it’s worth slowing down when you run into organizational messaging of any kind – leaders’ statements, public reports, ads – and ask yourself, ‘What, exactly, is the claim? Does it actually make sense?’ Because when a message leans heavily on buzzwords and jargon, it’s often a red flag that you’re being steered by rhetoric instead of reality.”
An open-access version of the study is available here.
Kate Blackwood is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.
Read the original article
Comments
By jvanderbot 2026-03-0616:5317 reply 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.
In the test these weren't coded language, they were randomly generated phrases. The finding is that the people who don't know how to decipher the code are easily impressed by it and have poor analytical skills.
By red-iron-pine 2026-03-0620:262 reply The Gervais Principle by the Ribbonfarm guy gets into this: powertalk vs. babytalk
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
the Cornell article is basically just empirical testing of these concepts.
By ignoramous 2026-03-0621:123 reply Also summarised in https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...
By sigwinch 2026-03-0711:00 > mortified to show off a $10,000 watch, but excitedly tell you about their $100,000 kitchen remodel filled with 100-mile diet cookbooks and single-origin Japanese knives, or their 6-month work sabbatical they spent powerlifting. This is a group of people where a Subaru is a higher-status car than a Cadillac, but the highest status car is none.
Very Boulder, CO
By red-iron-pine 2026-03-0622:082 reply this reads like an AI clickbait.
it does make Rao's original article a little easier to digest but it was already pretty tight through the first 3-4 parts.
By dboon 2026-03-0711:23 Ah god damn it, I'm Michael Scott...
By sigwinch 2026-03-0711:21 If you like ribbonfarm, the comment section in his follow up is worth reading:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/12/13/random-promotions-and-...
I wouldn’t be surprised if research like Cornell’s was inspired there.
By jvanderbot 2026-03-0618:175 reply from TFA:
> “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.”
I'm taking issue with "semantically empty" and saying they're actually semantically rich, but they are coded signals. Coded signals become increasingly indistinguishable from noise.
But they're not semantically rich. People who speak the code aren't doing it to more efficiently communicate, such that a long and complicated message can be expressed quickly. They are taking a short simple message, stripping away all the details, then padding it such that it becomes more verbose and vapid. This makes the real message harder to decipher for the uninitiated, it removes information even for those who understand the code, and it serves as a display for people who appreciate the flourish. There may still be some meaning left, but it's semantically emptier.
Further much of it is not even code. Examples like the microsoft letter are clearly a performative act to soften the blow of bad news. No one in the know is reading such an email to discern some hidden message; it's written to not be read.
In exactly the sense my HTTPS packets are semantically emptier than my HTTP packets.
By georgefrowny 2026-03-076:03 I think it's more like that you are signalling by your use of HTTPS at all, and the packet body itself is encrypted nonsense.
Hiding information in the protocol layer while the bulk content that is "supposed" to contain the meaning is present but actually meaningless. Or for a physical analogy the payload of the envelope vis a decoy and the real information is hidden in the way the flap is sealed.
By thfuran 2026-03-074:47 It's not even meaningfully similar, let alone exactly that way.
By jjk166 2026-03-0821:32 Yes, taking 16 kb to transmit what could have been transmitted in 1 kb with the express purpose of making communication more difficult. That is what semantically emptier means.
Well, if your HTTPS packets are somehow more retarded than your HTTP packets, yes.
I use HTTPS because it makes my packets “more retarded” than the HTTP version of those packets to anybody without the session key to decrypt the “retarded nonsense”.
That’s literally the whole point of encryption:
Your message becomes unintelligible to those who aren’t able to decode the content.
Except encryption isn’t made to protect enlightened few from stupid masses and their “poor” understanding. If you have something secret to say to other managers then just send an email to a mailing list. Assuming that only you and your clique understand the message directed at specific people is an insult to people around you.
By salawat 2026-03-0718:39 It's called elite maintenance of the social class hierarchy. They can't help it, it's all they know. The thing that bugs me is it should be on us working stiffs to divest them of these habits. You can only lead a horse to water, however...
> Eventually they figured out that language served a different purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. Overpriced bonds were not "expensive" overpriced bonds were "rich," which almost made them sound like something you should buy. The floors of subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors--or anything else that might lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind--but tranches. The bottom tranche--the risky ground floor--was not called the ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium. A CDO composed of nothing but the riskiest, mezzanine layer of subprime mortgages was not called a subprime-backed CDO but a "structured finance CDO." "There was so much confusion about the different terms," said Charlie. "In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there's a reason why it doesn't quite make sense to us. It's because it doesn't quite make sense."
The Big Short by Michael Lewis, page 101.
By Paracompact 2026-03-071:531 reply Actually, I think he's referring to the resplendent angel of the Kabbalah, Metatron. In the Jewish canon, Metatron is a big film buff.
By thenobsta 2026-03-073:37 Megatron is also a film buff and the enemy of Optimus Prime. Optimus Prime flies well above the mezzanine.
By vermilingua 2026-03-0620:12 I believe that’s a matinee
The mezzanine is the drink with the worm in it; after you get "mezzed", you feel like the worm is eating you from the inside.
By overcrowd8537 2026-03-072:31 woosh
By ludicrousdispla 2026-03-078:16 Close, it's the part of the cinema where you can purchase popcorn and soft drinks.
By andrewflnr 2026-03-0621:25 In some cases, sure, they're semantically rich, but the result here is that in some cases it doesn't matter whether they are or not, that some people can't tell. That can still be true even if corporate jargon originated and is sometimes still used for rational-ish reasons.
By georgefrowny 2026-03-075:58 I'm always reminded of Asimov's Lord Dorwin: "[the linguistic analyst] after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed."
By Brian_K_White 2026-03-079:19 But the article isn't about people who do the speaking or what their reasons or real meanings are, it's about people who like hearing it.
By notahacker 2026-03-0623:261 reply yeah, this is frankly isn't really showing what people think it's showing. The "not bullshit" examples are all manager-speak and coded phrases like
"We plan to right-size our manufacturing operations to align to the new strategy and take advantage of integration opportunities."
What the study actually shows is that less skilled people find it harder to distinguish this sort of way of saying jobs are being lost or puffery about "we have permission from the market to be a world class, tier one partner" from generated manager speak that's incoherent or mixes the metaphors up like "covering all bases of the low hanging fruit" or "drilling down one more click on people"). Probably because those less skilled people have poorer reading comprehension in general and typically less exposure to corporate environments.
Or that those “nonsense” phrases are not actually nonsense when spoken by a manager.
The conclusion they’re nonsense comes from the random generation and the technical perspective on semantics; but it’s entirely possible they’re generating phrases that do have semantic meaning when said by a manager… and hence their whole study is flawed.
They quietly assume their conclusion, when assuming their generated phrases are vacuous rather than contain coded semantic content.
By wiseowise 2026-03-079:23 Jesus bro it looks like shit, it smells like shit, it has the same texture – it is shit, you can’t convince me it is a chocolate. The purpose of the corpo speak is to inflate manager ego and fool smooth brains.
By alexjplant 2026-03-0618:215 reply Synergy has a real meaning: 1+1=3. A cigar and a whiskey. Chocolate and peanut butter. Hall and Oates. Et cetera. Unfortunately it's one of those terms like "DevOps" or "jam band" or "martini" whose true meaning has been sullied by people trying to sound cooler than they are.
On the rare occasions I've used it sincerely in meetings I've always caveated it with some variation of "the real meaning, not the BS one." This never seems to work so I've just dropped it from my verbal lexicon altogether.
That's the right move. If a word changes its colloquial meaning, better drop it and find a new one. Happens all the time. From stuff like "agile" in a software development context (pretty meaningless at this point, can mean anything from the original definition to the systematic micro management it got to be commonly associated with), to previously neutral words that became offensive (because they were commonly used as such).
No individual holds power over connotations. Language just evolves.
> No individual holds power over connotations. Language just evolves.
Okay, but I still reserve the right to be pissed off at teenagers using 'out of pocket' when they mean 'off the wall' or 'out of bounds'.
By fhd2 2026-03-0619:52 Absolutely. I'm pro emotions :) Just also good to realise what battles are lost.
I do sometimes rebelliously use words in their original connotation along with an unnecessarily lengthy explanation. Never anything that's now an insult, of course, those I just stay away from and am not mad about either.
By bcrosby95 2026-03-0619:31 This usage is probably older than you're thinking: some 80s and 90s hip hop songs used "out of pocket" like that.
By collingreen 2026-03-0620:361 reply I always avoid synergy and say "bigger than the sum of its parts" or "peanut butter and jelly". Simple language with less baggage.
By alexjplant 2026-03-0620:472 reply ...except for those of us who think that PB&J is a culinary abomination in which case the metaphor disintegrates ;-D (apologies to my mother for having to make me PB-only sandwiches growing up)
I do wonder whether adding chips or bacon to counteract the cloying one-dimensional sweetness of the other ingredients would make me a fan though... chunky natural PB, blackberry jelly, hickory-smoked bacon on ciabatta? Hipster PbB&J might be the ticket.
Wait, wait, wait. You were fine with the savory of peanut butter, texture, mouthfeel and crunch of the chunky variety of PB... But the jelly gave you fits for adding a shot of sweet and a slight hint of gelatinousness? You have uh... an interesting and idiosyncratic taste response, to say the least. The bacon would probably help, mind, though it's the culinary equivalent of "no shit, Sherlock". It'd run a spectrum from adding chewyness, to a bit of crunch depending on how it's prepared. It'd increase umami response, and add some protein content, but not really change the overall profile. If by chips you mean potato and not fries, you'll add some salty notes, crunch, and maybe a slight touch of after sweet as your saliva breaks down the complex starches. Still same problem with your jelly response. If you meant fries, salty notes, puffy mouthfeel/texture ranging from soft all the way through to crunchy-soft-crunchy depending on prep. If baked air fried, less oil contribution to umami. If deep fried, you have the frying medium notes added to the overall product. It'd be an experiment. I just think you maybe need to vary your jelly ratio. In proportion to your PB since you seem to have an exaggerated preference for umami.
By nineteen999 2026-03-081:061 reply To complicate things, this is unintelligble to non-US people who generally call what you call "jell-o" jelly, and what you call "jelly" we call jam.
But... US folks call jam jam too. Jam and jelly aren't the same.
At least, in France we'd also have the difference between configure and gelée.
Well, thought I'd fixed the configure typo and now it's too late.
But obviously, I meant confiture.
By nineteen999 2026-03-107:46 ./confiture --prefix=/usr/belly && make install
By rkomorn 2026-03-0710:27 I don't often want to start fights on HN but how dare you...
By johnisgood 2026-03-0618:591 reply Why would you drop it altogether? Medications and/or supplements can have synergistic effects, for example. Synergy is actually a term that is formally defined as "Effect(A + B) > Effect(A) + Effect(B)".
The point of saying and writing things is to be understood by your audience.
If I know a given wording is widely misunderstood, to the point I'm planning to immediately follow it with a clarification - often that's a sign it's not a very good wording.
There are exceptions, of course - go ahead and say Cephalopods (things like octopuses and squid) if you're a marine biology educator.
By johnisgood 2026-03-0620:47 I am pretty sure the term "synergistic" is widely used among laymen as well in the context of supplements and medications.
So yeah, sure, context does matter.
By bloodyplonker22 2026-03-0710:21 I once told a female coworker she used my style of syntactic sugar. Later that week, I received a stern email from HR.
By faidit 2026-03-0623:49 Synergy often means layoffs. As in, we merged two companies and now have two of every department, one of each has to go, and the remainder can do the work of both (yay synergy).
By nostrademons 2026-03-0622:31 > 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
In my experience neither one of those are automatically a sign of impending layoffs. Rather, it's an executive doing their job (getting the organization moving in one direction) in the laziest way possible: by telling their directs to work out what that direction is amongst themselves and come back with a concrete proposal for review that they all agree on. The exec can then rubber-stamp it without seriously diving into the details, knowing that everyone relevant has had a hand in crafting the plan. And if it turns out those details are wrong, there's a ready fall guy to take the blame and save the exec's job, because they weren't the one who came up with it.
Interestingly, this is also the most efficient way for the organization to work. The executive is usually the least informed person in the organization; you most definitely do not want them coming up with a plan. Instead, you want the plan to come from the people who will be most affected, and who actually do know the details.
If the managers in question cannot agree or come up with a bad plan, then it's usually time for layoffs. A lot of this comes down to the manager having an intuitive sense of what the exec really wants, though, as well as good relationships and trust with their peers to align on a plan. The managers who usually navigate this most poorly (and get their whole team laid off in the process) are those who came from being a stellar IC and are still too thick in the details to compromise, the Clueless on the Gervais hierarchy.
There is also the signalling when a new, truly meaningless fragment pops up. The bigwig says it first, then his direct reports, then their underlings, etc.
So by using such a phrase, underlings signal both how close they are to bigwigs by knowing such a phrase first, and also demonstrate a vote for alignement, by quoting some phrases more and others less. Bigwigs raise status of underlings by repeating and expressing interest in their new phrases.
These phrases come and go in waves. Underlings laughing with them basically signal they are not worthy of attention in the political melee.
By zippyman55 2026-03-0621:11 At my final Job, I jokingly used the word SPITBALL… in no time, everyone was saying…. I’m just spitballing here…. So funny.
By PunchyHamster 2026-03-0617:04 Do note that senior manager thinking the work is redundant also might be completely not aligned with reality. so "I think your work is redundant" is much closer to usual reality. And it's easy to be seen that as you pretty much also need to be a PR person for your own department, not just a manager, especially if department is doing necessary but not glorious tasks
By btilly 2026-03-0617:25 More precisely than "plausible deniability", it is plausible EMOTIONAL deniability.
When you put enough bafflegab around it, you can almost ignore that you said something unpleasant. Because the part of our brains that processes for emotional content, doesn't process complex language very well. Hence the example with ten paragraphs of complexity to hide the pain of a major lay-off.
After I noticed this, I found that I did this. I reliably use complex language when I don't like what I'm saying. So much so that I could use readability checkers to find discomfort that I was not aware that I had!
And I'm not the only one to notice this. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVtJNv4ZNM for George Carlin's famous skit on how the honesty of the phrase "shell shock" over time got softened over time to "post-traumatic stress disorder". A phrase that can be understood, but no longer felt.
Corporations have just developed their own special complex language for this. And you're right. It is emotionally dishonest. That's why they do it.
By deaux 2026-03-0617:25 > it's pretty culturally inevitable, I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language.
Pretty shocking belief when you're of courseing all "ICs".
If it was inevitable than the amount and degree of corporate BS would've been stable over the last 5 decades, and across countries and languages.
In reality, it has been anything but, instead showing massive differences across both.
By thewebguyd 2026-03-0617:091 reply Yeah, I agree. Language has always been a tool for tribal gatekeeping and in-group signaling, but also as a tool for precision.
What's specifically interesting about corpo-speak though is it's one of the only version of this (at least that I know of) where it's main purpose is to be euphemistic. In most other fields, the coded language is meant to be more descriptive to the in-group. In management, the coded language is designed to be less descriptive on purpose to avoid the human cost of the decision.
It's dystopian because it follows the same patterns as military language, and serves the same purpose to sanitize unpleasant realities. "Neutralize the target" in military lingo, "Right-size" in corpo-speak. In both cases, the human at the end is stripped of their humanity into a target or resource to be managed (or killed).
It's not like they're very subtle about this with their "human resources" horror speak.
By gzread 2026-03-072:51 That's why they call them People Team now! I still call them HR, but they call themselves and management calls them The People Team.
Can we go back to Personnel or Staffing? Those are nice and neutral by today's standards...
Its an interesting take, bit why is this coded ingroup messaging is communicated to outgroup then?
By jvanderbot 2026-03-0617:181 reply One example elaborated:
You _want_ most ICs to ignore a negative message that doesn't involve them, and you _want_ to give middle / lower managers the discretion to address an ICs "nonsynergistic" contributions on their own time. It's a signal not a prescription. This allows a public person to make a public statement and set direction without prescribing actions so lower management and ICs can do their thing.
Upper management becomes increasingly vibes-based, from what I can tell.
By contubernio 2026-03-0617:382 reply It would be a hell of a lot more functional to simply say directly what you want and mean.
This sort of management is dysfunctional even in it's premises.
By jvanderbot 2026-03-0619:152 reply In this example you're actually just being polite. You are not calling out a person publicly, you're transmitting a course-correction through their manager that allows the person who knows you best to communicate the correction the best way AND it allows the corpo to take the blame for being vague and uninformative.
Sure, direct, cold, concrete, public data is "best" in the objective sense, but people's feelings and pride matter, and any attempt to wave that away is just naive.
By beardedetim 2026-03-0620:11 Early in my career I tried very hard to "be concrete, cold, and direct" because that's what I thought a good communicator would do. It was seen as attacking to anyone below me and confusing to anyone above me. I was naive and I suffered for it.
I definitely agree with what you're saying here where these words actually do mean something, but it's completely opaque to those outside the "know". I also have found that there's not any better way to express information to those in the group than in this coded language, even if it makes completely no sense to me.
I wish younger me understood that the way I'm being perceived is the only important thing, not choosing the "best" words to technically describe a situation
By stinkbeetle 2026-03-0623:24 Schedule a meeting with the people you are directing it to then.
Blathering vague garbage execu-speak in a large meeting, even if it is some hare brained attempt to send "coded messages", is usually just some self-important charlatan bloviating and trying to sound intelligent and important to everybody else. And it is never effective communication.
Saying exactly what you mean is generating the paper trail and accountability, which is a liability.
By red-iron-pine 2026-03-0620:30 best possible outcome for most people
or even best possible outcomes for the shareholders. cuz most of this coded BS is to make some executive's life easier, not to keep the board happy.
if they had a concrete plan they'd say it, and coded signals are only for certain audiences, who in most cases may not be most people, most shareholders, or more employees.
For a somewhat cynical explanation of why that happens, I recommend https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-....
As with all forms of cynicism, it has a grain of truth. And a much larger grain of truth than is comfortable.
By bananaflag 2026-03-0617:461 reply Also see Scott Alexander's review
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
By geodel 2026-03-0622:55 Yup, saw that review. My takeaway is if one has knowledge and training level of Scott Alexander then this book has nothing new to offer. But since most folks don't so this maybe a interesting read.
By estimator7292 2026-03-0617:09 To solidfy the in-ness of the in-group. To underscore that management is better than ICs and ICs are considered other
By wiseowise 2026-03-079:27 So you can mog primitives with your sacred order practices.
For anyone else as confused as I was; apparently "IC" means Individual Contributor, as opposed to leadership or management.
By jvanderbot 2026-03-0617:232 reply Let's play "spot the manager"
By SpicyLemonZest 2026-03-0617:312 reply I don't mean to shame anyone for learning new information, but even if you have no interest in management, your career will benefit greatly from knowing the terms and concepts that managers in your industry commonly use. There's a lot of people out there who are aggressively against learning "corporate jargon" and then find themselves lost trying to understand why their company's leaders talk and act the way they do.
By shermantanktop 2026-03-0618:13 A lot of the “I won’t learn it” people are young. The ones who aren’t young end up appearing naive and ignorant.
The day the layoffs take your job (but not your officemate’s) might be a good day to learn how to read the corporate signals.
By NikolaNovak 2026-03-0618:18 Couldn't agree more.
Early in my career, I hated, and I do mean despised people who used the term "value".
And then, one day when my colleague suggested migrating all our servers from windows to Linux but couldn't for the life of them articulate what that would do for the business / client, it started clicking. A lot of us talk about effort, activities, tasks, accomplishments. I did this, Bob did that, Fatime did the other thing. At some level of management, "value" is the well understood shorthand for "when we follow the chain of benefits, what does this actually do for the client / business?". Its their job (when done well) to ensure technical tasks contribute to business value.
And we could be upset that they are inventing weird jargon for no clear reason, but then spend a minute explaining "garbage collection" etc as a term of art, and realize that pots are calling kettle black and all that - nobody has weird jargon like IT techies :->
By QuercusMax 2026-03-0617:48 When I was hired at my current role, it was clear to me that I'm in an IC vs Management position. It's really not that weird and is a very common term.
By sp1nningaway 2026-03-0619:294 reply I think this also explains some of our political climate. Everything the current administration says sounds like gibberish and equivocation to me, but to its intended audience it is a clear communication about wielding power and grift.
Conversely, when someone talks about "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices, to me it's a clear statement about who gets to define meaning and whose history counts, but to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.
> "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices
Can you expand on this?
By sp1nningaway 2026-03-0619:511 reply Those are just examples of academic/progressive jargon that I hear often in the Bay Area and in progressive circles. "Decolonizing," could mean for instance changing world history curriculum to cover non-western civilizations. "Centering" seems like maybe it just means focusing on, but there is a whole academic apparatus for designing curriculum around say, indigenous practices, and centering is the word used for that entire concept, which includes specific techniques.
I think to get the full meaning of both, you'd need to be fairly steeped in a world that uses those words all the time AND it is often used to identify people who "get it" from those who don't.
By hunterpayne 2026-03-071:011 reply What you write is true but it is also a bit dishonest. You are culling the questionable ideas being signaled out of your explanation. Really no different from MAGA folks who claim Trump is playing 4D chess or people who defended Hans Reiser because he wrote a really great filesystem. People don't tend to believe things that they don't want to be true (even if they are). Specifically, the fact that people who use this jargon actively oppose meritocracy (and thus aren't actually liberals) but instead want a demographically based quota system for all jobs and positions. This is why they abuse statistics and reasoning so badly in their analysis.
If these people weren't able to influence local governmental policies, then it would be fine to leave out the details. However, they are and so leaving out the bad parts of the policies they push is just dishonest and why the other side's propaganda is working so well right now. The biggest problem with that is that it makes politics more extreme (in both directions) and this is generally bad for the rest of us. So next time, don't leave out the actual practical effects of this type of politics and its messaging.
By warty 2026-03-0717:48 There's a chance this comment is what the user would have described as an incoherent but outright attack.
The user was claiming they didn't really understand the terminology but seemed to be trying their best when asked of another user to elucidate. You led with calling them dishonest.
You then said they were functionally MAGA and brought up some presumably racist German dude that I suspect few of us know about. You then had a diatribe on some view that had never been brought up in this thread and are now somehow discussing local governmental policies and propaganda.
I have no clue what I just read or how it connects to the post they made. I've tried to read in best effort but as best I can tell you maybe responded to the wrong person.
By g3f32r 2026-03-0619:53 > to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.
These are separate things. If he's interpreting it as an outright attack, he _is_ hearing it correctly. But incoherence would imply he's _not_ hearing the coded language in it's true meaning.
By red-iron-pine 2026-03-0620:332 reply > The Russian language has two different words for what most European languages would describe as lies. One is lozh (ложь), best translated into what we consider to be a lie; something that is the opposite of the truth. There is also vranyo (враньё). Vranyo is more than a simple lie. It is described as: ‘You know I’m lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.’
Trump is taking a lesson from Putin. Social media makes this extra easy, as you can bury criticism with a hoard of what-aboutism-bots, redirected arguments, and straight up BS.
By wisty 2026-03-0622:43 Yes I too have seen the 2022 Perun video where an Australian Youtuber gives a lesson on Russian linguisics, but I'm not certain he's right.
English also has more than one words for lies - lies, falsehoods, fibs, bs, prevarication.
Yeah sometimes we know stuff is a load of crap at work, but we gotta humour the process. Maybe it's 10x as bad in Russia. But I've seen little independent evidence those words Perun used mean completely different things, I think he's just accidently exhaggerating a possible bit of nuance.
By Nekorosu 2026-03-070:35 My first language is Russian. I’m not young, so I remember a bit of the Soviet era and many of the paper books I read as a child. I perceive lozh and vranyo as nearly synonymous, depending on the context. The only difference I notice is that vranyo can occur without ill intent, while lozh is told deliberately to deceive.
I found the source of this new alternative interpretation https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-vranyo-russian-for-w...
I call it BS.
By hunterpayne 2026-03-070:431 reply [flagged]
By vkou 2026-03-076:10 Well, I'm glad that only people who agree with you are rational.
By lukeschlather 2026-03-0617:58 You're confusing bullshit with jargon, which is something they talk about in the paper. The word synergize has a bad reputation, but its mere presence in a sentence is merely a signal, it doesn't mean the sentence is bullshit.
"We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" is an example from the article - you can't actualize a level, you can't renew a level either. And "cradle-to-grave credentialing" is at best a bad way to describe some real concept. It's word-salad from start to finish. It's not coded language, it's bullshit.
By cushychicken 2026-03-0617:34 it's usually coding something more precise in a sort of plausible deniability.
Yep. I'm a director now. This is exactly how it is. A big part of being effective in this role is understanding how direct you can be in a given scenario.
A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.
Option 1 is how I'd say it to a peer whose org is duplicating effort. You can give your advice, but at the end of the day: not my circus, not my clowns.
Option 2 is a more-direct way of how I'd say it to someone in my own org. I'd rephrase to: "Someone else is already doing this; focus your efforts on something more impactful."
By Waterluvian 2026-03-0623:481 reply Unnecessary abstractions are bad. These feel like those. Which leads you to wondering why they exist. And oftentimes it’s just like why bad developers preserve those unnecessary abstractions: job preservation.
By hunterpayne 2026-03-070:08 They are in-group signifiers. And when someone uses them and doesn't understand the lingo, they are clearly an interloper. Its amazing to me that people do this for benefit but anywhere they do, you are certainly in a business or institution that is dying (perhaps slowly but still dying).
By wnevets 2026-03-0621:26 > I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language.
Is it like when an executive or politician "retires" to spend more time with their friends & family?
By elzbardico 2026-03-0617:261 reply There's CYA jargon, like layoffs, workforce rationalizations, letting someone go, challenging fiscal environment.
And there's blatant bullshit, like paradigm shift, culture building, and so on.
Two categories of execspeak.
By jvanderbot 2026-03-0617:291 reply I think those are just degree of difference in "context required to understand", not different categories.
By johnisgood 2026-03-0619:121 reply You think so, with a term such as "culture building"?
Culture exists and can be built. Building it intentionally is basically impossible, but also an obvious thing to try to do if you don't know that.
By johnisgood 2026-03-0719:10 To me culture building does not imply creating culture from scratch intentionally (as you cannot intentionally force it), but rather influencing or guiding that natural process thoughtfully to encourage "positive" values and behaviors to encourage "positive" values and behaviors within a group.
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
By gregw2 2026-03-0618:00 A bit of "hacker history"... at the dawn of the web 1993 was birthed the first app (that I know of) along these lines: "Buzzword Bingo".
It got mentioned in WSJ of all places as news of it spread.
For the history+app from its creator, see:
https://lurkertech.com/buzzword-bingo/
(Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo )
I'm glad to see, 25-30 years later, the hackers/cynical-tech-workers who birthed it getting justified by actual social science research.
By linolevan 2026-03-0616:20 This is awesome. Almost all of these are believable even if you're looking at pretty carefully. I need this on a firestick or something.
By el_benhameen 2026-03-0615:592 reply A delightful update to https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
By reactordev 2026-03-0616:141 reply Ah, “the only difference being…”
That’s always the line you’re listening for. Everything before that is bullshit, everything after is trying to justify the new product for that one change.
In favor of preferable outcomes of operational excellence as part of our customer success. Barf.
By el_benhameen 2026-03-0616:36 I keep hearing this from the naysayers, but I just think that they haven’t fully integrated unilateral phase detractors into their work effectively. Maybe you’re using the free retro encabulator tier so you don’t see the full capabilities, but some of us are already twice as productive.
By plaidphantom 2026-03-0617:15 Here's another for the pile. https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4?si=yTB_dICMqnLjqVEi
By janalsncm 2026-03-0617:42 Reminds me of corporate ipsum
By fnands 2026-03-0616:14 Some of those pictures are delightfully cursed
By rawgabbit 2026-03-0620:50 This is a masterpiece. I have seen similar slides in many consultants' decks over the years.
By johnisgood 2026-03-0619:29 "Affordable ... at premium prices". :D
as someone frequently exhibiting at various industry trade shows, I can confidently say nobody would notice.
By roysting 2026-03-0617:08 [dead]
By the_real_cher 2026-03-0616:31 Brilliant!
By roysting 2026-03-0616:48 [dead]
By utopiah 2026-03-0616:09 Where can I transfer millions in investments already? This is revolutionary. It'll change everything! /s
By cyanydeez 2026-03-0616:40 Turn it into an endless LLM trap. The sooner tgese aystems are piinsoned, the batter humanoty will last
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.
By leonardoe 2026-03-0620:30 This observation really resonates with me. I have spent a lot of energy trying to communicate that ditching formal languages for natural language is a terrible idea in some (most?) domains. The power of formal languages comes precisely from their "limitations".
Software is not the output. The output is the theory-building process by which one arrives a formal description of both the problem and (hopefully) the solution. Avoiding the effort to express a problem (or a model of the problem) in a formal language is a self-defeating enterprise.
By PunchyHamster 2026-03-0617:07 The corpo-speak sounds like mostly way to communicate contentious things in nice way, everything done to not sound negative or aggresive, while knowing (or hoping) that other side gets the message.
It is awfully unproductive way to do it but I'm sure HR approves.
By AnimalMuppet 2026-03-0616:381 reply But if someone says something like "synergizing paradigms", isn't that essentially a parse error to any normal person?
You don't need formal language (though formal languages can serve that purpose). You just need to listen like a normal human being rather than like a corporate suit, and that kind of language is just incomprehensible - a parse error. You have to work at it to make sense of that kind of language. And why I took from your first paragraph is permission to treat it as a parse error instead of as some valid message that I needed to decode.
By cyanydeez 2026-03-0616:44 My guy: corporate sloganeering is as much cultural appropiation as ghetto speak and drug culture.
Theres no high minded difference. Its just in/out group identification.
By lo_zamoyski 2026-03-0615:351 reply That's not quite accurate. Formal languages (which have an old pedigree) can be useful for clarification and inference, but they can also obfuscate the truth, and what's more, subvert it. Every logical formalism necessarily presupposes some metaphysics, and if the metaphysics is bad, or you fail to recognize the effective bounds of that formalism, you can fall into mechanically generated bullshit. Modern predicate logic suffers from known paradoxes and permits nonsensical and vacuous inferences (like those caused by material implication). More subtle effects are expressed in, for example, the problem of bare particulars.
Formalism is a product of prior (semantic) reasoning that isn't formal. And because formalism is syntactic, not only can you still jam your semantic nonsense through it (through incoherent subjects and predicates, for example), but the formalism, stripped of semantics, can itself allow for nonsense. So formalism can actually aid and abet bad reasoning. The danger, of course, is the mistaken notion that "formal = rigorous".
Formalism is also highly impractical and tedious in many circumstances, and it can depart from human reasoning as expressed in the grammar of natural language enough to be practically inscrutable. There is no reason why natural language cannot be clear and well-written. So, I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree here.
The problem with LLMs isn't that they're not "formal". It's because they're statistical machines, not reasoning machines, yet many people treat them like magical oracles.
By ryandv 2026-03-0615:38 [dead]
By utopiah 2026-03-0616:09 Which is precisely why proper scammers, not to say "top" management, is excellent at spotting keywords, or even better shibboleh, and using them. If they must they'll even learn and adopt new keywords from HBR or whatever trendy management publication can help them look the par.
By CGMthrowaway 2026-03-0614:325 reply >a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay
Corporate speak as a signalling mechanism is only effective among the "clueless" in the Gervais model. If any CEO tried to talk 1:1 to a competent board member that way, they would lose all credibility. Once you've operated at a certain level you get it
>a system for turning bullshit into parse errors.
This is the (cynical version of) the framing I tend to hold about corporate speak. It's deliberately vague as a way to navigate uncertainty while still projecting authority and avoiding accountability in settings like a town hall, large meeting etc. Which is not to be read as a necessarily "bad" thing. No one wants a micromanaging CEO. They have to set vision and direction while leaving space for it top be executed by all the layers under them
> They have to set vision and direction
A prime example of corporate speak that is, as you rightly said, 'only effective among the "clueless"'
By gzread 2026-03-072:54 No. It means things
By dec0dedab0de 2026-03-0616:005 reply Corporate speak as a signalling mechanism is only effective among the "clueless" in the Gervais model. If any CEO tried to talk 1:1 to a competent board member that way, they would lose all credibility. Once you've operated at a certain level you get it
This also holds true for competent non-board members. I have interacted with C-level executives at fortune 100 companies, as well as smaller businesses. It is almost impressive how quickly they can switch in and out of corporate bullshit mode. I think it's what the kids call code-switching.
In general, once they trust you a bit, and they know someone isn't listening they talk like a normal person. Then you ask a difficult question about the business and the corporate-speak kicks in like a security sub routine trying to prevent them from saying the wrong thing.
I have also met some that seemingly calculate their tone and cadence to try to manipulate the person(s)/people(s) they're talking to. It's fascinating when you catch them doing it, and it's different than simply matching like a chameleon. For example, they may use an authoritative tone with younger people, a kind but subtly threatening tone with anxious people, and a buddybuddy tone with a plumber or someone they know isn't going to put up with any bullshit.
I'm really curious how much of it is formally taught in MBA programs and stuff, how much is them copying each other, and if any of it is just a natural defense mechanism to the pressures of being in power.
Ultimately I think all of what you describe there falls into a bucket of personality traits and social skills that contribute to success in many areas of life.
It's some combination of what they call "self monitoring" in social psychology, plus general EQ and Machiavellian personality traits that allow people to read the room and adjust their tone, speaking style, word choice (including picking up in-group lingo quickly), posture etc to be most effective given the setting. This applies to basically any social environment, and is often a frustrating reality to many people who may be extremely competent but see others around them who are obviously less competent "getting ahead" through social acumen, office politics etc.
This has been studied among MBA graduates, Do Chameleons Get Ahead, The Effects of Self-Monitoring on Managerial Careers (pdf): https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/...
By justonceokay 2026-03-0616:22 The higher up you are in a company the more of “yourself” you have to give as realistically many more people are relying on your job results than they are on your personal wellbeing.
It definitely takes a certain kind of person to be a good fit in that role
By anthonypasq 2026-03-0616:481 reply what you view as subtly manipulative is just having good social skills
By hananova 2026-03-0713:43 It’s both.
By SoftTalker 2026-03-0616:501 reply > I have also met some that seemingly calculate their tone and cadence to try to manipulate the person(s)/people(s) they're talking to.
This is a trait of a psychopath. Not surprisingly, one finds a lot of them in the executive ranks.
By jjkaczor 2026-03-0619:02 The polite term these days is "sociopath", which takes out the whole "psycho-killer" weightedness (because a sociopath can be very likeable and friendly) - and they fill the ranks of leadership in all professions...
By jjkaczor 2026-03-0619:01 Haven't there also been many studies that show high-level executives also have a high number of "sociopaths" in their ranks?
Sociopaths can code-switch instantly - I wonder how much of this is training, versus emulating others, versus a fundamental difference in brain operations...
The Gervais model is predicated on sociopathy as the driving force of social cohesion. This is the kind of model a sociopath would construct. There are other models available to us.
Social organizations require some sort of glue to bind them together. They need ways to maintain cohesion despite vagueness and to obscure (small) errors. There is a cap put upon max individual output, but aggregate output is much higher than whatever a collection of individuals could attain. This is a very basic dynamic that is lost amidst a cult of individualism that refuses to admit to any good greater than themselves.
Yes - the CEO talking to the board in this way would lose credibility. But a CEO failing to deploy this jargon correctly would also lose credibility with the board : it's obvious he doesn't know how to lead.
What I would like to see is a study of the ratio's between corporate speak and technical speak - and the inflection points at which too much of either causes organization ruin.
Hate to ask, but since it came up again and a quick search couldn’t find it - what’s that Gervais model? Links / explanations welcome!
Edit: seems that searching for „Gervais principle“ turned up what was talked about…
By pklausler 2026-03-0616:52 https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... is a good explanation. The diagram of the "MacLeod Cycle" utterly convinced me, having been around that loop a few times.
By gzread 2026-03-0618:20 The Gervais model! I haven't heard that in a while.
> Which is not to be read as a necessarily "bad" thing
I (and many others) read it as "dishonesty"
Is there a historical example or does anyone have an anecdote of some crunch time where the CEO blowing hot air was the best thing for morale? Compared to what I might think a lot of us would prefer in many cases, which might be an honest assessment & making us part of the journey to overcome whatever adversity.
"an honest assessment & making us part of the journey to overcome whatever adversity"
I suspect that most people just aren't wired up that way - we have a natural tendency to want to follow leaders and what we seem to want most from leaders is certainty and confidence. Does it matter what leaders are certain and confident about - not really.
It is hard to argue with a vague statement like "most people" without a proper scientific study. But I disagree: following the scientific principle, and being willing to change opinion in the face of new evidence increases my trust in someone. Someone who is certain and confident without showing their work / sources make me suspicious. And critical thinking is (pardon the pun) a critical skill.
By andrewflnr 2026-03-0620:061 reply If you actually think and act that way, so much the better. I don't even particularly disbelieve you. But can you really look at the mass of humanity around you and believe they think the same way? Even if they claim to value critical thinking, watch what they do, what they buy, how they vote.
You've most likely trained yourself to value critical thinking in your leaders, most likely from an early enough age that you don't remember what it was like without it. Lots of people don't get this training or don't apply it in a fully general way.
Hm, having a journalist and an academic (with a heavy focus on applied rigorous statistics) as parents probably helped there, you are right. But school is supposed to teach this, at least here in Sweden it is a part of the curriculum. But indeed, that doesn't seem to help, and the US it is especially bad (not saying the situation is good here either though).
There are other things I do remember having to train myself to do though, such as not make value judgments based on the language skill level of others. Rationally I have never cared where someone is from and if they are a native speaker or not, but emotionally that required some effort.
By andrewflnr 2026-03-0623:21 I'm not convinced it's actually possible to teach critical thinking to someone who doesn't care, but I'm glad your schools are trying harder.
But even when people are trained in critical thinking, the part at the end of my comment about applying it in full generality is also critical. You have to be emotionally ready to apply it in cases where it produces unpleasant conclusions, not just for your job or when it helps dunk on your political opponents. Also difficult to impossible to teach at scale.
By AnimalMuppet 2026-03-0615:361 reply Not exactly?
Let's say there are a thousand people there at the town hall. You don't want any of them to leave upset, or even concerned. But they each have different things that will make them concerned and upset. So there are maybe 10,000 tripwires out there, and you don't want to trip any of them.
So you're not being dishonest, exactly. You're being nonspecific. You don't want to get down in the weeds and nail down the answer too tightly, because you may trip someone's tripwire. (And also because it would take to long.) So you say something true but not very specific.
(I mean, there can be dishonesty, too, but that's a different thing. Smooth vagueness can still be honest, just unsatisfyingly vague.)
By duped 2026-03-0620:14 "Smooth vagueness" to me comes off as tautologies. If you cannot say anything specific it means either you don't know, or don't want others to know. So it is a lie about ones' competency, or a lie by omission.
It's all dishonesty at the end of the day.
Maybe controversial, but I believe a lot of OOP/Clean Code patterns are the software equivalent of corporate BS.
By antonymoose 2026-03-0614:432 reply Wildly controversial!
I look at OOP Patterns as standards and practices.
The same way we have building codes for staircases the framing of walls and electrical installations to prevent injury or collapse or fire.
Sure, you can dodge a lot of design pattern paradigms and still make a working application that makes money. You can also invent your own system when building your house and maybe nothing bad will happen. That tragedy hasn’t yet struck does not make the building codes bad just because you got away with it.
A decent chunk of OOP patterns was due to lack of language features, notably passing and returning functions
It's both.
The *concept* of patterns makes sense. A shared language that developers can use when building things.
The *reality* of patterns has been much less useful. The original ones were indeed a reaction to warts in the popular languages of their era. And as we tend to do in our industry, these have been cargo culted along the way and for some reason I still see people talking about them as first class citizens 30 years later.
People don't seem to realize that patterns should be and are fluid, and as our industry evolves these patterns are evolving as well. A major difference between software engineering and the analogous fields people use when talking about patterns is those industries are much older and move less quickly
By gzread 2026-03-072:57 A pattern is exactly what the word "pattern" implies; something that lots of people seem to have found useful, so you might find it useful too.
If you are a language designer and you see lots of people writing the same boilerplate, it behooves you to put it into the language. A pattern is a desire path - pave it. In that sense, they are missing language features.
By layer8 2026-03-0615:11 Since a single-method object easily serves the role of such a function, that’s simply not true. Looking at the 23 GoF patterns, I can’t identify any that would be obviated by having first-class functions (or lambdas, as many OO languages nowadays have). Some of the patterns can employ first-class functions (e.g. an observer could be just a callback function reference), but the pattern as such remains.
By throwway120385 2026-03-0615:18 The language feature isn't "passing and returning functions" but "loose coupling." Lambdas and Functors are just a way to represent that in OOP languages that care more about inheritance than about messaging.
By gavmor 2026-03-0615:09 A lot of patterns have become frameworks, or language features, yes. It's just paving cowpaths.
By irishcoffee 2026-03-0615:063 reply Are you referring to function pointers?
I believe C has allowed passing and returning functions from... the jump, no?
By scott_w 2026-03-0615:12 I recall a lot of this comes from Java 5/6 where I think passing function pointers around was difficult, if not impossible. Back in those days, I had many a conversation with a friend who would ask "can Python do pattern/feature X?" to which I'd respond "it doesn't need to."
Not just function pointers. E.g. in Scala:
addX(5) then returns a function that adds 5. So closures, which are equivalent to objects (behind the scenes, the compiler needs to allocate a structure to remember that 5 and know the "member function" to call to do the plus), and usually more straightforward.def addX(x: Int): Function[Int,Int] = { y => x+y }Once you get used to doing this, you realize it's useful everywhere.
In a decent language with functional programming and generics support a lot of GoF patterns can be directly encoded as a simple type signature where you receive, return, or both some function, so there's not really much else to say about them. Like half of the behavioral patterns become variations of the interpreter pattern.
By irishcoffee 2026-03-0615:521 reply Pardon my ignorance, isn't that a lambda in c++?
By ndriscoll 2026-03-0616:16 Yes, and in Java and other languages (e.g. in Lean you can literally use the syntax λ x ↦ x + 5). When OOP was more of the zeitgeist, these languages didn't have lambda functions.
By DauntingPear7 2026-03-0616:10 You can return function pointers but not first class functions, which means you can’t do closures and other FP things in C
By throwway120385 2026-03-0615:161 reply Design Patterns is more like the Human Factors and Ergonomics Handbook.
You can have your building engineered, in which case building walls out of 2x6's 16 inches on center is not off the table, but neither is a mortise and tenon timber frame with partition walls. In that paradigm, the code tries not to be descriptive of an exact technique but only gives you criteria to satisfy. For example you could run all of your electrical wiring on the outside of the walls or on the outside of the building, and you could use ramps instead of staircases. It only talks about ingress and egress for fire safety, and it explains how you're supposed to encase wires, or if wires are not encased it describes the way the wiring must be sheathed to protect the occupants.
You can heat your house entirely with an open fire, and the code speaks to how to do that safely. So it's unlike "design patterns" in a lot of ways in that the code tries to accommodate the kinds of buildings we try to build and the ways in which we modify buildings because that's easier than saying "these are all the allowed ways of building an entry staircase." Design Patterns are more in the latter category.
I disagree with that take. Design patterns are a language for (= give standard names to) patterns that tend to repeatedly occur in code, so that we can efficiently communicate about them. Programmers working in the respective contexts tend to reinvent them sooner or later if they don’t know them already, so it makes sense to circulate the knowledge about them. But that doesn’t mean that they are prescriptive.
By hunterpayne 2026-03-071:16 You aren't wrong. The problem with this is the overuse of it. Its the main thing people criticize Java for. Even though it doesn't have anything to do with Java language but instead has to do with Java the business ecosystem or culture. When these are overused, that's when it becomes an in-group/out-group jargon thing.
I agree. Mostly they are copes for lack of first-class functions and multiple dispatch. Go through GoF and you will see this is the case for 80% of the patterns.
OOP has no firm theoretical foundation, unlike FP which is rooted in the formalisms of mathematics.
By red_admiral 2026-03-0615:53 Ok, I'm in an argumentative mood, and I think this is more true than not.
The first theoretical foundation of OOP is structural induction. If you design a class such that (1) the constructor enforces an invariant and (2) every public method maintains that invariant, then by induction it holds all the time. The access modifiers on methods help formalise and enforce that. You can do something similar in a functional language, or even in C if you're disciplined (especially with pointers), but it was an explicit design goal of the C++/Java/C# strand of OOP to anchor that in the language.
The second theoretical foundation is subtyping or Liskov substitution, a bit of simple category theory - which gets you things like contravariance on return types and various calculi depending on how your generics work. Unfortunately the C++ people decided to implement the idea with subclassing which turned out to be a mess, whereas interface subtyping gets you what you probably wanted in the first place, and still gives you formalisms like Array[T] <= Iterable[S] for any S >= T (or even X[T] <= Y[S] for S >= T and X[_] <= Y[_] if you define subtyping on functors). In Java nowadays you have a Consumer<T> that acts as a (side-effectful) function (T => void) but composes with a Consumer<? super T> to get the type system right [1].
Whether most Java/OOP programmers realise the second point is another question.
[1] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api/java.base...
OOP pattern were useful for people stuck in a pure OOP language (say Java 1.4) And needed to make something understandable. Today, when many languages, including Java, have reasonable functional programming support, a large percentage of the patterns are over complicated. Just look at the list, and see how many can be replaced with less boilerplate by passing a function, doing some currying, or both.
By bluGill 2026-03-0615:50 That doesn't replace the pattern, it just does the pattern by a different name. Design Patterns was never about OOP - the publisher added OO to the title because that was the fad at the time, but the patterns happen in other systems as well, they are just implemented differently.
When applied without thinking about why. Yes.
Except dependency injection. I really can’t imagine why you’d ever not use that. I suppose it’s possible to overuse, but you’d still have better code than without. Certainly more testable code.
Because code becomes harder to understand.
With direct dependencies, if you are trying to understand some code that calls some function and what it does exactly isn't completely obvious, you can press a button to go to it, understand it, and come back.
With dependency injection it depends on what is going to be inserted during runtime, so you can't.
By 9rx 2026-03-0615:51 If you can press a button to understand what is going on, "it’s possible to overuse" most definitely applies. Dependency injection, as the name implies, is for dealing with dependencies — things that you cannot observe until runtime.
Hence the benefit to testing; allowing you to inject a deterministic implementation while under test.
By Aeolun 2026-03-0714:57 With dependency injection your interface always describes what your implementation can do. If you see the interface and you have to care what is going to happen when you use it you are doing it wrong.
Unless you mean just regular constructor parameters, dependency injection in the sense of a runtime dependency injection framework is the one thing I try to avoid like the plague.
By oldestofsports 2026-03-0617:481 reply That is called a "DI Container", and usually manages the objects and order of instantiation etc.
Dependency injection simply means to take objects as parameters, and not instantiate them themselves (which causes "Inversion of Control" also commonly mentioned when talking about DI). DI Containers just makes the managing of objects easier.
Avoiding it like a plague seems excessive, did you have a bad experience with them?
By layer8 2026-03-0619:29 When Martin Fowler coined the term Dependency Injection [0], that was specifically for the context of container instrumentation. Merely passing service objects as constructor parameters is more akin to the Strategy pattern. At least in the Java world where it originated, “dependency injection” has always been about wiring application components and services together at runtime based on configuration, often directly injecting the dependencies into object fields via reflection, and not about statically compiled constructor invocations that happen to pass service objects.
Why is OOP lumped with Clean Code? Objects are useful for managing complex states and relationships. They are complementary, not mutually exclusive, to procedural and functional programming.
By array_key_first 2026-03-0617:02 Usually when people refer to OOP they don't mean encapsulation, although that's the core tenant of OOP. Encapsulation, private and public etc is a given. Usually they're talking about the other OOP stuff, like inheritance. Inheritance is pretty much bad and is the wrong abstraction for 90% of stuff.
By kdfjgbdfkjgb 2026-03-0614:36 I think they meant "OOP patterns". Not that I agree with them
I worked with a junior dev who suddenly got really excited about Clean Code. Every example he brought up left me feeling that there was a kernel of good advice, but the book wanted you to take it to such an extreme that it would result in shitty code.
By jghn 2026-03-0615:48 > there was a kernel of good advice, but the book wanted you to take it to such an extreme that it would result in shitty code
I see you're familiar with Uncle Bob's handiwork
By ansgri 2026-03-0614:46 I feel like half of junior programmers are susceptible to this.
By teddyh 2026-03-0616:02 There is now a second edition of that book which has supposedly been rewritten to fix that.
By oldestofsports 2026-03-0617:56 It strongly pushes for max 3 LOC per function, and I am not even joking.
By SoftTalker 2026-03-0616:552 reply Most of OOP and design patterns was yet another attempt to make it possible for lower-ability (i.e. cheaper) developers to be productive. Just like dimensional lumber and standards like "wall studs are spaced 16 inches on center" made it possible for a lower-ability carpenter to frame a house and have everything fit together properly. Though in the latter case, it actually was successful.
By PunchyHamster 2026-03-0617:10 Nah, the engineering standards like that generally make everyone's job easier; the "pro" carpenter will save just as much time as the newbie, hell maybe more.
Design patents are more of "you need to build house with this exact room layout" than "the materials and ways to put them together are standarized"
By mikkupikku 2026-03-0617:10 There's a strong element of that, but there's more to it. It is to the advantage of management that even their experienced developers all speak the same design language, if only because this makes any individual developer easier to replace. Corps don't want a situation where the whole company is hanging off one brilliant programmer's completely impenetrable code. TempleOS is awesome, but not for businesses.
By exceptione 2026-03-0615:49 I think you can safely omit 'maybe'. OOP is harder and requires more design experience to achieve good results than functional programming. I welcome you to look at OOP code from people who don't get the patterns.
OOP can be wonderful, but the people who aren't able to step up a level in conceptual abstraction should really not touch it. Remember, for many years languages like Java didn't have any concept of lambda's and higher order functions, so design patterns were essential for elegant solutions. As they say, a design pattern is a symptom of the language being not expressive enough. In other words, many design patterns in OOP languages express the same thing as first-class language features in the functional paradigm would do, Visitor vs fold for instance.
By hsuduebc2 2026-03-0615:17 I believe it's more like formal letter, or prefilled form where you only fill data when required. It actually can be useful.
By t43562 2026-03-0614:30 I think it's more the idea that if using a pattern is good then using all of them at once is even better.
By joe_mamba 2026-03-0614:22 > but I believe a lot of OOP/Clean Code patterns are the software equivalent of corporate BS.
They're the corporate equivalent of USSR soviet style conformism, when everyone had to call each other comrade and refusal to do that had repercussions.
Similarly, if you say you refuse to follow the Agile/Scrum manifesto or clean code practices, you get ousted, as that's Haram/not-Kosher in this racket.
I still wonder how Valve manage to ship Half Life without Agile or clean code practices.
By raffael_de 2026-03-0615:37 > formal languages exist; as [...] a system for turning bullshit into parse errors
that's a very neat way to put it!
By jancsika 2026-03-0615:44 > a system for turning bullshit into parse errors
Because when I go to view an old website from the 90s that's missing a closing tag for something, I don't want the content-- I want a big red XML parse error with a gigantic horizontal scrollbar.
The history of programmers blithely attempting to add new parsing errors to existing problems instead of obviating them is long and storied. Your sentence would look right at home as part of the BS generated for the test subjects from the article.
By adampunk 2026-03-0617:27 You seem nice
By AreShoesFeet000 2026-03-0614:52 There are no natives anymore. For some time, really. Honestly I don’t even think there ever were.
