What's the worst "corporate speak/buzzwords" that you absolutely hate?

Jesus fucking Christ. This was excellently written and horribly real.

I threw up in my mouth a little bit.

Perfect except for ‘Thoughts?’ Instead of that it should be an appeal to the speaker’s boss: ‘Chris, do you have any builds?’

Thanks. It hit close to home. I hate it.

There was a website at some point that would put up themed meeting phrases each week, with points if anyone used them and caught it. I still remember a few of them.

“I don’t want a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, I expect a pot of uranium.”

“We either play barbie or go home. I didn’t get come here today to be Skipper.”

“I don’t say we build a barbie dream house, I want use to build a barbie on ecstasy house.”

“Is this a queen alien problem? Or more of a face hugger we can ignore for a while?”

How do I delete someone else's comment.

Lol

The only time I hear rightsizing is for cloud resources. I've never heard of it in human resources. That sucks.

I call this one oral tradition, it always gets a chuckle

This is normally called "institutional knowledge" which is definitely a real thing, I don't think it's a marketing or HR buzzword. Though, a lot of the time it somewhat trivial things those things do add up. Institutional knowledge around things like how to deal with a finicky piece of specialized hardware, or what are the right words to convince your bosses boss to pay for you to go to a conference are pretty helpful. If you have an older "individual contributor" in your company that has been there for a while and hasn't climbed the ladder, they might be a gold mine for that kinda info (they could also just be an ass)

wow I was not expecting to find something worthwhile in here but I will definitely be using that lol

This is a gamer term. I've never heard it in a business environment. Even as a IT engineer.

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.

Yeah, hate this. To everyone saying it's not corporate: or certainly is. I did B2B work for around a hundred corps through the one I worked at and I heard it at probably 70% of them.

It's just the company trying to control literally every part of your life. Like who gives a shit what I do on my break? That, and you can't get an "extra" break later saying you have to pee.

Huh. I literally only know this from the context of mmo games.

TIL where that is from

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.

fuck. i hate this one the most.

just say “break.” let everyone else decide for themselves if it needs to be biological in nature.

Bio break.

My friend uses that all the time.

It means a pee break, a tea break, sometimes a 'walk rover' break. When meetings cross that 44-min mark, it's break time.

I don’t use that, I usually just say I’m going to go grab some water but it’s better than saying “brb ima go take a wicked piss”. That being said, I’d respect the hell out of anyone who said that

I always hated “circle back” but I did get into using it ironically for a while.

Touch base too

Every meeting should be a fucking email.

Can we put a pin in that and circle back later? Maybe parking lot it and we can discuss it at the end of the call

In my experience, “take this offline” means they don’t want to have the discussion in front of present company.

For example, mentioning anything less-than-ideal in a meeting in front of large groups. It’s basically a thinly veiled way to control morale through selective information.

Oh snap I should have read more comments before posting about "double clicking". I hate it.

I've been hearing "velocity" a lot recently and that also makes me cringe.

Also "let's take this offline" which just means let's have a different meeting about it, it'll still be online because we're all remote.

See, I would think that would mean for more individual discussion, as in "this isn't relevant to this meeting, why don't you and I talk about this after the meeting or at a later point."

I think everyone has those coworkers who see meetings as an opportunity to ask about things with no relevance to anyone else in the room and makes everybody sit through 10 minutes (per discussion) about an issue that only pertains to them, instead of just going to the manager/whatever's office in their own time to ask about their personal situation.

If it's just to table it until another meeting, though, that doesn't make any sense.

The first one is an Abomination unto Nuggan. I'm OK with the second one being used in a meeting to divert a topic that needs covered but is getting off tack.

Take it offline as in turning it off? "We're taking the service offline" or "Let's talk about this face to face?"

Do you have a better way to phrase it? I usually see this to mean “focus on this topic rather than get distracted. We can discuss that later” … or I guess that’s a better way to phrase it

An old line manager referred to me as a resource in front of me once. I should have told her to fuck off.

I've heard "human capital" before. The soulless fucks make others a commodity by stripping the mere mention of their existance of its humanity.

Does it mean the same thing in corporate as in balatro

I’ve got a manager that’s replaced problem with “opportunity to succeed”. Well, I’ve got 99 opportunities to succeed I guess.

Seeing opportunities everywhere. The same underlying mechanism is at work here as with challenge: Let's replace the word for this bad thing with a different word that means something similar but positive. And then it looks like something good! I am very smart

Rightsizing

Dance, monkey, dance!

They do, the family just happens to be dysfunctional and abusive.

I always reply with, "Or we could right-click on that to see our options".

"I already three-finger-swiped down to minimize, sorry."

I’ve never heard that one. What does that mean?

That's what you get for being such a Will

"No"

I work hard and I play hard. Not here to play.

Everybody dance now!

Especially if the MVP ends up with a lot of scope creep for features that are not MVP

I had a visceral reaction to this. If you've heard this in real life, my deepest sympathies.

What would a linux user say for this?
"Can we just dot slash that then chmod plus x that semicolon dot slash that for a second"

I have to say, I have used the phrase "Drill Down" to refer to the same thing? Does it cause the same reaction?

Ew.

Congratulations, you win both this thread and my disgust. This is literally every company in software development these days.

Take your upvote and choke on it.

Unrelated but I only recently realised that when someone says they believe in family values it means they want to impose their definition of "family" on everyone else.

From an employer I guess when they refer to family they're really referring to a bond beyond work, which basically means they're expecting more from you than you're paid for?

I fell for this once. Thought it sounded great. Everyone at that place hated each other, constantly spread rumors and sabotaged each other's work.

#1 toxic workplace red flag

Next biz bro bestseller: "Leverage the power of your bowels to produce fertiliser that promotes growth"

I mean, yeah, but actually streamlining things is something I like. I work on helicoptersn so example:

Aircraft is broken because of a faulty component. So the maintainer has to go and sign on to our grossly over-bloated computer (which can take anywhere from 5 to 45 minutes to start up), look up the relevant illustrated parts breakdown and download it (because they've moved everything to the cloud from our previous local servers) which runs through our exceptionally bottle-necked security system (seriously, usually ~50-100kbps download on a 100Mbps connection), find the part, log into a different system to get the national standard number and see what type it is to find what system to look in to see if we have it, look up the part location. Look up the maintenance procedure card (which is not classified) from the same place as the manual, download it at 100kbps, figure out the operational check for the replaced component is not in the card but in a separate maintenance manual, go back into that system and download that manual, find the ops check. Try to print out both the card and the ops check from whatever printer wants to work today. Fill out a requisition form, grab the part, and now you can start the job. Basically, add approximately an hour of work to any task for this nonsense.

Streamlined: Have a standalone computer that is not connected to the internet, is regularly updated via approved external hard drive with the latest Maintenance Procedure Cards and manuals, pre-filled requisition forms (with locations) for parts, lists of consumable components (like gaskets) for each repair, connected to a standalone printer hardwired to the standalone computer. Pull up card, manual, form, and ops check and print in 5 minutes.

Finding time wasters that only serve to frustrate workers and finding ways to cut those time wasters out makes the workers and the managers happy, assuming the people doing the job want to do the job well and quickly (we all want to be here, so that describes our hangar deck).

I'm a fan of streamlining.

Yeah.... bring your own sack lunch and it's "voluntary", so no OT. That the lunch and learn I'm familiar with anyway.

“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 :)))”

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!

"vibes"

Typical double click request is as follows:

Manager: Leadership wants a "double click" on the numbers on slide 8.
Doer: What do they want to see.
M: Well they wanted to see more about the numbers on slide 8 they thought it was interesting.
D: What number? Interesting how?
M: They want a double click? Does that work? How long will that take?
D: ummm a week?

It always sounds so deliberate.

Sorry, I run KDE.

This one comes from Excels Pivot tables, where you double click to see the source data, but it got picked up and bastardized

This phrase is currently running riot at my work. Leadership have just created a new "North Star" so that they can Kingdom Build and leave their mark; years of progress on other projects are being thrown on a mini-bonfire of the vanities.