hell yea brother
I am often torn a bit on this one, depending on the cases.
Don’t get me wrong, management lingo is undeniably bullshit, trying to hide how simple what you’re saying actually is, and giving yourself stature and legitimacy.
But I would argue that there are fields were the emergence of complex concepts (and lingo, and notations to define them) is a necessary evil. For sure even there, there are people who abuse it to big themselves up, but I also think a lot of the time, either the thing you’re speaking of is genuinely complicated, or it’s just not well understood enough. Sometimes I really wish I could say things in a simpler way, both in concepts and expression, but I can’t find a way to make it so. Not by malice, not to appear to know more, but genuinely because I don’t understand it enough yet either and that’s the best I’ve got.
Having experienced it first-hand, I am more forgiving to this (depending on the attitude of the person spouting the jargon) and don’t automatically assume all technical-sounding terms are automatically bullshit. They often are, but not always.
But management lingo is. 100%.
I recently (2 years) got into management against my better judgement. I dont do all this lingo bs and my team scores are always the highest. Its almost like if you treat your team like people, and peers, they respect you and WANT to work for you, thus being better employees.
Good management is just good people skills. If you don’t have them, intentionally defanging your speech/correspondence helps prevent blowups. Unfortunately for people working under managers with bad people skills, this doesn’t actually make up for and mostly just highlights their managers’ deficits.
Tl;dr: management speak is intentionally harmless in and of itself, but is an obvious symptom of bad management.
You’re literally just describing this meme.
When you don’t know shit you think it should be simpler, when you slightly understand it then you end up using technical terms because you know those terms apply and aren’t confident enough to replace them, and then once you know enough you get confident just describing everything as bags within bags.
My point being that for some stuff, you just can’t describe things as bags within bags, irrelevant of where you are on the scale, at least not without being quite intellectually dishonest and oversimplifying.
I am not saying I am on top of the scale, I am saying I’ve met and worked with people on top of the scale (and couldn’t keep up), and they don’t explain things with bags within bags.
EDIT: for clarity, there are things that are too complicated for everyone right now. One day we may understand them well enough that someone can explain it in layman’s term without loss of precision, but to get to that point, we must accept that we need to work with complex notations and lingo. Example: in the past, only Newton and Leibniz and a handful of others understood calculus. Now it’s taught in high school. Newton and Leibniz were not in the middle of the bell curve, nor did they overcomplicate their theory to make it sound fancy.
Eh I don’t really agree, depending on how simple you’re talking. Bags within bags, or dumbing things down to a grade school level, then sure, there are topics that can’t be described succinctly.
But if you’re talking about simplifying things down to the point that anyone who took a bit of undergrad math/science can understand, then pretty much everything can be described in simple and easy to understand ways.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen many people at the top who can’t, but in every case, it’s not because of the topics’ inherent complexity, but either because they don’t actually understand the topics as well as they may seem, or because they lack the social skills (or time / effort / setting) to properly analogize and adjust for the listener.
The meme is about technical science jobs. There are absolutely technical science jobs where you cannot communicate key ideas and concepts without a) the person you’re describing it to needing more than “a bit of undergrad math/science” and b) if you try to explain it without using specialist terminology, you’ll spend an unnecessary hour for every quarter hour of content recalling the specialist definition of things because, for some reason, you refuse to use the precise word that the scientific community have agreed means exactly that.
I’ve progressed quite far in the technical science part of my job. I’m at the top end of the graph and encouraging my junior staff to simplify their language and message. Some things absolutely need technical terms, but they don’t need to use overly complicated words to say “this has moved up” or “this thing is bad”. More often meaning gets lost in using euphemisms instead of being clear about the message.
I’ve moved up the management role as well and really can’t bring myself to move from the bottom end of the meme graph. Management really has its own language so they can say lots of words in meetings with very little meaning. We’re in the business of doing shit…are we going to do shit or not?
Well yeah, but that’s business bullshit speak, nothing to do with science!
Their literal entire first paragraph is about scientists doing it.
Thanks, I gaslit myself into thinking I misunderstood what “technical science job” meant.
If you’re communicating with another scientist about the actual work you’re doing then sure there are times when you need to be specific.
If you’re publishing official documentation on something or writing contracts, then yes, you also need to be extremely speciific.
But if you’re just providing a description of your work to a non-specialist then no, there’s always a way of simplifying it for the appropriate context. Same thing goes for most of specialist to specialist communication. There are specific sentences and times you use the precision to distinguish between two different things, but if you insist on always speaking in maximum precision and accuracy then it is simply poor communication skills where you are over providing unnecessary detail that detracts from the actual point you’re trying to convey.
Anyone who took undergrad maths/science is not layman’s term.
I also disagree with this for the record but that’s besides the point.
It is for a white collar job where most people have degrees.
“amongst the people who understand the jargon and notations, jargon and notations are layman’s term”
Sure, I guess that’s true if you limit your sample, this is not what I took the meme to mean but ok.
No, I’m talking about engineers and scientists communicating with project managers, designers, lawyers, business people, and the many many other people who work in the same industry but do not have technical backgrounds.
Seems like we just need to circle back and then double click into this. I don’t want there to be any lack of alignment in this cross functional group.
WTF does it mean? Are we doing the project or not??
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Roughly translated from management speak: We’ll need to come back to this specific aspect of the discussion on its pwn later, so we can more directly focus on this one part.
Could be blowing smoke to get someone stuck on something to let go so the meeting can move on, or a legitimate “this part deserves its own dedicated discussion”.
There’s a decent bit of good “steering” of groups and discussions that comes out of management speak, but the word choice and phrasing makes it needlessly opaque, and very “fellow kids”.
Sometimes the opaqueness can be intentional too, to avoid making someone feel like their idea has been dismissed, or to slow down somebody while they parse what was just said so they can’t keep rapid fire talking and dominating the conversation.
We’re circling back, then double clicking! They said it in buzzwords. How much clearer could they have been!?
You’re triggering my PTSD from the weekly cross-team meetings I’m forced to attend.
Nearly ten years of my life essentially reduced to “Keep poop in ground, not on ground.”
We will be starting a new working group to explore the feasibility of commissioning a new tool chain to assist in aligning our supply chain with our social responsibilities while maintaining stakeholder values.
Translation: Creating a recurring meeting to look into changing to the our processes to have better PR while not costing any money.
Its meant to keep you on the other side of the gate. If you cant speak their lingo, then they can use it as an excuse for why youre not “management material”
my head-canon says a time machine’s only legal use is going to be to go back in time and smack mothers for raising road rage douchebags but… this may also suffice.
