Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs (news.cornell.edu)

Article summary

A Cornell study introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale, a tool designed to measure susceptibility to corporate jargon. The research found that employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak may struggle with practical decision-making and display lower scores on tests of analytic thinking. The study suggests that being more receptive to corporate bullshit is positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements, but also negatively linked to effective workplace decision-making. The findings imply that corporate cultures that reward the use of empty rhetoric can create an informational blindfold that exposes companies to reputational and financial harm.

Main themes

• Corporate jargon
• Decision-making
• Job performance
• Critical thinking
• Workplace culture
• Language and meaning

What commenters say

• The study's findings are unsurprising and confirm the common perception that corporate jargon is often used to sound impressive rather than convey meaningful information.
• The use of corporate jargon can create a self-reinforcing cycle where those who are most receptive to it are more likely to rise to leadership positions, despite being less effective at making practical decisions.
• Some commenters argue that the study is not falsifiable and that its conclusions are too vague to be meaningful, while others defend the study's methodology and findings.
• The discussion touches on the idea that certain programming practices, such as Object-Oriented Programming and Clean Code, can be seen as the software equivalent of corporate BS, prioritizing form over function and leading to overly complex or inefficient code.
• There is disagreement about the value of specific programming practices, with some arguing that they are essential for maintaining code quality and others seeing them as overly rigid or dogmatic.
• The use of dependency injection is debated, with some arguing that it makes code more testable and maintainable, while others see it as making code harder to understand and debug.
• Some commenters note that the study's findings have implications for how we evaluate job candidates and how we approach critical thinking in the workplace, highlighting the importance of looking beyond surface-level impressions and rhetoric.