Hacker News Reader

Comment by SamuelAdams | Hacker News Reader

> A lot of Americans tie up a lot of their emotions in work success.

For anyone else still wondering "why" corpspeak still exists, this is it. America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.

I guess I'm just disappointed at the world I've inherited. Why are people so afraid of direct conversation? Why is hearing bad news "too much" for some people? I remember a quote from a comic strip saying "people would rather hear an outright lie than an uncomfortable truth". Which is true, but I wish American work culture didn't need to hide from the truth.

To me part of being a professional is being able to have direct, pragmatic conversations. You learn to keep your own emotions in check and focus on the discussion at hand. Look at the larger picture of the meeting / your work / whatever is being discussed.

What would it take to change work culture to be more pragmatic?

View on HN

> America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.

I specifically make a point to not ask the dreaded "what do you do?" question. In my experience, that question is an absolute energy killer. Most people do not like what they do for a living, so asking them to talk about it brings the mood down. Plus there's the whole "sizing up" aspect of that question that's very off-putting to me, as if we need to know how much money people make before we decide how we feel about them.

I'd much rather talk to people about their hobbies, travels, creative pursuits, kids, etc. - the things that people are actually excited to talk about.

I’m usually interested to here what other people do as a selfish endeavor because people usually do or work for something at least moderately interesting. If someone doesn’t want to talk about it, there’s plenty of ways for them to steer the convo away from work.

I’m excited to talk about what I do too, so I enjoy when people ask me…

> I'd much rather talk to people about their hobbies, travels, creative pursuits, kids, etc.

Yeah , this gets exciting only to people who can afford these things. It's possible that one only meet these types of people. In most context I have seen asking people what they do is not out of some deep interest in other's jobs/work but just the safe topic to broach with an adult.

Yep. I remember we had specific training at my company on not mentioning literally any of these things when interviewing candidates, in part for that reason.

> just the safe topic to broach with an adult

Why is it unsafe to ask people about hobbies, even if they "can't afford these things"? They can just say that "I can't afford hobbies" and then you can talk about that.

People also might not have a job/work, so asking about that could get uncomfortable too, if you are not willing to hear negative answers.

Safe in that there's a good chance that everyone has an answer for the question. It's the same thing like asking about the weather: it's easy to observe and most people will have some kind of, even minor, opinion about it. It's called "small talk" for a reason and is meant as a conversation starter and/or to avoid the awkward just-staring-at-each-other moments. Even a tiny human connection is still a connection.

> talk to people about their hobbies, travels, creative pursuits, kids, etc.

This backfires when you have more hobbies or travels than the other party.

Also interests don't usually align (e.g "I spent last month looking for that one elusive comet from my DX-7512 telescope. here.. see this photo. What about you ? Umm. well nothing much")

It's better to gradually start with some topic where opinions are likely to align.

For small talk I do realize how important (and how easy once you've run this with 4-5 people) it is to find a hobby I enjoy, and pick sharable stories around it and back it up with some artifacts (like photos on my phone).

I think it would help to come up with clusters of topics that are well aligned. Pick a topic from one cluster and see how it works, if not pick one from the next. If it worked, pick another one from the same cluster.

I find people of other profession talking about their professions genuinely interesting thing to listen about. It is topic they have deep knowledge about and I usually don't.

People with kids dont tend to have deep hobbies and exciting travels. Thinking about it, most people without them dont have hobbies they are super invested in either. There are some people with those and it is interesting when they talk about it, but most of them splits time between work and familly, putting a movie on top of it here and there.

I enjoy discussing my work. If someone asked me about my hobbies, I'd stare blankly, wondering if they really want to hear that I go to the gym, or the hours I spend on obscure corners of Wikipedia, or doing math for fun. For small talk, stick with questions that folks are asked constantly, and that everyone has a ready and rehearsed answer for.

> If someone asked me about my hobbies, I’d stare blankly, wondering if they really want to hear that I go to the gym, or the hours I spend on obscure corners of Wikipedia, or doing math for fun.

I have never related to something so much.

I've started asking people "What do you do with your time?" It's an open enough question that people can answer with work, hobbies, or life, whichever they feel more comfortable enough to share with someone they just met. It also invites unprompted switching between the topics.

I was always taught growing up that asking that is rude! I still make a conscious effort not to do it straight off. It's a bit of a lazy conversation opener and with a bit more imagination (e.g. based on something interesting/strange that is happening in the moment) I often get better conversations. Or maybe people just think I'm weird

In my personal opinion, if we just stopped doing this, and people at work experienced their first "breakup" (in the form of being told "you screwed up" or having to say "I am sorry that I screwed up") we would all be able to be more honest with each other. Just like dating, some people would go through an emotional trauma, but everyone would learn to get over it. Similarly, each manager would learn how to say "this project went poorly" or "you screwed up" in an empathetic way.

However, that is just not the culture, and it takes a very long time to change a culture. To make matters worse, the presence of the linguistic emotional barriers makes their removal a lot more painful. The people fighting against this oppressive language would be labeled "mean" (or worse, "non-inclusive"), and unfortunately that is a much worse label than "bad programmer."

I think this culture is dangerous, and normalizes both weasel-talk and lies. It has already infected media and politics. I just don't know how to stop it.

this is basically why i got fired recently. now, idk what to do from here. being so "fake" (idk a better one, using that word feels like angsty teenager) just isn't in me. corporate life isn't for me maybe, but those paychecks...

"You screwed up" is a tricky one. Yes, individuals do screw up. But that's actually not very interesting; a true individual screwup (with no one else contributing) has a very small blast radius.

The bigger the screwup, the more people had a hand in it, and the less truthful it is to point to one person and say "you did it."

Let's say I merge a syntactically incorrect piece of code that brings down the entire system on the next release. Nobody notices for a few hours and the company loses a bunch of money. Did I screw up? Yes I did, but that's the tiniest piece of it.

* How did my change get merged? Who reviewed it? Did nobody test it or notice that it had no test coverage that would exercise my stupid change? Do we have any standards or accountability for review quality?

* How did it get released? Do we not have any automated tooling to stand up a candidate release in staging and do smoke tests?

* How did the downtime last so long? Do we have any operational monitoring? Was someone on call? Who is accountable for system uptime overall?

A bad boss would just throw the person closest to the cause of the failure -- me -- under the bus. But who among us has never committed bad code? That's why we build systems for code review, for automated test, for release QA, for operational monitoring. And if all those systems fail or are inadequate, it's not really the fault of any single developer who was essentially walking a tightrope without a net.

You basically nailed the problems with a non-blameless approach to business. Blamelessness has some very clear benefits, but I have also seen the pendulum swing too far (eg refusing to blame someone for gross negligence). I do think you can have blamelessness without corpspeak, but it takes a lot more humility and self-control.

>For anyone else still wondering "why" corpspeak still exists, this is it. America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.

Are there other societies where corpspeak does not exist- what are they?

> America has a very work-centric culture. Within a few minutes of meeting someone, people typically talk about their family or work.

That's pretty much the norm in Australia too and I would expect so even elsewhere. I'm not going to claim it's universal but I'd suggest at least widespread in the modern developed world (I was going to put in "Western", but even in Japan I'd say self-identification via career choice is largely the norm).

To what extent does corpspeak exist in other languages though?

  >> A lot of Americans tie up a lot of their emotions in work success.
  > America has a very work-centric culture.
  > Why are people so afraid of direct conversation?

I feel like the "emotions" side is just as important as the "work" side, here. To be able to (1) be emotionally invested and (2) have those emotions hurt from time to time can be just fine, as long as you can also (3) process those emotions in a healthy way. I feel like a lot of Americans (and humans in general, to be fair) have trouble with (3).

If I could magically fix it, I think I would be less interested in "make people more able to maintain emotional distance at work" and more in "make people more able to deal with emotions when they come up, in general".

Just my 2¢

Reply on news.ycombinator.com