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Comment by OldGuyInTheClub | Hacker News Reader

As a native English speaker I've let my native English speaking management know about all sorts of rude, condescending, infantilizing corporate doublespeak and yet it gets worse every year. "Do the needful" pales in comparison to the codswallop in the layoff notices that get posted here regularly.

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Oh, the company recognizes your outstanding effort and is offering you a 1% raise. Corporate speak is meant to gaslight people.

2% for me. I met expectations and was accordingly paid for my performance as one of the company's most valuable assets.

Yeah, to me it's basically just a vernacular peculiar to Indians that would be almost exactly equivalent to "take care of that".

The one that blew me away in my first corporate job was referring to people as "resources". And I don't mean as in the human resources department which I begrudgingly accept. I mean saying things, like "let me get a resource" to mean get a person. I get that we're viewed as replaceable cogs in the machine, but there's no need to rub our faces in that.

I actually did have some success in persuading people that it was dehumanizing.

See, this is the correct take. Using "resources" for people shook me the first time I heard it in a high-level planning meeting. I'm being serious here that it kept me up all night.

"Headcount" strikes me the same way.

“Resource” is an artifact of our services companies (outsourcing) and their project management training.

Extremely annoying and frustrating as they would yank people off projects and replace them with junior “resources,” and expect no impact on the project.

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