this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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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.