Link: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/23/corporate-speak-study

“The people that are the most susceptible to the corporate bullshit tended to choose the worst solutions to those problems on a consistent basis,” Littrell said.

Hmmmmmmmm.

Well that goes some way partially to explaining why management at large corporations almost as a rule are uselessly incompetent.

I'm a programmer. I'm literally paid to think. The number of times I've had to attend a corporate wide event and been asked to just not think about the shit they are spewing is unacceptable--and every time the sales guys just lap it all up.

Oh interesting I thought the job of a programmer was to be paid to fix AI slop vibe code made by clueless management who would have done better by coming to you and asking you to think in the first place.

Littrell noted the workers who participated in the study all came from highly educated backgrounds in HR, accounting, marketing and finance, had bachelor’s degrees and even PhDs, which shows the findings go beyond simply assessing the intelligence of the study participants.

Actually, I'm not convinced that we've managed to eliminate that hypothesis. The only group that gives me pause is accounting.

Sometimes we need studies like this to point out the obvious.

“Study finds graduates of programs that require colouring inside the lines do well at colouring inside the lines at work.”

Morons are bad at their jobs. Who knew?

All of those sound structured backgrounds that apply fixed definitions and derivatives based on that. They lack a developed sense of creativity outside the rigidity of their domain and so, are pretty much biological LLMs after a decade of purposed training and instructions.

Most of us can see this for ourselves, but anecdotes don't move the needle. So, yes, studies with numbers and charts make a difference, sometimes.

"Gullible idiots: bad at everything? More at 6."

Not a single hard science occupation in engineering or technical aspects? Yeah that's a shit biased study.

And yet the more corporate bullshit you "fall" for, the more you seem to get paid.

A PhD is when you know everything about one specific rock on the beach, is how I put it. You know exactly where it is, all of its properties, and can go to it any time. Outside of that one rock, maybe a slightly above-average person, but nothing special.

Hmmm..let's take this idea and run it up the flagpole, see if anyone salutes it.

you want sales guys to be as stupid as potential customers.

But also, when they 'think' of something, it's basically your fault of their idea doesn't work, even if you told them why it wouldn't work.

I had a ... VP of Marketing, basically, once suggest to me that I 'implement the blockchain' ... into our entire PostgreSQL system.

... These people are an idiot nobility, its just their thought patterns that are inbred, this time.

"The bureacracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureacracy."

Generally speaking a PhD requires producing original research. Which ass-tier PhDs are you referencing that only require learning?

Or, the longer you're employed, more like. 😜

fuck. i instinctively downvote scott adams even though he's dead

I mean that's mostly true. Coming up with novel ideas and how to test them is a small (but critical) part of the job. Still I agree, you don't actually spend that much time on it.

so, are pretty much biological LLMs after a decade of purposed training and instructions.

🤯

Uuh I feel you, my older job got worse and worse until it had up to 25 meetings a week... All bullshit.

When I complained it was first brushed off as not true, then I screenshotted a week with 25 meetings (senior software dev, but not manager) and that got some attention finally and actions were taken to reduce the number of meetings.

So they started with "stand up meetings" doesn't count, so those 5 meetings does not count ... (So down to 20, right?) Because they are not meetings, right? Stand up Meetings...

And all mandatory of course, except they said they were not, miss obe and you'd get problems and childish lectures about corpo culture and crap.

Can't make that shit up. And yeah, people running on hot air love corporate speak and corporate everything ugh, probably they think they're finally productive or something.

/Rant off!

I'm no longer there, good luck to you!

He understood exactly how many bullshit jobs exist in corporate culture.

"Corporate Bullshit" = "Mission Statement"

No it doesn't. You are confusing the ideal of a PhD with the reality.

Most PhDs are doing bland derivative safe stuff, to get their degree and get a job. Very few are doing anything legitimately original. And most of them won't get a job in their field anyway. We have way too many PhDs because they are the cheap labor for teaching in the university systems, that have over-enrolled for decades so they have to hire less faculty.

Most of my cohort in grad school did not belong there, at a mid-level state school. Only about 1/4 of us were serious about our studies. Yeah, at elite schools you will be doing original research for sure, at most low/mid level programs (and there are a lot) most PhDs are just people with good grades killing time tying to figure out what they want out of life, and a PhD is a good way to do that for 5-10 years. The time to graduate has been going up to over 6 years on average now.

PhD is really mostly a proxy for how rich or educated your parents were. And rich people always score higher on general intelligence because they are better educated due to money. Less than a 1/3 of PhD students are first-generation. Meaning 2/3 of them have parents who have advanced degrees.

I was a first gen PhD student. I was the only one in my cohort of 20 students who was. Everyone else had highly educated parents. I ended up quitting because the deck was so incredibly stacked against me, and my dream job/career was basically the lazy fall-back career of folks who had generations of education and money carrying them through life.

people in hard sciences aren't getting jobs in HR dude.

Oh man, I was part of a small non profit for years. I loved it.

I quit once they decided they needed a mission statement, because the enshittification had begun. And now instead of doing work and standing on their own, they are on social media grandstanding for clout and begging for money... because it was no longer about doing good work and helping people, it was about getting a fatter paycheck. And you get that by leaning into the corporate bullshit marketing crap.

I’m a programmer. I’m literally paid to think. The number of times I’ve had to attend a corporate wide event and been asked to just not think about the shit they are spewing is unacceptable–and every time the sales guys just lap it all up.

That doesn't exactly make him Nostradamus.

"Standups" by video call where everyone is sitting. That sounds like corporate thinking.

Just this week I had someone try and book a half hour call with me to get the url for a repository.

You're not relaying accurately: the underachievers and floating job cancers pretend to fall for corporate bullshit because being cheerleaders covers up their ineptitude.

ooOOOooOOOooo he had a corporate job for 20 minutes

Mmm you know that's a good point, I never even considered looking at mid or low tier programs when I was school shopping. Your point reminds me of Mike Israetel's embarrassing doctorate that he likes to use as a kudgle. I could have done his dissertation without the typos and I am educated in a completely different field.

Not surprised. Sales is the art of presenting an emotional call to agreement and making people think they got there intellectually. Corporate bullshit is very similar

He did do really well at depicting the incoherent blathering of management as it was, but Graeber he wasn't. He was just a cartoonist who thought himself an engineer.

Education ≠ intelligence. To quote Berkeley, "Few men think; yet all will have opinions."

There are also a growing number of PhDs where you are paying for the degree rather than being funded. They are jokes. A lot of dumb people see PhD as a vanity thing.

It's worse, he thought the boss was right.