Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs - The Register

[justaprogressive]

Workers who believe "leveraging cross-functional synergies" sounds profound may want to rethink their career trajectory because a new study suggests people who fall for corporate word salad also tend to perform worse at their jobs.

Researchers from Cornell University have developed what they call "the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale," a tool designed to measure how impressed people are by business school-style jargon that sounds strategic but says very little.

The findings, described in a recent study, suggest that employees who rate this sort of language as insightful are more likely to struggle with analytical thinking and workplace decision-making.

To build the scale, researchers ran four studies involving more than 1,000 working adults in the US and Canada. Participants were shown a mix of genuine corporate statements and nonsense lines generated by what the researchers call a "corporate bullshit generator" – effectively a tool that mashes together buzzwords into sentences that sound like they came straight out of a quarterly strategy meeting.

Examples included lines such as "actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" and "pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence." Participants were then asked to rate how meaningful or insightful the statements appeared.

snip

People who scored higher on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale tended to perform worse on tests measuring analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. They also made poorer judgments in workplace decision-making scenarios designed to mimic common business problems./excerpt]

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/15/corporate_jargon_research/]

[LearnedHand]

1. I work in IT, where the jargon is vastly more creative and hilarious

Like “smoke testing solutions” and taking measures not to let a new effort “blow up the help desk.”

[regnaD kciN]

2. I honestly cannot tell if this is satire or not...

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

[SWBTATTReg]

4. I always told my IT people to speak in English, as most of our clients weren't IT people but in fact, folks on the front

lines, in front-end applications such as customer service apps, numerous other apps. Some kids get too wordy, confuse the heck out of clients w/ IT speak-talk.

[OC375]

5. Sounds like Dev and Manager talk

I don’t know any IT operations people who talk like that. It is funny though.