Corporatese is the corporate jargon / bullshit that is used by people in the corporate world, or similar bureaucracies. It’s usually worse in big corporations, but is also found in startups.
This page of honest translations is inspired by the Womanese page.
Where Womanese breaks down women’s bullshit into honest English, Corporatese does the same for common Corporation bullshit.
Make sure to read the Career Advice page too – for both useful tips and funny memes.
For more hilarious bullshit speak, watch Silicon Valley and show it to people who have worked there – they’ll either laugh or cry, or both, because it’s all true. Your girlfriend who knows nothing about technology, not even the internet or programming your TV channels, will be deadpan and not twitch though. Keep it for guys who have at least some personal gadget interest in technology and reads the internet.
Index
- Make the World a Better Place
- Passion
- We’re a Family
- Digital Transformation
- Gender Pay Gap
- Ninja / Rock Star
- The Salary is ‘Competitive’
- Job Hopping
- Hybrid Working
- We believe in DEI – Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
- Diversity
- Equity
- Inclusion
- Cultural Fit
- Synergy
- Deep Dive
- Pivot
- Cutting Edge
- Get in on the Ground Floor
- Take it ‘Offline’
- Peel the Onion
- Mission Critical
Make the World a Better Place
Make the wallets of our handful of founders or major shareholders a better place.
Passion
We want you to be passionate about making us money and happy with the crumbs from our table.
You can be as passionate as you like, but if you’re not making your sales targets or business deliverables, we’ll still fire you. This isn’t a family after all…
We’re a Family
We want to treat you like a junior family member by exploiting you ruthlessly.
This involes getting you to work whenever we want like it’s a small family run business which you’ll inherit – except you won’t. We have founders and shareholds for that. Sorry, not sorry.
Digital Transformation
We are a bullshit consultancy who will take existing computer systems (already digital!) and migrate them to even worse ones while overcharging you a fortune.
We will not turn your business from analogue to digital, but we’ll pretend like we are making that big a difference.
Of course, we’ll pay peanuts to some juniors in India that we slave drive for 100 hour weeks to do the actual work that you could have just hired yourself for 1/10th of the cost.
We manage the client’s expectations and turn up on-site as necessary to shake hands and bullshit them out of their money and most important of all, cover up our incompetence and keep the contract going at all cost with whatever lies or backhanders are necessary. Hopefully this gravy train never ends and the hiring managers never get fired for their incompetence/corruption.
Gender Pay Gap
We want women to get paid more for doing less than men.
Thoroughly debunked in The Gender Pay Gap Scam.
We don’t care about the Gender University Gap. Don’t bring it up. Or the bullshit easy degrees that account for it.
Ninja / Rock Star
We want an expert who works 80 hour weeks while we pay him for 30.
Rock stars may ask them how much time off you’ll get for rehearsals and tours. The answer will be none.
The Salary is ‘Competitive’
Your salary will be competing against bills.
We want to figure out the minimum we can get away with paying you.
Job Hopping
We want you to stay here long as possible.
We don’t want to hire someone who might follow your own best interests to go elsewhere for a decent pay rise.
See Why Changing Companies is Important on the Career Advice page and Changing Jobs for why you should require a minimum 20% pay rise to change jobs.
Hybrid Working
We’ll give you a slightly longer leash, but not so long that you can live somewhere more affordable and benefit.
We believe in DEI – Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
We will discriminate against you at every opportunity especially if you are any intersection of white or even worse, male.
Heaven help you get through our hiring process if you are both. You’d better be the best-of-the-best. And even then we have our trump card to play of ‘Cultural Fit’.
Diversity
We prioritise giving jobs to women over men, and if it doesn’t conflict with this primary mission, then optionally to ethnic minorities in priority of the darkness of their skin.
Equity
We want to get paid a lot of money for doing bullshit easy jobs.
This is more important than Equality and fairness, because under a fair system we wouldn’t be able to extract as much salary from the productivity of the other people doing actual practical jobs in the company.
Inclusion
We believe in excluding anybody who is a normal traditional conservative, especially someone who is not a feminist or who objects to our anti-meritocratic DEI policies.
Cultural Fit
We don’t like you at a personal level.
Or we are discriminating against you to meet our DEI hiring quotas.
We can’t criticise your suitability for the job which you would on merit deserve, and we can’t openly discriminate against you, so we’ll use this vague blanket term to avoid you being able to sue us for discrimination.
Synergy
Let’s do the same thing others are doing.
Deep Dive
Let’s spend more time trying to actually understand what we’re doing.
Pivot
What we’re doing isn’t working.
Let’s try something else.
Cutting Edge
Modern stuff, as opposed to the rest of the legacy crap we do.
Get in on the Ground Floor
Our company isn’t successful yet, but if you join and work 100 hour weeks for the next 5 years it might be!
In the slim chance our company works out, you will make some good money, approximately 1% of what we’ll make.
Please don’t go start your own company with a similar idea.
Take it ‘Offline’
Let’s talk face-to-face like humans instead of doing everything on technology.
Often this doesn’t actually mean doing it without technology, but rather starting up a small 1-on-1 meeting to discuss instead of doing it in the group meeting. It’s still online.
Peel the Onion
Examine the problem in detail by stripping away the outer layers to get to the core of the problem.
Mission Critical
We can’t make money without doing this.
Our business operation requires this to support our oh-so-important mission
