“What is going on here? Given the beatific expressions, you’d think they were undergoing some kind of nerd rapture. Maybe they’re getting a sneak preview of the singularity, I don’t know.”
Look at the look on their faces, especially the woman in the middle. They are clearly looking at something extremely cute. Either a baby, or a lolcat.
No one ever got fired for creating a bland, corporate web site, using stock photos and Verdana 12pt.
It’s all about PsyOps. This is what Madison Avenue has been so good at since the 1980s, and the Web simply followed. People are now trained to expect this sort of imagery so the lack of it suggests sloppy incompetence.
Why do you think single urban apartment dwellers drive giant diesel pickup trucks?
I always get annoyed by this sort of fluffy corporate-speak on company websites when I am going for an interview and I want to know what exactly they do. Why can’t they just say what they do?!
I have noticed a few company websites lately that are very direct and clear about what the company does (I don’t have any links handy). They tend to be newer/smaller companies, and I think this no-nonsense approach to communication adds adds to their credibility and honesty, and therefore sounds far more “professional”! Hopefully this is a trend that will take hold over the next few years.
This isn’t communication, it’s advertisement. It holds no more communicational value than large breasts, and it’s not supposed to.
shudders at another well articulated article about the horrors of coding …
Spot on. It’s not coding horror, it’s real life horror.
@Justice - “Don’t blame Madison Avenue. Advertising plays to our insecurities and lack of self-awareness, but it doesn’t create it.”
Are you sure? Remember, you’re talking about an industry that relies on deception for the express purpose of getting us to do (buy) things we otherwise wouldn’t.
A classic advertising strategy is convince me I have I problem (likely one I didn’t even know I had) and then show me how your product fixes it. I get your point, but I don’t think the line between playing to our insecurities and creating them is as bright and well-defined as some might think.
Beware of the corporation though that ‘pretends’ to be cool (I think Apple is falling into this category at this stage). My own experience was of a company (cant say who it is or I’ll get sued) where, on the surface, everything was cool. Developers were paid really well, everyone had one of those fancy programmers’ chairs, two 24" monitors on every desk, lunch was free and there was a nice gym on the premises (someone must have read one of Joel’s blogs). Unfortunately, they were hell bent on exploiting their customers, they treated developers like shit, they never told anyone what was going etc, etc. My own epiphany came on the day our boss called the group in and gave us a ‘motivational’ speech. There had been some firings in another part of the company and he wanted us to know that “It was a great company to work for, you are being watched and you should be scared”. The scary part was that these three phrases occurred in the same sentence. I went back to my desk and logged on to a job site right away…
To Jeff & Joel
Can you please discuss and inform us all what is meant as a ‘tight deadline’.
I see this often in job ‘specifications’ and descriptions.
Or is it also corporate fluff?
No Blond in that picture, How could you do it Jeff…!
Great post, This is something I have been thinking about every single day…!
Here’s how things work on my current project:
I write a technical document in (as far as I am able) a readable, jaunty style. The goal is to communicate complex information to the reader, so anything that makes the text warmer and more approachable has got to be a boon, right?
I get review comments back that basically suck the life out of the thing. Sections with any hint of informality are reworded to make them less comprehensible and much more stilted, but, hey, it’s more “professional”.
We actually had a QA person (now thankfully departed) whose sole purpose on the project was to mutilate documents in this way. She once painstakinly itemised a list of 50-odd “unprofessional” uses of language in a functional specification I wrote, this included things like analogies where I was comparing a complex process to things in the real world to make it more approachable.
My take on this is that IT has ballooned in the last 20 years from a geek-centric niche into a broad industry which now attracts talentless drones with little or no technical inclination. These are the sort of people who are responsible for the plague of bogus “professionalism” blighting the industry.
+1 for Headset Hotties reference.
+10
For a programmer like me, if a few customers that don’t want to hire a good designer want the said prof… site, this is very handy.
Shameless, I know. But there’s a ton of these guys and a ton of their customers like to see the same thing - “Can’t you put a smiling lady so that it looks professional?”
I probably did not rob a designer of a contract because most “designers” here do the same thing!
I charge less, and I tell them where the thing came from (to cover up the guilt) so I guess I’m the lesser evil ! 
I think this has to do with the mindsets we are in and the mindset training done.
Creativity is not allowed in analytical work. Indirect socializing is a crime. This goes back to obfuscation of plain concepts in sophisticated English.
Equations and source code have brought some balance to the scene.
Legalese still remains unaltered, although we have sufficient tools for documenting the worst cases of legalese in easily visualizable pictorial form.
I think someone should start a formal movement to de-obfuscate things.
Several manuals are precise and apt inspite of not using legalese.
Some are downright friendly!!
But I don’t see corporatese going anywhere as long as majority of society is willing to accept some lofty-sounding explanation for something trivial or wrong.
Most businessmen swear by “if you cannot convince, confuse”.
It’s the natural extension of animal escapism and childhood fibbing that stays over even though your body grows into adulthood.
Sometimes Jeff, you write something like this, and then the world is a better place because you exist 
keep up the good work
Jeff, are you and/or Jason Cohen suggesting that the term “data mining” is marketing doublespeak?
“happy talk” ? Thats everything that our government has been trying to shove down our throats since the first “the sky is falling” BS going back to Paulson in Sep 2008.
I love it when I try to figure out what a piece of software actually DOES and all I can find is a blurb that says sometime like:
INCREASES EFFECIENCIES AND STREAMLINES PROCEDURES. PROVIDES TOOLS WHICH ALLOW YOU AND YOUR CUSTOMERS TO COLLABORATE ON PROJECTS WITH EASE, THEREBY REDUCING COSTS.
I remember many years ago trying to figure out what the hell Windows Server ISA actually did! Besides provide “enterprise-level security” and “granular control over traffic”. and exactly how implementing it would “lower TCO”.
So 1 90-trial later I finally figured it out. “Oh! It’s a firewall/proxy/VPN server, and it’s AD-integrated!”
Even if that’s not 100% accurate, at least it gives me a better understanding of what it actually does than the dribble that came from Microsoft’s description.
And I’m not a Microsoft hater either! I like their products and work almost exclusively with them
It’s a matter of knowing your audience.
Most of us here are techies, geeks if you prefer. We want our communication to have intellectual substance, both to and from other people. While we may like pictures of lolcats and hot members of the appropriate sex, we have this instinctive feeling that somebody who substitutes them for facts must be hiding something.
On the other hand, we don’t generally buy expensive stuff for corporations.
The headphone hotties and professional models are designed to appeal to a different sort of person. Being geeks, we have some difficulty in understanding different sorts of persons. (Those who deal with people professionally also have difficulty understanding different sorts of persons, and there I consider it a professional failing.)
Therefore, when you see the multiethnic group of good-looking people apparently having a heartfelt moment of quiet joy because of a new accounting package, remember that this is an artifact of an alien subculture. You aren’t the target audience. This is either because the advertiser isn’t trying to sell to you, or the advertiser doesn’t know any better.
So what are your (least) favorite instances of corporate-speak?
I nominate “learnings”, “talk to [not about] subject X”, “have a conversation on that”, “go ahead and [verb]”, and “offline”. As in, “Let’s go ahead and talk to our learnings in a conversation offline”.