Don't Work Where Bullshit Is the Job
A new study claims that jargon-loving workers are bad at their jobs. It may have accidentally proved the opposite — and that's a more troubling finding.
“Working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking, we will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing and end-state vision in a world defined by architecting to potentiate on a vertical landscape.”
A computer generated that sentence. It was assembled algorithmically from corporate buzzwords without regard for meaning, truth, or semantic clarity. When Shane Littrell, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell, showed it to office workers alongside real quotes from Fortune 500 executives and asked them to rate the “business savvy” on display, the average rating landed at 1.82 on a 5-point scale — not universally impressive, but far higher than zero for sentences that mean nothing.1
Some of them, it should be noted, found the real executive quotes impressive too. This is perhaps less reassuring than it sounds — when Littrell ran factor analysis on the results, several genuine quotes from actual business leaders cross-loaded with the computer-generated nonsense. Trained statistical methods, in other words, struggled to reliably distinguish the output of a corporate bullshit generator from the considered communications of people running some of the world’s largest companies. One is left to draw one’s own conclusions about the signal-to-noise ratio in the average earnings call.
Bad at their jobs — or good at the wrong ones?
The headline finding is that workers who scored high on Littrell’s Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale also scored lower on analytic thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. More importantly, they performed worse on situational judgment tests designed to measure workplace decision-making. Corporate bullshit receptivity was, in the regression model, the only significant negative predictor of decision-making performance, even after controlling for every other workplace variable in the study.
The takeaway, as framed by the press coverage, is straightforward: people who fall for jargon are bad at their jobs.2 Caveat emptor. Mind the buzzwords.
This is true as far as it goes. It does not go far enough.
The satisfaction paradox
Buried in the same results is a pattern that complicates the narrative. Workers who scored high on bullshit receptivity also reported higher job satisfaction. They rated their supervisors as more charismatic, more “transformational,” and more visionary. They were more inspired by corporate mission statements. They trusted their managers more. And — completing the circuit — they were more likely to spread corporate bullshit themselves.
These are not the characteristics of people failing at work. These are the characteristics of people thriving in it. The question is what, exactly, they are thriving at.
The late anthropologist David Graeber offered one possible answer. In Bullshit Jobs, he argued that as many as 40% of white-collar workers — based on polls in which they said so themselves — consider their own jobs pointless.3 Not unpleasant or underpaid, but without productive purpose. The productive economy, in his account, had become efficient enough to require far less labour than the culture was willing to admit, and the surplus was absorbed into roles whose primary output was the appearance of output. The argument is deliberately provocative, and the empirical basis is contested. But the structural observation — that organisations can and do sustain roles with no clear deliverable for extended periods — will be familiar to anyone who has conducted a rigorous headcount review.
Graeber’s framework suggests a reframe of Littrell’s findings that the headline doesn’t quite capture. The study measures analytic thinking as a proxy for job performance. But that is only the right proxy if the organisation in question actually rewards good decisions. Anyone who has spent meaningful time in a corporate setting will know that this is frequently, and sometimes spectacularly, not the case — regardless of what the organisation’s values statement says.
If the actual selection pressure in a promotion system rewards the ability to sound strategic, inspire confidence, and generate consensus through impressive-sounding language, then bullshit-fluency is not a deficit. It is the core competency. The workers Littrell identified are not failing by their organisation’s revealed preferences; they are succeeding by them. They are more satisfied, more trusting, more inspired, and more likely to produce the very output — more bullshit — that the system selects for.
Bullshit selects for more bullshit
This creates a feedback loop that is elegant in its dysfunction. Bullshit-receptive employees perceive bullshit-fluent leaders as visionary. They rate them highly, they trust them, they emulate them. They are — Littrell’s data suggests — more likely to produce and spread corporate bullshit themselves. Meanwhile, the employees who score highest on analytic thinking and decision-making are specifically the ones least impressed by the jargon. One can speculate, without excessive imagination, about which group tends to accumulate influence in an organisation where the prevailing communication style is “synergistic.”
This is not so much a rising tide lifting all boats as a blocked toilet backing up through the org chart.
Littrell speculates — carefully, as an academic should — that ambitious employees may use corporate bullshit to appear more competent, accelerating their promotion. The study doesn’t directly measure career outcomes, so this remains inference. But the mechanism is suggestive: if the people most receptive to bullshit are also the most satisfied, the most trusting of leadership, and the most prolific producers of more bullshit, the system doesn’t need a conspiracy to reproduce itself. It just needs a promotion committee.
The analytically competent and bullshit-intolerant, meanwhile, are the ones running into the blockers that the jargon is covering for — or working through them only to discover that there is no tangible work to do underneath all the impressive-sounding language. Their lower satisfaction scores are not a mystery. They are the rational response.
How to read the room
A Microsoft memo that Littrell cites in the paper is the canonical example of where this goes wrong. In 2014, a senior executive at Microsoft sent an email to staff that opened with ten paragraphs of strategic jargon — “our device strategy must reflect Microsoft’s strategy and must be accomplished within an appropriate financial envelope” — before arriving, in paragraph eleven, at the news that 12,500 people were about to lose their jobs. The press dubbed it “the worst email ever,”4 which was perhaps unkind but not inaccurate. Someone had been very good at the organisational performance game for a very long time, and then ran into a situation the game couldn’t handle — they had to say something that mattered. Laurence Peter, a management theorist who argued that employees rise to their level of incompetence, would have recognised the pattern — though even he might not have anticipated a version in which the competency and the incompetency were the same skill applied to different stakes.5
This is the point at which the gap between performative competence and operational competence ceases to be merely amusing and begins to produce real damage. Every organisation exists somewhere on the spectrum between “our language describes what we do” and “our language substitutes for what we do.” Littrell’s research offers a diagnostic: the ratio of abstract buzzwords to concrete specifics is a measurable signal, and it correlates with measurable outcomes.
Which, for anyone navigating these environments — and most of us are, at one point or another — is useful intelligence. The tells are consistent once you know to look for them.
In an interview, listen to whether the hiring manager describes what the team shipped last quarter or what paradigms they are synergising. In an all-hands, note whether the strategy presentation contains a single falsifiable claim. In a reorganisation announcement, count the paragraphs before anyone mentions what is actually changing and for whom. When the mission statement is revised, check whether the new version could apply with equal accuracy to a hospital, a hedge fund, and a dog-grooming franchise.
None of this requires cynicism. It requires attention. Organisations where people can tell you plainly what they do, what they built, and what problem they are trying to solve next — in language specific enough that you could check whether they succeeded — are the ones where your work is likely to matter. The language is the leading indicator. It always has been.
The study, to its credit, supplies a rather elegant test: read the sentence at the top of this essay again, and notice how you feel about it. If your first instinct was that it sounded like someone with a firm strategic vision, the research suggests you may wish to reflect on that. If your first instinct was that it sounded like a random number generator with an MBA, you are — statistically speaking — better positioned to make consequential decisions.
Though, of course, that may not be what gets you promoted.
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Littrell, S. (2026). The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes. Personality and Individual Differences, 255, 113699. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2026.113699 ↩
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Blackwood, K. (2026, March 2). Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs. Cornell Chronicle. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/03/workers-who-love-synergizing-paradigms-might-be-bad-their-jobs ↩
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Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster. The 40% figure derives from a 2015 YouGov poll. It is widely cited but should be treated as indicative — it measures self-report, not an objective assessment of productive value. ↩
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Roose, K. (2014, July 17). Microsoft just laid off thousands of employees with a hilariously bad memo. New York Magazine: Intelligencer. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/07/microsoft-lays-off-thousands-with-bad-memo.html ↩
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Peter, L. J., & Hull, R. (1969). The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. William Morrow and Company. The classic formulation is that employees are promoted based on success in their current role until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. The corporate bullshit variant is subtler: the skill that earns the promotion — fluency in impressive abstraction — is the same skill that fails when the situation demands specificity. ↩