Do Women Really Make 22% Less Than Men?

Yep, let's go there:

The Census Bureau released updated data this week showing that the so-called “gender pay gap” between men and women reached a record low, with women earning 78 cents for every dollar a man earns.

But does this mean that a woman who performs the exact same job as a man gets paid 22 cents less on the dollar? Of course not. If companies behaved that way, they would face lawsuits. Their profits would also suffer: underpaid women would jump ship to competitors and overpaid men would drive up costs and reduce companies’ competitiveness.

The pay gap results from the choices women make. Once factors such as career choice, education and experience, hours and work schedules, and career interruptions are taken into account, the so-called pay gap falls to about 5 cents. Other factors, such as the cost of fringe benefits, likely explain some or all of the remaining gap.

For example, even within the government’s General Schedule pay scale that effectively prohibits pay-based discrimination, women make only 89 cents on the dollar compared to men. Why? Well, women make up 75 percent of all federal social workers but only 17 percent of all federal engineers. However, federal social workers make an average of $79,569, while federal engineers make an average of $117,894.

Differences in career choices do significantly affect earnings differentials between men and women. But does that mean we should limit individual choices, forcing women into male-dominated professions and men into female-dominated professions?

Attempts to reduce the so-called remaining “pay gap” through legislation such as the Paycheck Fairness Act would unintentionally harm women by forcing one-size-fits all jobs upon employees, thus taking away some of the choices women make, and by potentially subjecting women to increased discrimination in the hiring process.

While it may be true that the average women earns less than the average man, most women don’t measure their worth by the size of their paycheck, but rather their ability to freely pursue their own choices and happiness.

It's not rocket science, nor is it some giant sexist scheme to keep women down.

Can we please put this myth to bed now?  Just sayin'.

Agree or disagree?  Feel free to comment below...I think this could be an interesting discussion.

Photoshop Manufacturers Models

It's really no secret that Photoshop is often used to tidy up pictures of models used in advertisements, but to see the process fast-forwarded from start to finish is still pretty astounding.  Hit the link to watch an animated gif and a video of an underwear model getting the Photoshop treatment.  It's borderline NSFW, but still fascinating to watch the literal transformation - she's literally a different girl at the end!  For a safer version of the same kind of process, check out this video of a high-end watch:

Who knew watches needed this much touching up?  It's pretty amazing what can be done with technology these days.  It's also pretty amazing the lengths to which companies will go to make their ads look as good as possible!

On a completely unrelated note, I thought this was interesting:

According to researchers cited by Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, three verbal cues give bald-faced liars away. ...

1. Verbosity

The first tell was simply that the liars tended to use a lot more words to make their points than the truth-tellers did.

"Just like Pinocchio's nose, the number of words grew along with the lie," says Van Swol. The only caveat here is that people who deceived simply by omitting facts, rather than offering untrue ones, also tended to use fewer words. So don't consider this tell foolproof.

2. Profanity

It turns out that people who swear more often tend to lie more often, too. In the study, this was even more pronounced after the receiving player challenged them.

"We think this may be due to the fact that it takes a lot of cognitive energy to lie," Van Swol says. "Using so much of your brain to lie may make it hard to monitor yourself in other areas."

3. Projection

The final major tell was that liars tended to use third-person pronouns more often ("he," "she," and "they"), presumably instead of making offers and justifications in the first person ("me" or "I").

"This is a way of distancing themselves from and avoiding ownership of the lie," Van Swol explains. Liars also used more complex sentence structure.

Hm, good to know...

Honest Job Descriptions In The Age Of Social Media

Just for fun:


 








It's that grain of truth that makes it funny.
 

Out Of Office Messages For When You're In The Office

Funny stuff!

 I might have wanted to use one or two of these at some point.  Maybe.  Just sayin'...

Ah, Corporate America...

I've been in this meeting too many times to count.

Business Advice From Mr. Wonderful

One of my favorite TV shows over the past few years is ABC's Shark Tank.  It's a group of self-made millionaires/billionaires who are now venture capitalists (i.e. "sharks") looking for new businesses in which to invest.  Entrepreneurs come into the "shark tank" to pitch their business or product in the hopes of enticing one or more of the sharks to invest in exchange for a percentage of ownership of the business.  They're real investigations, with real people, and real money at stake.

It's fascinating.

One of the sharks is Kevin O'Leary.  Known for being brutally honest and using phrases such as, "You're dead to me" or "I give you permission to kill your business," O'Leary has justly developed the ironic nickname Mr. Wonderful.  Despite his prickly demeanor, he knows a whole lot about starting, building, and running businesses.  He was recently interviewed on CNN about the current state of the American economy, and he knocked it out of the park:

He's business-ed his way into a net worth in the billions; he knows what he's talking about.  He's exactly right on this.

Obama: Surrendering The Internet, Too

As if American foreign policy wasn't enough of a joke under the Obama administration, what with all the bowing and spineless bluster of unenforced red lines, the latest big story to be horribly underplayed by the sycophantic media is the fact that Obama is planning to give away control of the Internet.  Don't laugh, it's a much bigger deal than you might think:

When it comes to the Internet, there's never really been much question about who owns, operates, and influences it the most: The U.S. does.

But that will all change in 2015, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) cedes U.S. control to a global amalgam of Internet groups.

ICANN is the entity that controls assigning and administration of top level domain names--the .coms and .nets and .orgs with which Internet users are so familiar.

As a result of the changes, you and your business may face higher prices, less Web security, less consistent service, and, potentially, less freedom of speech.

Keep in mind the fact that this is coming from a business-centric website rather than a political one.  That's how mind-bogglingly obvious this mistake is.  Not that business websites can't play in politics, of course - they just don't do it very often.  By taking a political stance on anything, you almost invariably alienate half (or at least a significant portion) of your customers.  It's just not worth it most of the time.  So, it's all the more poignant coming from this source.

Let's look at some specifics of how it will affect you:

While ICANN has operated like a monopoly for decades, it's been a fairly well-regulated one, Rosenzweig says. So when ICANN announced in 2012 that it would release 2,000 new domain extensions, prices to obtain them did not spin wildly out of control, Rosenzweig says. That could change with more members controlling ICANN.

That's particularly important to business owners, because when you buy your domain name, you usually have to buy all the others related to your brand, to prevent competitors from muscling in on your territory.

To illustrate how expensive it can be already for companies to purchase new domain extensions, when ICANN released the new domain extensions two years ago, Google submitted applications in four categories, such as trademarks (.google), core businesses (.docs), subsidiaries (.youtube), as well as domain names they thought had creative potential (.lol). It spent an estimated $18 million for those.

Similarly, Amazon reportedly spent $14 million acquiring new domain names two years ago.

Plan on buying anything online?  Plan on paying more for it after this transition giveaway takes place.

Another concern is how well-managed the technology around naming will be going forward. The technical management provided by Verisign for the past 14 years has generally been efficient, without significant service outages, experts say. The new ICANN will have to decide who runs this function, and could possibly put it out to bid for another company, or companies, to handle. And the switch could cause service interruptions, or worse. ...

Technology entrepreneurs like Tejune Kang, founder and chief executive of Six Dimensions, a small business that offers mobile and Web content management as well as cyber-security solutions to other businesses, worries that security breaches could become more common as well, should Verisign's role be phased out, or handed over to multiple parties.

"A hacker could get in, figure who the domains and IP addresses belong to, and the hierarchy and blueprint for the whole Internet could be exposed," Kang says.

Who else has the infrastructure in place to run a global technology network like what we're used to?  No one besides us.  Giving control to anyone else will be an invitation to both security breaches and simple failures making the unholy joining of Comcast and Time Warner Cable look rock solid.  We're used to the Internet simply working, all the time.  Kiss that goodbye.

And here's the biggie, if you ask me:

Additionally many countries have more restrictive attitudes toward freedom of speech, and that could cause some problems with certain domain names themselves under new management.

"The Internet is the forum for free speech today, so who will [ICANN] bind themselves to, to protect free speech, and openness, and not ban .gay or .islam?" Rosenzweig says.

Or what about content?  How long will it be before Communist-style censors start shutting down websites because they openly endorse political or religious views that the reigning governments don't like?  Not that anything like that would happen under Obama's watch, of course.

Still, take a look at any attempt by a third world dictator to quell an uprising in the populace, and you'll see one of the first things that happens is that pieces of Internet access -- if not the whole thing -- are severely choked or cut off.  That's because it's an open medium that inherently promotes free speech and transparency.  Our own government is bad enough, but just imagine how open and transparent the Internet is going to be with Russia, China, or pretty much any Middle Eastern/Islamic nation holding serious influence over policy.  Syria, for example, seems to have made a habit of cutting off Internet access when the people get too greedy for pesky little things like political freedom and discourse.  In fact, they did it again just a few days ago.  Even Turkey, that supposed bastion of Islamic tolerance and sophistication, that gateway nation that joins the best of Islam with the best of the West in what gives delusional liberals optimism for a willing dhimmitude in our nation...my, my, my, they just cut off Twitter a few days ago because the political discontent bouncing around the social media platform hit a little too close to home.  Perhaps they'll be on the governing committee of the new ICANN...?

There's even a formal organization, Reporters Without Borders, dedicated to preserving Internet freedom around the globe.  The NSA's recent activities have landed the U.S. on the Enemies of the Internet list for the first time this year, but it's a simple enough task to reform the NSA and clear the air (though Obama isn't about to do that).  Still, if you question the assertions in this article about many nations throttling Internet access for political gain, just take a spin through the list (here) and you'll see that this happens constantly, and if anything, the article actually downplays the danger.

Has American stewardship of ICANN and the Internet been perfect?  Of course not.  Should things be reformed in the light of the recent NSA spying messes?  Definitely.  Is giving away control like this the right answer?  You'd have to be a complete mind-numbed idiot (or a liberal Obama supporter) to think so.  The correct answer is a resounding no, for many reasons.

Now you're informed.  You might consider contacting your Senators and Congressman to give them your thoughts on the subject.  Sure, it's down the road a ways, but there's no reason to even let this proposal survive to see an actual attempt at legislation.  Sound off now, and hopefully we won't have to fight it back later.

Every Day In Corporate America

Perfection in both tone and accuracy:

Be Thankful In All Things!

Especially these office victories worth celebrating...

Enjoy the holiday, and be thankful!

:)

Pet Peeves About Job Searching

I saw a fantastic article at Inc.com and couldn't resist posting it in its entirety:

Your business's most expensive asset is probably its people. It's all about those brains getting your work done, so you want the best you can possibly get, right? But, if you're not careful, you may be inadvertently driving away the best candidates with your recruitment policies. Here are five things good job candidates hate.

Tedious online applications. Go apply for a job at your company. How long does it take you? 30 minutes? An hour? Do you get almost done when it crashes and tells you to try again later? We like data. Data is good. But the method which many online job applications collect it is painful and intrusive and unnecessary. At some point, people who aren't desperate get fed up and quit.

Who are the least desperate for a new job? Those already employed in good positions. They tend to be the very people you want to hire.

You show me yours, but I won't show you mine. No one wants to go through a huge interview process only to find out that the job candidate wants $50,000 more than your budget will allow. But instead of having an honest discussion at the beginning, where both sides reveal what they are thinking, many recruiters demand candidates provide a complete salary history.

Now, the reality is that you should be tailoring the salary to fit the job and not basing it on previous salaries. I understand that your star candidate isn't likely to leave his current job for less money, but you know what? You never know. Instead of demanding their information, try giving up some of yours. Be honest: "We don't have an exact salary in mind for this position. It will depend on the candidate's skills, but we're looking for somewhere between $75,000 and $95,000."

Now, I know can see the sheer panic on the faces of your recruiters. "If we say that, everyone will expect $95,000!" No they won't. They aren't dumb.

Silence. If a candidate has simply submitted a resume, you're not obligated to do anything other than send an automated response that says, "We've received your resume. Don't contact us, we'll contact you." (Although you should say it a bit more nicely.)

Once you've brought someone in for an interview, radio silence is just rude. Socially unacceptable behavior. Inappropriate. You should fire your recruiters if they do this. Heaven knows I understand that things happen in the recruiting process--priorities change, budgets shrink, internal candidates get shuffled around. Still, once someone has taken time out of their day to come in to your office, you owe them a response. Remember that the candidate who isn't exactly right for today's open position may be perfect for tomorrow's open position. Simply by not responding, you may have lost that candidate forever.

Meaningless job descriptions. "Dynamic individual, self starter, who can provide thought leadership, through effective communication." Sound familiar? It means nothing. I mean, honestly, is there job description out there that says, "Boring individual, drone, will be micro-managed and expected to communicate poorly"? Because otherwise, the first job description is meaningless.

Focus on what the person in the position will actually do. And don't worry about skills that are not needed. If someone's job is going to be to sit in a cube and produce TPS reports, they don't need to be dynamic thought leaders, so don't ask for it. When you write a job description, sit down and write a list of tasks that the candidate would be expected to do in a week. Provide that information and your candidates will self-screen.

Too much focus on the perfect candidate. We all want perfection, but it's not likely that the picture you've created in your head actually exists. So don't throw out the great candidates in your search for the perfect candidate. Some things can be taught. Others really aren't necessary. I've seen people dragged through four or more rounds of interviews only to be rejected at the end, and the position reposted. In the meantime, not only does this make quality candidates want to avoid you like the plague, but you're spending a fortune trying to find someone and the position is still empty. Look for great, yes, but not perfect.

AMEN AMEN AMEN AMEN AMEN!!!!!

Over the years, I have raged about all of these things (especially #1 and #2).  The one that isn't on here but should be is slogging through that tedious application process only to reach the end and then upload your resume.  Seriously??  Why did I just waste an hour filling out a bajillion stupid little boxes when I could have just uploaded the document and given you everything you needed in one shot?  Personally, I find this an immediate turn-off, and a first strike to even wanting to work at that company.

I think the reality is that most companies are absolutely atrocious in their hiring process, and are guilty of most -- if not all -- of these simultaneously.  This stuff happens on job changes within a company, too, which is simply compounding the original mistakes.  If someone is already an employee, they already know a pretty fair amount about the company and don't need the outward-facing gibberish intended to persuade people to come work there.  Instead, how about you get real with people who've already committed to you and focus on getting the right person with the right skills into the right position.

Unfortunately, too many HR departments are huddled in their secretive caves of "confidentiality" with giant blinders preventing them from seeing anything but how they've "always done it" in the past, living in the stone ages of dead tree resumes and giant collections of text boxes, inconveniencing applicants to no end, and being actively hostile toward real human beings who are trying to improve their lives and careers.

Nerf Supremacy

I'm real sure I need one of these for my cubicle at work...

Is it possible to not love Nerf?  I don't think so.

When You're Having A Bad Day At Work...

Just remember you're not alone...

www.dilbert.com

A New Job!

For those of you who don't know yet, I recently accepted a new position at DST, and will be starting on October 16th.  It's a client-facing job working with a specific client on a specific product that is essentially a liaison between that client and the developers to communicate requirements, enhancements, bugs, and anything else that needs to go back and forth.

Or, basically, this:

***Editor's Note: due to the results of an informal push-poll, roughly 50% of this blog's audience thinks that posting the Office Space video clip is a career limiting move.  While the editors feel it was clearly offered in good fun, it is also perfectly reasonable to assume that all potential future employers will not, in fact, have any kind of a sense of humor.  Thus, it has been removed.***

It Sucks Being At The Mercy Of Lazy/Old/Stupid HR Systems

If you've applied for any job in the past few years, you know what I'm talking about.

First you painstakingly craft your resume, choosing the proper format to best highlight your skills and the stage in your career, weighing and discarding words that don't seem exactly right in favor of words with even a slightly better nuance, arranging the information in a way that is quick and easy to read while still maximizing how much information you're able to present, and babying details like margin widths (small enough to let you fit all your info on just one or two pages, but not so small that it looks like you're crowding the page), font (too informal? too difficult to read? too boring and won't catch the recruiter's notice?), and whether or not to include that one last key word that may or may not make or break your chances of landing a job.  If you're doing a completely new resume or a ground-up re-work of an old one, this can take quite some time.  If you're really diligent you might show it to your spouse or send it to some friends to get feedback and suggestions, and then you go back over the whole thing again to incorporate those suggestions.  It's not unnecessary - research shows that the average resume gets about six seconds of visual examination by most recruiters, and especially during these tough economic times most recruiters probably have enough resumes to rebuild the tree for every position and have no problem ejecting yours from the stack.  If you can't succeed in those six seconds, you're completely sunk.  Of course, that's assuming you got through their filtering software to begin with.  Still, after finally completing the polish on the masterpiece, you're ready to apply.

And that's when the aggravation factor really skyrockets.

Pretty much every job application is done online now.  That's great - it's a fast, efficient way to give and receive job applications and resumes.  Unfortunately, I think most HR systems are running the same software that they used back in the late 1990s.  They're out of date, they're slow, they're disorganized, and they're generally very unuserfriendly.  You know how this works:

- you go to the company's website and hit the Careers section

- you have to create a login (it's free, they tell you, as if that helps make up for the fact that you already have a list of one-time-use logins longer than your arm to manage)

- you login and search through their jobs, finding the one to which you want to apply

- you upload your resume in Word format

It is at this point that my blood usually starts boiling.  Never mind the fact that you've just uploaded your painstakingly crafted resume, and thus communicated 100% of the information the company needs to know about you...they invariably direct you next to a series of screens where you have to manually enter all of that information again.  Are you kidding me?!  It's hard to envision any bigger insult to my time than to make me do all this twice (and this is coming from someone who types very fast and knows how to use keyboard shortcuts to jump from one empty text box to another), as if I'm so desperate to get their advertised job that I have literally nothing better to do than spend another 30 minutes typing in the same name and address that I just gave them.  Let's also consider some of the absolutely idiotic things they ask for.  In the past few months, I've had to supply things like my high school GPA or the phone number and mailing address of my elementary school.  Really??  Why would any of those details be necessary -- much less relevant -- for any job application?  Waste of my time, waste of my time, disrespectful...and a waste of my time.

Occasionally, I've found an application process that makes a half-hearted attempt to auto-populate those manual data entry screens from the Word document you uploaded, but I have yet to see one actually get more than about half of the information correct (and, for the record, the format of my resume has been deliberately simplified precisely to avoid as much auto-populate confusion as possible).  I appreciate the gesture, but it really doesn't save me time or aggravation.

Don't even get me started on companies (like mine) that force you to repeat the entire process every time you apply!  Uh...didn't I create a free login so you would remember my information??  Nope, guess not.  That's not just wasteful and disrespectful, that's a nasty combination of arrogance, belligerence, and obnoxiousness that can only come from a self-absorbed HR department that considers itself a gatekeeper holding back a horde of riffraff from gaining entry into the promised land.

The technology exists today to not only parse a resume and auto-populate every conceivable field correctly, but also to do so in such a way that the system can even make educated guesses about the context of the information on that resume to prioritize skills according to how important they were to previous positions held.  It can deliver this information neatly into the hands of a recruiter who has had 80% of the work done for him/her and can take more than six seconds to look at it.  As an IT professional, it's hard to think well of a company that obviously puts so little effort into the application process, even to the extent of making it actively hostile.  This is a personal axe to grind for me, sure, but I'd bet money I'm not alone.  And here's the bottom line - successful and productive people are busy and know how to prioritize their time and resources.  If a company wants to attract those people, an ineffective and hostile application system would go a long way toward discouraging those people from applying.

The icing on this festering cake is, of course, the complete lack of response and respect from the company to the applicant.  No, the canned email saying your application was received doesn't count.  I mean an actual response issued by a living human being.  It just doesn't happen.  Believe me, I've submitted dozens (if not hundreds) of applications over the past few years to many different companies of all different sizes and in a vast array of industries, and I can't recall the last time I got an actual response from a real person.  I know, they get hundreds of resumes for every posted job, yadda yadda yadda.  But if a personal interaction is just too difficult, then how about at least a cold and impersonal one?  You can't tell me that it's terribly burdensome for a list of names that get rejected by the automated system to be sent a polite automated thank you/rejection email rather than simply get discarded.  But no, in my experience it's pretty rare to even get that - after the application it's just a giant black hole of nothingness, and that's just rude and insulting.  In the unlikely event that a manager or recruiter actually lays eyes on a resume, there's no reason they shouldn't provide at least a quick personal thank you/rejection note.  The applicant is expected to grovel and scrape through this entire process, so the least a recruiter can do is politely tell them they can get up off their wounded knees.

Get a clue, HR executives who make these decisions: get a real application system, and stop being evil.

Daily Life

So True It Hurts

Anyone who works in corporate America knows that Dilbert is the story of their life.  Pretty much every day is a good strip, but here are some of my absolute favorites from recent weeks.  Enjoy (and just try not to think about how damned real they are)...

 


 

 

 

 

*sigh*

Life After Death By Powerpoint

My better half showed me this video, and I just had to post it. Enjoy!

On Buzzwords

I saw this article on PC World recently and almost stood up in my cubicle to applaud it:

As technology moves forward, the English language sometimes takes a step backward. You can thank public relations professionals, CEOs, and technology journalists for that. Whether grammatically incorrect or simply annoying, these overused tech buzzwords are painful to hear.

But don't feel too bad if you're guilty of using some of this lingo: For every one of these terms, we can identify a member of our staff who says it regularly (the rest of us just secretly scoff).

1. "Dot-com"--as in, "the dot-com sector had a strong fiscal quarter"--is a victim of progress: It's no longer especially relevant to distinguish Web businesses from "brick-and-mortar" (another outdated term) companies. In fact, if your company isn't on the Web by now, you're doomed.

2. "Tweener" originally referred to a basketball player who was too tall and slow to be a true guard and too shrimpy to hold his own at forward--so he ended up playing for the Warriors or the Clippers. But referring to gadgets that straddle two or more categories or usage patterns--such as tablets, which can be viewed as a midpoint between phones and laptops--as "tweeners" is just obnoxious. Knock it off.

3. "Visionary" has some validity as applied to, say, Joan of Arc, but the term has been abused for decades as a way of offering fawning praise to tech entrepreneurs of all stripes, regardless of how derivative their products are. Double points if a CEO describes himself as a visionary.

4. "Convergence," which once described an important concept in technology, now says practically nothing, given that every gadget you own represents a convergence of at least 10 other things.

5. iPhone (or anything else) "killer" is probably the most overused metaphor of all time in tech headlines. We disavow any knowledge of our ever having used this bit of hyperbole ourselves.

6. "Game-changing" is the kind of trite, nonsensical piffle you get when sports metaphors and nerd metaphors converge in the hands of a journalistic tweener. This one needs to be buried in the Meadowlands end zone with Jimmy Hoffa.

7. Does the word "solution" have any discrete meaning anymore? Does it ever involve actually solving something? Spare us.

8. "Bandwidth" is not a mental function unless you're a RoboCop or a Terminator--nor is it a monetary one. What you really mean is "attention" or "time" or "additional resources."

9. In a group setting, the phrase "let's take this offline" is acceptable only if the meeting is in fact online. Which it usually isn't. Similarly, "You wanna take this outside?" doesn't work as an escalation of an alfresco disagreement.

10. We can accept "googling," "photoshopping," and even "friending" as verbs, but good sense must take a stand somewhere. "Facebook" is a noun. You can google it.

11. "Social graph" is a marketing term that means... well, we have no idea what it means, and we suspect those who use it don't either.

12. When IT administrators map out their networks, they typically draw a little cloud to signify the Internet. But calling the Internet "the Cloud" is taking things a little too literally. (We never liked "Saas" much, either.) And the spinoff term "cloudsourcing" must bear the bulk of the blame for the truly execrable "crowdsourcing" that followed in its wake.

13. When people say "form factor," what they mean to say is "dimensions" or (even more simply) "shape." The extra word isn't impressing anybody.

14. Sometimes we kind of wish people who say "bleeding edge" would end up on one.

15. We'd pay money just to see a new tech gadget that actually incorporated "bells and whistles."

16. When talking about the cost of something, there's no need to say "price point." It's like calling "tuna" "tuna fish."

17. "Prosumer," as a marketing term for high-end products, means very close to nothing. What, exactly, is a professional consumer?

18. The next time someone says "gimme your digits," we'll try to resist handing over a bag of fingers.

19. "Future-proof?" Who are we fooling? Nothing is built to last more than two years.

20. There was probably a time in history when the phrase "eye candy" sounded vaguely edgy, maybe back whenMiami Vice regularly featured nose candy busts. As for "ear candy"--yuck!

21. Not sure whether someone is sold on your business idea? Just insist that it will "monetize," and your funding is in the bag. Better yet, use "monetization" to "incent" your audience to recognize the lurking "value proposition." Or be like the little red hen and "productize" your idea with a little "architecting" of your own.

22. Acts of nature--such as an earthquake or a visit from an in-law--are "disruptive." Calling a new technology "disruptive" gives it far too much credit.

23. "Synergy" describes the combined action of two elements working together in a mutually beneficial way. We just think it's one of those feel-good things CEOs like to say to draw your attention away from what's going on behind the scenes.

I was just getting my snark on when I saw this comment down below (from someone who clearly works at the same company I do) that says everything I could hope to add:

I totally disagree.

If you're going to monetize the bleeding edge of the dot-com sector, you need a visionary convergence of game-changing solutions, one with a price point that includes bells and whistles. Today's Prosumer is looking for that Tweener or iPhone killer that merges form factor with eye candy and the synergy of future-proof bandwidth. Truly disruptive technology takes the social graph and crowdsources it, architecting a value proposition online, as well as offline.

You can google it for yourself. Just don't photoshop my ideas or I might unfriend you on "The Facebook"

Brilliance!  Sheer brilliance.

For those of you who don't live in Corporate America, this irritation is no small thing - you simply must rent/Netflix Office Space today, if you don't understand the corporate environment.  Seriously, that's real life for us Cubeville dwellers.

Regardless, just for fun, pay attention for a few days to see how many buzzwords you hear.  As you tally them up, also note who says them.  I'll give you 100:1 odds that 99% of them are used by one of three types of people:

1. executives who are too ignorant to actually know what they mean

2. suck-ups who are trying to become an ignorant executive

3. peons like you and me who are in the unfortunate position of having to communicate with the aforementioned people

Seriously, do this experiment.  The only people who ever seriously use these idiotic terms are people who are compensating for...er...something...