When you hear managers, project managers, and other consultants talk like that, you code switch to fit in and show you belong in the room.
Of course it is not genuine, nothing about corporate America is genuine. It’s all bullshit.
If you saw some of my writing before LLMs existed - it’s out there on an AWS official blog somewhere - you would swear it was created by ChatGPT, it reads like all of the other generic salesy crap that was the house writing style at AWS.
Hopefully what I’m about to say next doesn’t come across as me pulling out the “race card”. I’ve hardly ever been rejected from any job I’ve applied to in 25 years as a developer and the last 5 working full time at consulting departments/companies - first working at AWS (Professional Services) and then at third party companies. So I am not claiming racism is endemic in the industry from my personal experience.
But I am one of very few customer facing, highly technical senior Black consultants I’ve come across - even at AWS I think I worked with one other person and even they were more IT focused (security, networking) than software development. I am now the only Black staff consultant out of 70 in my company. I’m not saying it’s racism - it just is what it is.
I am saying that when I am interviewing for consulting jobs, speaking to executives, writing proposals and assessments where real money is on the line, I speak
corporate as well as anyone else. I don’t get the default assumed competence as a short black guy that a tall white guy gets.
When the rest of the people talk about the concerts they went to or what they do for fun as small talk, it’s also not like I’m going to talk about seeing WuTang Clan and Ice Cube in concert.
I am going to talk about how much fun my wife and I had in Costa Rica and our other vacations we take during the year.
When I talk to the technical side of the company, I turn off my corporate speak and talk to technical.