alt Hacker NewsAI;DR This is the broader symptom of a global toxic corporate culture.
We are afraid that one badly phrased message can hurt our reputation or even our jobs, so optimizing every message with softer wording, more political correctness, less directness is safer.
But the real problem is the culture underneath it. If people are constantly worried about how every sentence will be interpreted, eventually they stop speaking plainly, stop challenging decisions, and sometimes stop speaking up at all. So this is like attacking the consequences not the root causes. There should be some sort of measurement of how broken is a community or a company by letting a bot scan Slack/Teams and let the bot remind everyone the importance of lowering the fake index.
Completely agree. I wonder how much this varies across cultures on the country level (like how people say the Dutch are blunt).
I think that indirectness emerges when a critical mass of people decide that they're better off in an indirect culture. i.e., thinking "nobody is straightforward with me, but that's worth it because it means I don't have to be straightforward with anyone else". And of course that's infuriating for anyone who would rather take the opposite deal!