Photo by Toni Cuenca.
This year, our eldest started grade 11. The American cousins are quick to point out this is just a funny way of saying “eleventh grade” or “junior year.” Whatever you want to call it, the Canadian teens all talk about how they need to “lock in” because “this is the year that counts.” The cousins want to know why it doesn’t all count, why they don’t need flawless transcripts dating back to preschool. That’s not how it works, we explain. Here, the kids have grade 9 and 10 to get into the flow of things, but 11 and 12 are the marks that get submitted for university admissions.
If you find yourself sharing a roof with a grade 11 student, you may come to know the sympathetic greeting for other households in the same situation. “How’s it going? Are they doing ok?” asked in near-hushed tones. Living with teens is tricky at the best of times. Now add a large layer of stress for the kid and their entire peer group and you, too, will get good at hushed tones.
The youth will keep you young, if you let them. Part of cross-generational fluency is being genuinely curious about what’s going on in their lives. Which teachers are great? Which subjects are surprising — either tougher or more straightforward than they anticipated? Which extracurriculars are trendy and which have fallen out of favour? Is everyone still vaping? Do they smell bad?
Friends of ours also have a kid in grade 11. She’s in a club that’s mostly boys. The club itself is technical. And the boy in charge sorta sucks. We have lived this story. So have both her parents. This is the story of our undergrad classes and all of our careers in tech. So we listen, keen to understand what, if anything, has changed in the several decades since. The boy isn’t welcoming to newcomers. He’s dismissive of contributions that aren’t code. So far, this is eerily familiar. And when the grade 11 in question talks about her contribution to the group work, he says, “Your part is just fluff. It’s not that important.”
The vaping is actually the only part of this story that’s novel. The rest of it is straight redux.
In every generation
In our day, we were rockstars. Later, ninjas. Then, later still, people who typed all day in comfy chairs and ate snacks out of pet-food dispensers and talked about themselves as professional sports teams. Not sure how many sports teams prepare with this specific training regimen. Though we’re reliably informed that NFL players are obsessed with uncrustables. And hey, while we’re talking about it, very few rockstars need their Apple watch to remind them that’s it time to stand up.
The silliness doesn’t stop every generation from reinventing this. Sure, the youth are quick to point out that cringe is now cringe. But we can agree that it was cringy as hell to have pretended debugging a computer had anything to do with Japanese warriors or throwing stars. Today’s ninjas are builders. And it would help a lot if when you think about wrangling AI agents, you call to mind the 1932 photo Lunch atop a Skyscraper. Because, when it comes down to it, it’s all about making cool stuff. And those builders also have snacks. See? Basically identical.
The words change but the core idea is the same. We want a way to describe some people as hardcore and in-group. And, by definition, if we’re gonna have an in-group, we need an out-group. We need a way to describe the opposite of rockstars, ninjas, athletes, and constructions workers. People who sit still a lot would be an ok way to describe this but then computer workers are people who sit still a lot so that doesn’t work. No, it needs to be something that captures all the uncool and unwanted of the out-group. And while the in-group word seems to have trends and seasons, the out-group word should have some staying power so we know what to avoid. Like, if we call the out-group “pirates” and then pirates get cool, that will be a problem.
What’s a word that means a persistent lack of substance yesterday, today, tomorrow, henceforth and forevermore?
Say what you mean
Words often give their writers away. When someone in tech crows about being a builder, it’s a safe bet that they — or at least their influences — are big fans of Marc Andreessen’s Time to Build essay, with all its associated nonsense. When someone talks about being AI-pilled, they’re building on a history of reddit incels calling themselves red-pilled, a catchphrase meant to launder their misogyny as edgy access to a secret truth. The irony of wrapping their hatred up in a metaphor lifted from the Matrix — itself an allegory for transgender experience — is, safe to say, entirely lost on them. But you wouldn’t ever use -pilled as a suffix without that manosphere shit being in your brain somewhere.
So what about fluff? That feels like a pretty handy word. We’ve certainly used it in the past. Fluff is the useless bits, right? Literally the forgettable filler material — good for nothing except that it takes up space. Made of something cheap and undifferentiated. Insubstantial. Crushable and disposable.
In our work we see it everywhere. No-fluff workplaces. No-fluff interviews for no-fluff teams run by no-fluff managers. So many no-fluff training programs it’s become a running gag in RSG slack. And wherever you see it, there’s always two messages happening at once, text and subtext. The text is: we focus on real, measurable things here. We are hardcore, clear-headed, and rigorous. The subtext is often: we only value the things we’re competent at, which tilt heavily analytical or lend themselves readily to being quantified. The things we judge to be fluff — either because we explicitly name them, or because they are conspicuously absent — are mostly things we don’t understand or make us uncomfortable, and we only engage with as strawman versions of what they represent.
The specific list of things that get labelled as fluff — the crushable and disposable work — is revealing, too. Metrics aren’t usually fluff, unless maybe they’re social-media metrics. Code isn’t fluff, though sometimes documentation is. Sales isn’t fluff, but marketing is, except paid marketing isn’t, except influencer marketing maybe is, at least if it’s on instagram. It’s all so trivially schoolyard boy/girl binary-coded that you can change how fluffy something is by what you call it — meetings are sort of fluff but strategic discussions are cool. Feelings are fluff, but sentiment analysis is rigorous. Building adaptable, resilient teams is hardcore, but diversity work is fluff.
As with any in-group/out-group binary, the idea of being one of the cool kids is part of the appeal. And as with any binary you cling to too rigidly, you end up saying some pretty foolish things, and missing some pretty important conversations.
Work doesn’t work that way
If you’re a leader in an org today, let us offer that the attempt to sort some disciplines, or kinds of work, or people, or activities into “fluff” and “hardcore” buckets isn’t helping you or your colleagues, and you should probably knock it off. There are more than two points in the multi-dimensional space of work that might occur in your organization.
Anywhere you’re tempted to dismiss something as fluff, ask yourself what you’re really trying to say. It might be any of:
- I don’t understand how that work supports the other things we’re trying to get done
- I think that work will have a low return on investment, or only superficial impact
- I don’t value the same things that person/team values, and my values are the ones that should dictate our approach
- I’m worried it will distract us from more important/urgent work
- I don’t know how to assess or integrate this stuff with the rest of my work
- I can’t understand the value of this discipline because I lack competence in how it’s done, and I’ve never paid attention to what it looks like when it’s done well
All of these take more words to say, but they are substantially clearer. They also root the conversation in a much more productive place — your own understanding of the work and how it supports the org, rather than some immutable property of the work itself. A team can have a meaningful discussion about ROI, or weighting different inputs, or even values, in a way that you really can’t when forced to talk about relative fluffiness.
The other benefit of articulating what you mean, even just to yourself privately, is that in many cases you’ll find that it bottoms out at: I don’t understand it. That’s paydirt y’all. That’s the good stuff for any leader. Because a thing at work that you don’t understand is often going to provoke some defensiveness, some us vs them, some struggle to see the value. That’s normal, happens all the time. The problem is when you let it get in your way.
Once you clock that the root of your opposition is that you don’t understand it, don’t give up and write it off, get curious. Brand marketing, design, psychological safety, user research, community management, coaching — whatever thing you are tempted to call fluff because you don’t understand it, you can go learn instead. Learn the best version, not a strawman. You will only ever benefit from having a working understanding of more of the business anyhow. And yeah, one possibility is that from a place of competence and understanding, you determine that this isn’t work the team needs to be doing. That’s cool, you’re allowed to make an informed judgement. But sometimes you’ll learn that this work is utterly essential, and needs immediate attention.
The kid at the top. The one who called the grade 11’s contribution fluff and said it wasn’t important. He was the person in charge. So when he didn’t value the work, she stopped doing it. Keep in mind, it’s not like the States, this club has zero bearing on her eventual university admissions. It’s just for fun. So if he wanted to run the club without her input, she’d focus on other coursework. A week later, the boy popped back up with some urgency. The fluffy, unimportant part that he didn’t care about was the budget. Several of our finance readers just died a little inside.
— Melissa & Johnathan
PS – The guys eating lunch on the skyscraper, that was staged as part of a PR stunt. That’s why the photographers were there in the first place. To make sure it made the papers. Which it did. As intended. If you think about that image as an enduring testament to brave builders, know that it is also, equally much if not more so, an enduring testament to wickedly well-executed public relations. Who’s fluffy now? 😉
