Tech Titans Declare War on Manners: 'Please' and 'Thank You' Costing Us Billions

In a groundbreaking press conference that left etiquette experts aghast, leading Silicon Valley CEOs announced a bold new initiative: the complete elimination of workplace pleasantries, which they claim are “crushing productivity” and “bleeding profits.”

“Every ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ is a microaggression against our bottom line,” declared Xander Blip, CEO of tech giant Nimbus AI, while aggressively mashing his keyboard for emphasis. “We’ve crunched the numbers, and it turns out that basic human decency is costing the tech sector approximately $4.2 billion annually in lost productivity.”

The movement, dubbed “Efficiency Over Etiquette” (EOE), has gained rapid traction among the hoodie-clad elite. At a recent all-hands meeting, Streamify CEO Rebecca “Disrupt” Johnson reportedly fired an intern for saying “good morning” instead of immediately diving into their status update.

“Let’s do the math,” Johnson explained, dramatically erasing a whiteboard covered in polite phrases. “If each of our 10,000 employees wastes just 30 seconds a day on pleasantries, that’s over 5,000 hours of lost productivity every year. That’s time that could be spent optimizing our snack bar’s kombucha-to-seltzer ratio!”

The backlash has been swift and brutal. Several tech firms have already implemented “No Courtesy November,” where employees are fined for using words like “sorry” or “pardon.” One startup, BlitzScale, has gone so far as to develop an AI that automatically strips emails of any trace of politeness before delivery.

“We’re not monsters,” insisted Blip, while his personal assistant was quietly replaced by a more efficient robot in the background. “We still allow ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’—for now. But we’re running the numbers on those.”

In related news, the word “you’re welcome” was officially declared a form of workplace harassment at three major tech firms this morning.