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I understand they had to do it (I'm sure we—their users—understand), but I can't understand the need for bullshit business-speak. Just say, "Due to circumstanc

I understand they had to do it (I'm sure we—their users—understand), but I can't understand the need for bullshit business-speak. Just say, "Due to circumstances you all familiar with, business is slow, so I have to let go of some people from X department." Putting up bullshit like this is like adding insult to injury. Especially, since their user demographics are mostly people who don't like bullshit.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
Imagine you’re on the CEO career path. What behaviours are you going to exhibit in order to pad your resume for the next position? You don’t really care about the company or the people who work there, you care about the next CEO position that pays more.
- Traubenfuchs 6y ago
  Exactly, no one wants to be the odd one out when doing things that could be bad for public image.
- scarface74 6y ago
  I’m just thinking about the big tech companies and which CEOs would think long term. Out of the big 6 tech companies, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix are still run by their founders. Microsoft is not run by a founder, but it’s run by a company man with deep understanding of their culture and market. Apple’s CEO is not really technical, I don’t think he has a clue about what customers want, but at least he’s efficient and understands the operations side. But I do think he is more numbers and investor focus than Jobs was. He does know his weaknesses and it seems like he defers to his VPs - a good thing. I think he at least cares about the company. Google has never been able to execute outside of advertising so I’m not sure whether it would matter if the founders were still in charge.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    Apologies for the delayed response: your comment did get me athinkin’. > He does know his weaknesses and it seems like he defers to his VPs I reckon, if I ever find myself in the unfortunate position of being in charge of anything that might matter to people in a significant way, either financially or personally, that’d probably be a reasonable way to go about things: defer to your advisors and direct reports. I mean: that is why they are fucking there. At the extremes there are outliers who happen to have been in the right place at the right time to have either been a visionary, or a massive cunt, and succeeded. But, on average, the average leader is fairly fucking average, and would, on average, make better decisions by allowing other, more well-informed, people make decisions for them. Perhaps. Maybe. Some of the time.
    - yellowstuff 6y ago
      Counterpoint: Sometimes "I don't know, what do you want to do?" is exactly the wrong response from a leader, because it leads to delay, confusion, and incoherent and conflicting actions by different people. In my professional life I've been in situations where I was either happy to have a manager who simply made a decision, or unhappy to have someone who deferred them, because having a fast, clear process was more important than making the optimal decision.
egorfine 6y ago
eps. given the fact that this site is a product for developers, i.e. people specifically allergic to marketingspeak.
- wiradikusuma 6y ago
  I initially wanted to say that, but then I realized they have other Stack Exchange sites :)
- throwanem 6y ago
  It's cute that people think this way, but probably not wise. How hard do you think you are to bullshit, when you go around telling people how to bullshit you? How do you think so many startups sucker so many skilled engineers into doing so much for so little and odds-on getting screwed at the end of it? How did Stack Overflow bullshit you (probably) and me (for sure, years back) and a million other people into collectively doing millions of dollars of work for them for free?
  - foolmeonce 6y ago
    Well, the were in a social contract involving the sharing of millions of dollars of work between engineers. Thy violated the contract and learned that they weren't getting things for free. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ (Now they have a heavily trafficed landing page trafficed only by people who wouldn't recommend doing anything with them.)
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Engineers are susceptible to a very different brand of bullshit, which is why there is often tension between engineering and business management.
franze 6y ago
I worked for a company with a horrible PR/communication department. The CEO was making a clear, precise, sometimes intense statement. Gave it to PR. Then the CEO dealt with other stuff. The weak communication department had meetings after meetings, internal drama shows, delegation games and then a) either nothing was communicated at all b) business b#llshit speak came out. Communication is just as strong as it's weakest link.
- specialist 6y ago
  Do you know of any corporate PR & communication primer? Extra credit for wisdom on how to assess someone's PR-fu. Your comment makes me now realize I have no idea what "marcom" actually is. I've worked with two superior marketing people in my career. One was also superior with "marcom" (short for marketing communications, their term). I just got lucky. I have zero idea how I'd find, recruit another. I've worked with some messaging people for activism, politics. Most notably David Domke [1]. But again, other than seek out a recognized expert, I have zero idea how to judge someone's efforts. While some of the notions may transfer to other domains, I'd just be guessing. [1] Previously http://www.com.washington.edu/domke/ http://www.com.washington.edu/domke/ Currently https://commonpurposenow.org/david https://commonpurposenow.org/david
sytelus 6y ago
When Spolesky brought on this guy, I was shocked. He had no profile or activity on Stackoverflow. He wasn’t even a developer and his resume indicated he was just generic management talking head. Given how much Spolesky emphasis “product person” to be in charge as opposed to white label MBAs, none of that made any sense. I’d to only imagine he was cashing out and part of the deal from investors was to place this guy who they trusted to grow “enterprise” business. Just why every beautiful startup must make their owners billionaires while getting ruined?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Just why every beautiful startup must make their owners billionaires while getting ruined? That's literally there in the definition of a VC-backed business model. You get a lot of money now, in exchange for some amount of ownership and expectation that the business will grow, whether it makes sense for it or not. The investors want a return on their investment, so they absolutely will push the business past the point of breaking; if they can extract their return before it burns down, then they win. Or, in short, from investor PoV, startups are cattle, not pets.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    I feel like putting a talking head in charge of SE risks limiting growth. SE is a business that benefits greatly from leadership that understands their core demographics. I'm sure they still still grow, because SE is an incredibly useful product. But I think a bad leader poses a serious risk of constraining natural growth by pushing monetization too hard and driving away organic growth.
- gregd 6y ago
  I'm shocked that people continue to be shocked that this happens under Capitalism.
- lonelappde 6y ago
  It's quite clear that Spolsky simply cashed out and went home. The best way forward is for someone with a good reputation to take the content and launch a new server, as Spolsky himself always said should happen when SO one day jumps the shark.
GordonS 6y ago
Fully agree. I've been using SO since it's inception, several years ago. But with the whole moderator thing, the switch to a ridiculous buzzword homepage, and all the damn bullshit corporate speak, my trust in SO is at an all time low. How did it get here from the straight-talking, community-orientated feel it used to have under Spoelsy and friends?
- lonelappde 6y ago
  Spolsky cashed out and left.
- qes 6y ago
  > How did it get here from the straight-talking, community-orientated feel it used to have The same way as every other community on the Internet that got popular.
sradman 6y ago
The Stackoverflow CEO and/or PR team is guilty of what journalists call “burying the lede” but the following quote from the message is quite good in my opinion: > This week, we reduced our global workforce by approximately 15%. Most of the affected employees were furloughed, except for employees and contractors in regions where furloughs were unfortunately not an option. These actions primarily affected sales and customer success teams within our Talent business, which is dependent on the hiring environment. TLDR at the top perhaps? Communication is hard. Enterprise sales and service will suffer as the world comes out of pandemic lockdown. As we go through this “Great Pivot”, we have to embrace the engineering concept of “good enough”. The content in this message could be better but it is good enough given the circumstances.
- ryanwaggoner 6y ago
  This is a quarterly update on the entire company, and I don’t think the main purpose of this update was to announce layoffs. I’m sure there were internal communications about the layoffs that were more pointed and had a different tone. I agree on the paragraph you pulled out. This writing style is more formal and “corporate” than preferred, but it’s not inherently terrible.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

Imagine you’re on the CEO career path. What behaviours are you going to exhibit in order to pad your resume for the next position? You don’t really care about the company or the people who work there, you care about the next CEO position that pays more.

Traubenfuchs 6y ago
Exactly, no one wants to be the odd one out when doing things that could be bad for public image.
scarface74 6y ago
I’m just thinking about the big tech companies and which CEOs would think long term. Out of the big 6 tech companies, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix are still run by their founders. Microsoft is not run by a founder, but it’s run by a company man with deep understanding of their culture and market. Apple’s CEO is not really technical, I don’t think he has a clue about what customers want, but at least he’s efficient and understands the operations side. But I do think he is more numbers and investor focus than Jobs was. He does know his weaknesses and it seems like he defers to his VPs - a good thing. I think he at least cares about the company. Google has never been able to execute outside of advertising so I’m not sure whether it would matter if the founders were still in charge.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  Apologies for the delayed response: your comment did get me athinkin’. > He does know his weaknesses and it seems like he defers to his VPs I reckon, if I ever find myself in the unfortunate position of being in charge of anything that might matter to people in a significant way, either financially or personally, that’d probably be a reasonable way to go about things: defer to your advisors and direct reports. I mean: that is why they are fucking there. At the extremes there are outliers who happen to have been in the right place at the right time to have either been a visionary, or a massive cunt, and succeeded. But, on average, the average leader is fairly fucking average, and would, on average, make better decisions by allowing other, more well-informed, people make decisions for them. Perhaps. Maybe. Some of the time.
  - yellowstuff 6y ago
    Counterpoint: Sometimes "I don't know, what do you want to do?" is exactly the wrong response from a leader, because it leads to delay, confusion, and incoherent and conflicting actions by different people. In my professional life I've been in situations where I was either happy to have a manager who simply made a decision, or unhappy to have someone who deferred them, because having a fast, clear process was more important than making the optimal decision.

egorfine 6y ago

eps. given the fact that this site is a product for developers, i.e. people specifically allergic to marketingspeak.

wiradikusuma 6y ago
I initially wanted to say that, but then I realized they have other Stack Exchange sites :)
throwanem 6y ago
It's cute that people think this way, but probably not wise. How hard do you think you are to bullshit, when you go around telling people how to bullshit you? How do you think so many startups sucker so many skilled engineers into doing so much for so little and odds-on getting screwed at the end of it? How did Stack Overflow bullshit you (probably) and me (for sure, years back) and a million other people into collectively doing millions of dollars of work for them for free?
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  Well, the were in a social contract involving the sharing of millions of dollars of work between engineers. Thy violated the contract and learned that they weren't getting things for free. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ (Now they have a heavily trafficed landing page trafficed only by people who wouldn't recommend doing anything with them.)
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Engineers are susceptible to a very different brand of bullshit, which is why there is often tension between engineering and business management.

franze 6y ago

I worked for a company with a horrible PR/communication department. The CEO was making a clear, precise, sometimes intense statement. Gave it to PR. Then the CEO dealt with other stuff. The weak communication department had meetings after meetings, internal drama shows, delegation games and then a) either nothing was communicated at all b) business b#llshit speak came out. Communication is just as strong as it's weakest link.

specialist 6y ago
Do you know of any corporate PR & communication primer? Extra credit for wisdom on how to assess someone's PR-fu. Your comment makes me now realize I have no idea what "marcom" actually is. I've worked with two superior marketing people in my career. One was also superior with "marcom" (short for marketing communications, their term). I just got lucky. I have zero idea how I'd find, recruit another. I've worked with some messaging people for activism, politics. Most notably David Domke [1]. But again, other than seek out a recognized expert, I have zero idea how to judge someone's efforts. While some of the notions may transfer to other domains, I'd just be guessing. [1] Previously http://www.com.washington.edu/domke/ http://www.com.washington.edu/domke/ Currently https://commonpurposenow.org/david https://commonpurposenow.org/david

sytelus 6y ago

When Spolesky brought on this guy, I was shocked. He had no profile or activity on Stackoverflow. He wasn’t even a developer and his resume indicated he was just generic management talking head. Given how much Spolesky emphasis “product person” to be in charge as opposed to white label MBAs, none of that made any sense. I’d to only imagine he was cashing out and part of the deal from investors was to place this guy who they trusted to grow “enterprise” business. Just why every beautiful startup must make their owners billionaires while getting ruined?

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Just why every beautiful startup must make their owners billionaires while getting ruined? That's literally there in the definition of a VC-backed business model. You get a lot of money now, in exchange for some amount of ownership and expectation that the business will grow, whether it makes sense for it or not. The investors want a return on their investment, so they absolutely will push the business past the point of breaking; if they can extract their return before it burns down, then they win. Or, in short, from investor PoV, startups are cattle, not pets.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I feel like putting a talking head in charge of SE risks limiting growth. SE is a business that benefits greatly from leadership that understands their core demographics. I'm sure they still still grow, because SE is an incredibly useful product. But I think a bad leader poses a serious risk of constraining natural growth by pushing monetization too hard and driving away organic growth.
gregd 6y ago
I'm shocked that people continue to be shocked that this happens under Capitalism.
lonelappde 6y ago
It's quite clear that Spolsky simply cashed out and went home. The best way forward is for someone with a good reputation to take the content and launch a new server, as Spolsky himself always said should happen when SO one day jumps the shark.

GordonS 6y ago

Fully agree. I've been using SO since it's inception, several years ago. But with the whole moderator thing, the switch to a ridiculous buzzword homepage, and all the damn bullshit corporate speak, my trust in SO is at an all time low. How did it get here from the straight-talking, community-orientated feel it used to have under Spoelsy and friends?

lonelappde 6y ago
Spolsky cashed out and left.
qes 6y ago
> How did it get here from the straight-talking, community-orientated feel it used to have The same way as every other community on the Internet that got popular.

sradman 6y ago

The Stackoverflow CEO and/or PR team is guilty of what journalists call “burying the lede” but the following quote from the message is quite good in my opinion: > This week, we reduced our global workforce by approximately 15%. Most of the affected employees were furloughed, except for employees and contractors in regions where furloughs were unfortunately not an option. These actions primarily affected sales and customer success teams within our Talent business, which is dependent on the hiring environment. TLDR at the top perhaps? Communication is hard. Enterprise sales and service will suffer as the world comes out of pandemic lockdown. As we go through this “Great Pivot”, we have to embrace the engineering concept of “good enough”. The content in this message could be better but it is good enough given the circumstances.

ryanwaggoner 6y ago
This is a quarterly update on the entire company, and I don’t think the main purpose of this update was to announce layoffs. I’m sure there were internal communications about the layoffs that were more pointed and had a different tone. I agree on the paragraph you pulled out. This writing style is more formal and “corporate” than preferred, but it’s not inherently terrible.