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Comment by acaloiar | Hacker News Reader

> Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to give it to you straight.

Well, since you said it that way, I should assume that what comes next will not sound like a steamy pile of meandering corporate speak, right?

> The team has been working around the clock to produce streamlined roadmap for Twitter, Vine, and Periscope and they are shaping up to be strong. The roadmap is focused on the experiences which will have the greatest impact.

A roadmap focused on high-impact experiences. Got it. I hope your firings go really well, Bob.

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Eventually people in a certain environment just start talking like that. He might not even realize how silly that sounds.

It happens in academia too:

http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/

He said he would give it to you straight, not ELI5. They are focusing on fewer things that they believe are the most valuable, and stopping stuff that isn't core to their purpose. What about this is confusing to you?

What you said is as near the definition of "giving it straight" as one might expect to follow his preface. What he actually said is as near the definition of corporate speak as possible. There is no confusion on my part. Perhaps Jack is the one confused about what people mean by "corporate speak".

how would you have phrased it?

"We're laying off up to 336 people, with the biggest impact to Product and Engineering. We'll be providing generous exit packages and helping find new jobs. Sorry. It's our fuckup, not yours."

It would have been better to phrase it the same, but leave out the part about giving it to everyone straight.

If you understood exactly what he meant, then it was pretty straight. Especially the bit about how many people are being let go and from where, that's remarkably forthcoming.

Forthcoming as that may be – an understanding listener does not a pretty straight statement make.

>> What he actually said is as near the definition of corporate speak as possible.

No, it's really not.

Only on HN. <eyeroll>

"As many of you who have(had) vested stock with us know, our stock and investor faith have collapsed - and in a desperation move to win back our shareholder's trust, we are 'going lean,' so to speak, so we spent a mid-six-figure sum in hiring an outside consulting agency to eliminate human capital - so we didn't have to review it internally - regardless of what you've built with us."

That's actually pretty easy to understand and communicates what the plan is.

I see what you're saying -- but if the "generous exit packages" and "help finding a new job" are true, then it's still way better than some companies I've worked at, where the firings consisted of two weeks of pay and being escorted out of the building on the same day (of course, said companies weren't in SV).

Of course, given his buzzword-filled talk, those "generous exit packages" might just consist of two weeks pay as well.

"We just fixed the glitch"

He has to write this email in a way that doesn't make investors recoil, and he did his best.

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