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Comment by have_faith | Hacker News Reader

> several of whom discussed their decision to leave with Gizmodo, say that executives have become less transparent with their workforce about controversial business decisions

It's a significant amount of people if all of these people are close to or part of the project being discussed. I wouldn't expect Mike from the Angular team to resign over a project he knows little about so I don't think the employee count is relevant.

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But that's not what the article says and it does that on purpose. The phrase "Google Employees resign in protest" is significant from a writers PoV. If they had sources and evidence to suggest it was close to the project, they would have said "Google's Project Maven Employees resign in protest" as it gives it more weight.

The art/lie is omission and letting the reader jump to the conclusion. Currently there is nothing in the article to suggest that these aren't just call-centre workers but they (Gizmodo, pronouns pal) will let you believe that its Maven people and senior engineers.

It puts the article in to random-arse speculation mode of a pretty bad kind.

I agree that the nature of their employment isn't being made clear and I'd argue that this was done to mislead, if the author had knowledge that people close to the project resigned they would have published it in the headline.

The reason they don't include the roles of the people who resigned is likely because those people are anonymous sources, and revealing their position risks revealing their identities.

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