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.
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.
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.
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.
So they find a buyer for the business, transition things, cash out and go find something else to do.
The investors set a goal and Joel executed it.
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.
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/ Currently https://commonpurposenow.org/david
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?
The same way as every other community on the Internet that got popular.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
(Now they have a heavily trafficed landing page trafficed only by people who wouldn't recommend doing anything with them.)
> 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.
I agree on the paragraph you pulled out. This writing style is more formal and “corporate” than preferred, but it’s not inherently terrible.