What else in the post is worth debating?

YC made a decision about the value of one of their departments, and HackerNews generally accepts it as given that companies can make these kinds of self-determinations. The reasons for the decision were given. As a result of that decision, 17 people no longer have jobs with YC.

All that’s really left to debate is how YC phrases it. “17 teammates were impacted” is weasellier than the average layoff announcement so it gets the criticism.

As an aside, there seems to be a general but informal understanding that fired means you did something wrong while laid off means you’re alright but the company no longer employs you. Other terms like “impacted” have to be matched to one of these two cases. Probably a lot of benefit for everyone from formalizing this distinction. The military uses “honorable discharge, other than honorable discharge, dishonorable discharge” https://www.zero8hundred.org/types-of-discharges for example.

Sticks and bones may break my bones, but words can divert me into hours and hours of endless hairsplitting and bickering until I die of being bored with myself and doctors gather and marvel at the inexplicable fact that I am still complaining in the absence of a discernible pulse

Clarity and technical honesty are very important in technical work; especially so in a startup: you want people to focus on solving technical issues, not translating corporatese to human.

Plus, if a group tries to hide behind the wording for an inconvenient message what else would it sweep under the rug? YC is usually way better than this, which may be the reason there is so much attention to the wording which reads like the standard PR spin. My 2c.

Probably because there’s not much new in the layoff story that hasn’t been covered in tens of thousands of comments on previous layoffs. But this is the first time a lot of people have had an outlet to discuss the frustrating linguistic phenomena that have been on display this cycle.

not only that but it's the exact same top-comment subthread that appears at the top of literally every story involving corporate comms. I wonder if it's the same people every time or if there's a constant influx of new commenters who feel strongly about corpspeak.

Yours too

This thread has to be best description of nerds i've seen