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Comment by FartyMcFarter | Hacker News Reader

You don't write that email by yourself. There are lots of cooks in the pot when it comes to writing this kind of message to a large corporation.

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And yet thay all apparently lack basic human empathy?

Some of them probably do, and I'd also bet that when responsibility for writing the message is diffused throughout a group, people don't feel the need to make it as nice as they would otherwise.

Why would they have any more compared to any other industry?

There's nothing better at diluting empathy and care for humans, not to mention creating evil, than diluting responsibility.

Somebody else will make it sound empathetic /s

Legal is one of the main cooks producing the pot.

I'm really having trouble connecting the dots between potential liability and leading with "building the future of human connection"

There's a reason why we're called "resources".

You assume this email is for the people who will be affected by the layoffs. It is not - it's for the investors and leaders who stay around. Empathy isn't part of this decision or the way it's carried out, unfortunately.

You're on the money. Like literally, empathy here would convey some sadness, or just "negative feelings", which would affect how the money feels. We can't have the money feeling bad now can we? Plus who cares anyway, we all know software monkeys don't feel. They just want to sit around all day drinking coffees and mashing little plastic chiclets! And the money is perfectly happy with this arrangement. /s

Just in case you or another onlooker comes by and assumes I agree with the morality of what I said, I don't. I think it's awful letting 10K people go for money, like they don't have bills too. But I don't live in delusion or the dark about these things. Zuckerberg posts this letter to inspire those who stay, not mourn those who go. Empathy, in this case, negatively impacts the message, which is Facebook is important and is moving to be a more financially sound company. Again, I don't like it, but my likes don't matter here.

Damned if you do damned if you don't.

We've seen the entire gambit of layoff messages in the past year. No matter how empathic they're written, people complain.

Good people remember though and hold a grudge if you insult them on the way out the door. People you want to hire in the future are watching as well. There's incentive to be classy (ex: Microsoft's https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing...) unless the whole ship is going down.

Edit:

That being said, after actually reading it, the Meta letter is relatively classy. The HN comments made it seem worse than it was.

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