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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

HN headline is quite different than the actual article, which is "Microsoft admits slim staff and broken automation contributed to Azure outage". The headline as submitted is quite focused on the manager vs employee conflict that is so in vogue on HN at the moment, while in the actual headline (and the rest of the article) Microsoft acknowledges they've put too few people on that shift and have already taken mitigations. Mitigations both to increase the team size and improve the automation that supports them btw.

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The title tag on The Register article starts with "Microsoft blames outage on small staff, automation failures", so it is not something added by the submitter.

It must have changed as I don't see that at all:

> Microsoft admits slim staff and broken automation contributed to Azure outage

> Just three people were on duty in Australia when 'power sag' struck and software failures left them blind

That's the heading, the title is still "small staff" for me. The heading is what shows at the top of the page, you'll see the page title in the browser tab's name among other places.

The word "small" in the HN headline ("Microsoft blames outage on small staff [...]"). I am not native English, but the image in my head was of the staffers being physically small. A bit curious how a native speaker reads it?

Small as in few in number. Consider the phrase a “a large crowd”. Or its size if you take it as the aggregate size - I.e. population. That works too.

Small crowd, or small team, parses just fine. Small staff sounds strange.

In the UK staff is used much the way “team” or “employees” are used in the US. It’s a collective noun.

“Staff must park behind the building”.

As an Aussie, yes the word "small" would indicate something about their stature. I would use the phrase "low staff numbers"

reduced, minimal, skeleton, insufficient, 'a small team'.

Agree with all, but 'small staff' does sound odd. I wonder if it's because of the alliteration. A 'great group' can also be confusing.

Agreed about sounding odd but "a small staff" sounds fine to me. I think the missing 'a' is what weirdifies it.

As a native speaker that reads as: "Microsoft blames outage on small [number of] staff".

I'm not sure of the technical terms, but "staff" can both be the total mass of employees, and the individual employees.

"Small staff" means a small number of employees in the same way "small army" means a small number of soldiers.

Something, something countable vs uncountable nouns?

To this native speaker, the intended meaning was immediately obvious, but I agree, it is awkwardly phrased. Something like "inadequate staffing levels" would be much better.

It's on brand for "the register" whose editorial staff never miss a chance for a good pun or double entendre so the awkward phrasing is likely intentional.

As a native speaker I find the phrase "small staff" to be quite awkward and I would avoid writing it.

I'll also note that it's totally standard for the theregister.com to have headlines that incorporate puns or colloquial language. In this case the original headlines has "slim staff" which is also awkward but has a different mental image :-)

This is a good lesson in clear writing, by the way. Take some documentation you've written and try to misunderstand it. Think about synonyms or think about the words in a different context and see how far you can run away from the original meaning.

For example - "original meaning" here is kind of strange. What if the original documentation is wrong or ambiguous? Then we don't want the original meaning, we want the intended meaning. But I'll leave it in here as an example.

Well, the team size increase is only temporary....

> We have temporarily increased the team size from three to seven, until the underlying issues are better understood, and appropriate mitigations can be put in place.

I read it in the context of management stating that they’re understaffed. Different worldviews and perspectives I suppose.

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