Can one of the many commenters decrying this as "bullshit business-speak" explain to me what is so terrible about this? I'm genuinely asking. My theory is that this is a good example of why HN discourages editorializing in titles. The current title here ("Stack Overflow reduces global workforce by approximately 15%") sets you up to think that this is a layoff announcement by SO. But from reading the first paragraph,…
Personally I don't think it was that bad -- however it's so much text and words so I couldn't read all of it. It could have been 1/4 it's length?
I’m just thinking about the big tech companies and which CEOs would think long term. 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 a…
Apologies for the delayed response: your comment did get me athinkin’. > 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…
Counterpoint: Sometimes "I don't know, what do you want to do?" is exactly the wrong response from a leader, because it leads to delay, confusion, and incoherent and conflicting actions by different people. In my professional life I've been in situations where I was either happy to have a manager who simply made a decision, or unhappy to have someone who deferred them, because having a fast, clear process was more important than making the optimal decision.
You think mean comments are a SO or reddit problem? The fact that anonymous online discourse gets rude and heated has been known since the days of usenet. There was even some of this on BBS forums, but that was a more civilized time, likely because we knew the people we were talking to were within our local calling area in most cases. None of this is new. It's a humanity problem, not a technology problem.
It's a community problem. And more specifically a growth problem, when a community grow too fast it's hard to educate all new members about the community policies. Once those new members get moderator status without first being educated, the community is doomed.
If you think it's possible to "educate" everyone participating in an anonymous online discussion you have failed before you even began.