If I read another piece of American corporate crap --- plastic, formulaic, always-be-selling --- I'm gonna throw up on my keyboard. The write-up is rife with stock phrases, and vapid emotionalism. Somewhere when the rest of us are busy there's a room somewhere where people get the cheat-sheet, fill-in-the-blank training that produces this junk. Look the guy probably had some success and met some great people. So why in the hell can't you say that in your own words?
When you are a company leader, your words can have a material effect on your business. This is doubly so true at a disruptive point like leadership exits. Of course words are going to be delicately chosen?
That being said I didn't notice anything particularly offensive about this letter. He describes the accomplishments under his watch, expresses gratitude for employees, and expresses confidence in his successor.
Mostly started by Google as "Do No Evil" PR, and later by Apple's creating products that “enrich people's lives.”
I dont think it is this letter in particular. So may be it is not fair to criticise it. But my guess is that the accumulation of these cooperate speaks, PR, and the past 10 years of main stream media riding along these PR to new height, just happen to tricker OP this time around.
And it doesn't seems to be an American things either, I read a lot of Fortune 500 post, somehow these over the top PR speak are mostly related to tech only.
However, I still think Github and Nat deserve a lot of praise for what they have done. Lots of changes and improvement happened after the acquisition. And not only credit to Nat but also to Microsoft.
There is one particular corporate leader who speaks their mind and has made a tremendous impact on the world. So, it's not clear if it has anything to do with polished big-corp language.
I'd rather listen to someone who is straightforward than Sundar Pichai speaking entirely in corporate-speak while saying absolutely nothing of value or substance. Completely uninspiring.
All corporate speak is rather an invention of the 80's and 90's. Listen to corporate leaders from any other time before that.
Why is one thing a corporate persona and the other "speaking their mind"? I think most CEOs are good at cultivating a personal brand that speaks to the people they want to be reaching out to.
Musk is equally if not more pompous with his nuggets of wisdom, and offers no value or substance either.
Can't deny that Musk is an incredibly successful man, but if it's the choice between Sundar Pichai's corporate speech and someone who attacks a rescue expert as "pedo guy" because his ego is hurt, I'd rather work for Pichai.
I mean, if we can excuse Musk's behavior as "So what? His companies have been incredibly successful," then, fine, but why can't we say the same for other CEOs? Other CEOs at least have a good sense of keeping their personal feuds out of twitter.
It's funny to me that you think Musk isn't an "always-be-selling" type of person and that you think he speaks his mind without spewing "corporate speak" because to me, "Musk speak" is just another form of corporate speak.
Musk isn't so much "speaking the truth", he's more "selling things, his way".
Exactly, his shtick just happens to be the complete opposite of conventional corporate speak. It's edgy "tell-it-like-it-is" trolling, but it's still designed to build a brand and a relationship with the consumer. He's not even the only corpo who does that.
When you're a corporate leader, the way you speak is by default a form of corporate speak, because as a public figure who is listened to, everything you say is a reflection of the brand.
I think there's a specific "corporate style" of speaking that's very stiff and blandly positive, which is what they're thinking of when they're saying corporate speak. But I agree with your point and was making it, even though Musk speak is a different style, it ultimately works the same way as the corporate style, which is to buff up his brand in a way that maximizes shareholder value. Musk speak might not be the corporate style, but it's still a form of corporate speak, as per your definition.
Edit: lol, this will be the most downvotes on a char count basis I've ever received. I thought it was generally accepted that for better or worse, he does not mince words.
Ah yes Elon Musk also tweets about “TITS university”. I’m sure there’s no one that finds issue with that, but doesn’t have the power to speak against it.
There are over 7 billion people on this planet. I'm sure that for every utterance you could construct in the English language, you could find someone who "finds issue with that, but doesn’t have the power to speak against it".
If someone finds issue with it but doesn't have the power to speak against it, then who cares that they find issue with it? If Elon was worried about making sure he didn't offend anyone, he wouldn't speak the way he does.
Agree. Corporate speak is un-open. It's a spin. It's pejorative because it's essentially manipulative. To get out of that and to work from one's own experience requires intelligence and some (not a ton) of confidence. If the putative speaker doesn't have that, how in the hell did he get into the top spot? To be sure, such plain speak also comes with a take, a slant, and frame. Is that manipulative? Not in the end: you see it coming. You see from whom it's coming. And the listener can assess how it lands. If there's a meeting of the minds, great. If not no harm, no-foul.
> Of course words are going to be delicately chosen?
that question mark at the end of a non-question. Nothing personal, just critique on a larger trend, but IMO upspeak and vocal fry are more annoying than corporate speak.
But I agree about these exit letter being more delicate. The more intimate notes are fine internally.
I feel you. Words of those in leadership positions can often seem fairly hollow. They don't just seem so, though, they are and that's on purpose.
Being authentic as a leader is impossible. Your thoughts, desires, core beliefs, etc are going to be offensive to someone -- even if those disagreeable things made agreeable outcomes for people mad at your words. I mean offensive in the broadest possible definition here; more plainly, they'll be perceived negatively by someone with enough motivation to be nasty and often it's not worth the trouble of dealing with someone who woke up feeling nasty. We live in a world where people think it's okay to read into the words (and lives) of others, try to derive deep meaning out of simple actions (even if there is none), and where people believe you're lying by default (as a leader). The fact is, as time has gone on confirmation of these things in various people and businesses builds, so they're hard assuations to just toss aside. Therefore, it is most safe to type a paragraph giving direction, listing accomplishments, and thanking entities that helped you along the way in the most taste-free way one can, while saying absolutely nothing at all.
You're absolutely right, though is this case even the taste-free text is offending enough people. Being a leader means you'll offend someone, so it becomes an exercise in whom you're ok with offending.
Nat is a mogul in SV. Everyone knows him, many even before GitHub. Simply walking away from GitHub without much of a speech would make it seem like he didn't care or left on bad terms, optics-wise. That would have a potentially serious effect on perception and thus shareholders would be affected. This clearly isn't his intent.
I offer a contrary point of view: why does it bother you so much? Simply do not read it.
A little off-topic, but why does the CEO even need to say goodbye? I'm not really concerned with listening the words of most CEOs of companies I work at. It's just another job at the company, albeit, probably one with a bit too much power and influence.
mostly b/c it's rather unlikely that someone has decided, themselves, to do that. There is no human behind the pen (or the keystrokes). I suppose some might have been in a similar position and resent it.
Sure it was, and for MS there is definitely strategic value in owning Github. But I even if you factor in that strategic value, Github is not as important to Microsoft as, say, Instagram is to Facebook.
Instagram is likely the greatest acquisition of all time in terms of synergy and mainly financial gains.
Instagram is worth hundreds of billions now. Bought for $1B. It is an actual unicorn situation of being incredibly rare.
There’s no point bringing up something so rare.
For example, the only other [tech?] acquisition that I can think of even sniffing IG is Priceline (now Bookings Holdings) acquiring Bookings.com for a couple hundred million. Now being the core of the business.
—
Beyond that. Just to be geeky about this stuff. The only other general financial deals in this ballpark are SoftBank, Yahoo, and Naspers investments. Copy pasting previous comment:
SoftBank and Yahoo bought around 40% stakes each in Alibaba. SoftBank spent $20M in 1999, the year Alibaba was founded. Alibaba owned 34% as of the mid 2010s. Now own 26%. Yahoo, because of Jerry Yang, invested $1B in 2005.
Naspers invested $32M for almost 50% of Tencent in 2001. Probably the best investment ever. Naspers split into two companies. Prosus owns the remaining close to 30% stake now. Though Naspers and Prosus both own around one half of one another.
All three investing companies have had issues with their own valuations. They’ve all had their own market caps be undervalued. Their one investment alone usually was close to or even exceeded the entire market cap of the company. Still the case for SoftBank and Prosus.
It'd be reasonable to peg GitHub as being worth $40-$50 billion.
That's a serious asset for Microsoft shareholders - even if the parent is worth $2t - and they will want to see it flourish. Which goes in line with what the parent comment noted about presenting the correct impression, not only to shareholders but also to anyone interested in working at GitHub for Microsoft. Potential employees will want to know that the context is healthy.
GitHub’s acquisition cost was close to $24B (dividend and stock value today). Gitlab being far smaller are closing in on $20B valuation. Even if Microsoft is worth $2.5T, GitHub being worth $50B-75B still means a lot. Especially for the synergies they gain with Azure and the good publicity they get from being current stewards of GitHub.
They absolutely care about revenue, but in the early innings it is not AS important. Strategic value is essentially enterprise value you haven’t quantified yet.
You need to read enough to be sick to realize what it is.
In part because even the title is clickbait. Even the tl;dr manages to inject some platitudes before getting to the point.
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And you're arguing a strawman. The comment you replied to never implied he shouldn't say farewell. They're complaining about how utterly insincere it comes across being blasted full of every trite corporate saying in existence
If anything they're arguing for more of a farewell than this, and it would have taken less effort too.
I wonder why it upsets you that someone would complain about this though, do you have a personal attachment to Nat?
I have no dog in this race but it sounds like you're assuming that a sentence with a negative sentiment (whatever that actually means) must have been created by a person who's upset. A bit of a stretch, no?
A tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact HN users act like basic social skills like the ability to infer tone are voodoo gets dissected like this?
You can't make up this stuff up.
To the reply:
> would not be acceptable in any social setting otherwise
You're close to getting it!
In a normal social setting if someone says "If you don't like X don't interact with it!" that can reasonably understood as a negative statement.
Going "show me where I said I'm upset!!" instead of just clarifying is not acceptable in a social setting. Busting out an ML model is just holding up the mirror.
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> I am not responsible for how the voice in your head portrays what you read.
I'm not responsible for teaching people how basic social interactions work, yet here we are...
I believe using a sentiment analysis tool you googled for to back up an assumption you made about me and my character would not be acceptable in any social setting otherwise. Just pointing this out. My original comment was made with an informative/inquisitive tone.
I am not responsible for how the voice in your head portrays what you read.
Of course you couldn't help yourself, I poopoo'd on your dog in the race and you couldn't think of something meaningful to reply with.
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And I am upset, I hate working in one of the few industries where people wear social ineptitude like a badge:
Like someone says something when they're clearly upset, you ask why they're upset, then suddenly they derail the conversation because
"how dare you imply I am some descendant of a caveman capable of being shudder upset"
Like holy shit, real people get upset! Wowie what a concept!
Dude was upset someone insulted his rockstar idol that everyone in SV knows and got called out.
I jokingly tell him even a computer can see he's upset and now there's literally another reply to me by this "peter" person picking a fight with the computer!
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Maybe you're all stuck in this weird passive aggressive bubble of timidity (maybe that's the "everyone") where you're not allowed to express emotion but I'm not going to coddle you, not here or in real life
This person was upset. They didn't need to present it as some passive aggressive "informative", like the guy they replied to didn't know they couldn't read it.
They're just not used to having to deal with emotions directly instead of being as biting as possible while seeming... "informative"
> In a normal social setting if someone says "If you don't like X don't interact with it!" that can reasonably understood as a negative statement.
Except they didn't say that, did they? What they said verbatim was "simply do not read it" which is a much more reasonable tone than how you seemingly interpreted it.
Whether it's negative or not also depends on the context which in this case is a proposed solution to literally the most negative and upset-sounding post in this chain: the one that started it. What does your ML model think of "I'm gonna throw up on my keyboard"?
"You don't have the social skills to realize people can infer tone, so here let your fellow computer tell it to you"
third person shows up to pick a fight with the computer.
Never chance y'all.
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And for the record, if someone complains about a piece of writing, and you tell them "simply not to read it"
You are being a passive aggressive joke, and you are clearly upset with their critique.
People are allowed to dislike things, and gasp even hate things, you don't need to get all max passive aggression over that.
Not everyone lives in an echo chamber of timidity where all emotions must be moderate some of you put yourselves in.
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The person I replied to had no answer to the actual point I made, so they tried to derail the conversation to "how dare you claim I'm upset!" which was a complete aside in my comment as it was in theres.
Yet now I am talking to a guy who wants to argue with an ML model so I guess well played?
This is written in Protect-The-Stock-Price::English; a late post-modern dialect of American English distinctive for its bold and verbose phrases that are also in-explicitly devoid of any substance.
We're confident that intelligent audience members, like yourself OP, can appreciate the large amounts of money and diverse political sensitivities that our communication must be careful to navigate. And while we respectfully regret any discomfort you might have experienced, we hope that you find joy in our future communications.
I actually thought OP's take was very pertinent to the situation.
...which was riddled with phrases like:
"With all that we’ve accomplished in mind, and more than five great years at Microsoft under my belt, I’ve decided it’s time for me to go back to my startup roots. What drives me is enabling builders to create the future.
If you start from the assumption that it is meaningless and insincere, then it is eye-rollingly vapid.
If you start from the assumption that it is a genuine attempt to put messy feelings into concise words, then it is a bit lacks vividness but is nonetheless heartfelt.
When you choose not to trust someone, you make them untrustworthy.
Is that why we make judgement calls on this case? No one can know the intent or original thoughts of the author, but we can certainly ascribe qualities to their product based on our experience...
The fun exercise here is not that this is yet another vapid post on HN, but that people are defending it.
> The fun exercise here is not that this is yet another vapid post on HN, but that people are defending it.
It's quite plausible that the simple truth of the matter is that some people commenting here, defending the post, may feel that HN shouldn't be so very frequently cynical, negative, mean, quick to jump to assuming the worst about intentions, and so on. The Guidelines - for good reason - even go out of the way to try to drive users away from behaving that way.
Because “If people would assume the worst about someone as competent at communication as $leader, then how much more likely are they to mistrust me when I try to communicate sincerely?” is the story I tell myself. Spending time in low-trust environments does bad things to the psyche.
Reading up higher will inform you of context, but to reiterate:
OP: "Look the guy probably had some success and met some great people. So why in the hell can't you say that in your own words?"
My comment: "Not even Clark Kent could be this braggadocios."
There are better way of expressing one's (dis)satisfaction in the workplace. Starting with, perhaps, whittling down one's pride in accomplishing what tens of thousands already have...
He cannot say it in his own words because it's a ritual. All formulae here are ritualistic, following a corporate protocol for such speeches. The speaker's agency is,limited to choosing which formulae to choose, and filling in the predefined slots in them.
The point of the ritual is to signal the world that all goes as planned, while giving away as few salient details as possible.
When a leader lists each of these accomplishments, it’s less “See what I did” and more “To the team that did this: I see you, I recognize your contribution”.
I think all these comments are incredibly childish. It’s a nice goodbye letter from their well known and visible leader.
That's fair. It is interesting when you look at other types of farewell post over the years/decade on HN (mostly open source projects or programming langs). There is definitely a tendency to favor those types versus corporate ones.
I do agree we're living an eternal september for the past months and comment quality has gone down to reddit-level, but I also agree with the commenter about this specific post from GH's founder.
How so? My first thought when reading the title and seeing it was a GitHub blog was that someone was probably leaving the company. Do you expect someone leaving their company to title their goodbye blog post like "John Doe leaving GitHub"?
disagree. Honest exasperation over the constant fakeness in the industry and how corporate it has become is valuable in the sense that it at least expresses a genuine emotion, something that can't be said about the empty but faux-civil communication that is 99% of the tech industry nowadays with its constant need to pat its own back.
I don't really think it's virtue signaling. "Virtue signaling" is itself an extremely tired cliche/accusation. To me it feels more like stock "relatability signaling", which gives me a similarly unctuous feeling. Kind of the nerd-corporatespeak version of "hello, fellow kids".
I'm with you about corporate drivel generally, but I'm not really seeing it here... this post is much more human and expresses seemingly genuine gratitude towards team members in a way that's absent from the utter tripe I find, for example, in the LinkedIn feed.
I always wonder how much of these statements are PR driven vs PR edited... what percentage of these words actually belong to Nat vs the corporate communications team.
The mind numbing boringness is entirely the point. The real message is that there’s nothing to see here, everyone is on the same page, everyone loves the successor, if you’re an investor or an employee this is definitely not an event that should make you reconsider your relationship with the company.
I can be subject to similar views at times but here it's just the usual leaving message. Just like on the Firefox release, people should chill out. I guess the global context is getting to people's head.
Yoooooooooooo homies. I'm dippin out! Tom the new homie now. This a legit cruise. One love to y'all. Always remember, Snitches get stitches.
Peace out braphogs.
Because this is a corporation. Why would he say it in his own words? This is not a dinner party with aunt and grandma, it's a multi-billion dollar business with lots of liability.
He probably can but doesn't want to. He may be posturing for whatever thing he wants to do next which requires being "very professional" (aka high-quality executive bullshit). Or he might just be boring as hell. My dad was an executive, and he was one of the most bland and uncreative human beings I've ever met.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I don't see the reply I made here with that throwaway (shadowban?), so I'm doing it with my other one.
> for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to
Apparently not! Using throwaways, people have upvoted me like crazy. Hundreds of points per month, for a person with no identity. If it kept going at the same pace, I would outrank some of the highest-point users within a year or two, all from using throwaway. Is that not community? And if it's not - isn't it better than community? Isn't upvoting someone you don't know, don't owe anything to, who you hold no preconceived ideas about, actually a more honest way to interact with a community?
When I get upvoted, I'm happy. Me being happy encourages me to post in a happy mood, so I create happier comments (on average). When I get downvoted or ignored (on my 'real' account), I get angry and depressed, and that makes for much less happy comments (and just a bad feeling all around). Using the throwaways not only makes me less angry and depressed, but it also enables creating content that people clearly approve of.
> Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community
There have been throwaways on this site for ages, in addition to known people. The community hasn't disappeared as far as I can tell. So it seems like you can, in fact, have it both ways. In addition, I've been a member of a lot of different communities. A lot of the time, the ones that banter on about how much of a close-knit community they are, enable some of the most toxic behavior. There are some great aspects to community, and some horrifying ones. Rather than trying to change the community to fit the standards we think it should have, perhaps we should encourage the behavior that metrics show have a more positive outcome. I could be crazy, but it seems like anything that inspires more upvotes (without the content being hateful, vitriolic, judgemental or divisive) seems like it's worth keeping.
Maybe I missed something, and there's some metrics-driven approach where you're pushing back on all throwaway behavior because its existence (regardless of content) leads to worse outcomes. Or maybe you just consider 'most' throwaways to post divisive content, and push back on all of them. Or maybe you just don't like the idea of throwaways, I dunno. All I know is this little experiment with throwaways has made me much happier on HN.
You can't judge these things by upvotes alone. Indignation and flamebait routinely get upvoted, for example, and are obviously not what this site is for. The system is complex and upvotes are just one factor.
As for 'the community not disappearing' - this is a freerider argument. You're benefitting from the contributions of all the people who aren't behaving this way.
So do you consider positive comments that get positive engagement to be a benefit to your community? If not, I get it, and your position is basically "I just don't like throwaways regardless of their contribution". But if that's not your position, you don't seem to have much of an argument yourself.
Also, there is no "freeriding" if the throwaways are actively producing positive content. You might as well call every single user a "freerider" - what are they contributing at all? Is your forum getting paid by someone based on an estimate of "real users" or something, and throwaways screw up your numbers? It really doesn't make sense.
The idea that a static username alone has an outsized positive effect on your community doesn't seem to be provable, in the face of accounts like mine. Maybe you're just making a general rule so you can eliminate the majority of accounts used for flaming or spam, I can't tell.
Incendiary statements don't add much to the conversation.
You probably like buying groceries, you're typing on a computer and you presumably at least own clothes so you don't have a problem with all corporations. One would also assume you don't want a return to feudal society in which the goods generally available to you were those produced in a 2-mile radius.
The computer point is fair, but for many growing your own food and making your own clothes is nearly impossible with some kind of corporation involvement.
Corporate PR speak is a reflection of the American media's willingness to endlessly mock anything that is outside the accepted norm. PR speak is meaningless because saying something interesting isn't worth the potential blowback.
As I live longer, I realize some people take to corporate speak and corporate values like ducks to water.
It's actually their preferred mode of communication and existence.
Politicians play this game most clearly - they need to communicate allegiance to the rich, their political party and 'the people', which is an impossible ask (because the parties are not aligned and you please one by taking away from the other) but they do quite well by having invented a vocabulary that's interpreted differently by each group, plus they can outright lie, which's a last resort move they try to avoid.
