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Yep, it is. Lot's of jargon. But it's the jargon used every day, by everyone up and down an org, in an attempt to be polite. It's not an attempt to use new language in a way as to absolve themselves of responsibility. Give them a break, they probably (rightly) have their egos and lives wrapped up in this business and feel kind of stupid right now. Just because they are successful it doesn't mean they are robots.

It's really not, they just knew it would be leaked and are getting ahead of it. They aren't fools.




This isn't about "jargon" being used to "be polite". "Jargon" is specialized terminology which may not be understood outside of a group or context. "We took an existing encoder-decoder transformer model from huggingface and slapped a token-level classifier head on it" is lot of jargon. By contrast, everyone understands what "let go" means.

The reason for choosing to say "let go" vs "terminated" isn't to "be polite". More broadly, in this and similar announcements, we see framing, of active vs passive parties, to spin responsibility, agency and involvement. The tone of the whole thing is "because of the broader economic environment, this business outcome was so inevitable and our hands were so forced we will barely acknowledge that it was a decision." And as a stark contrast, they describe all of the things they're giving "impacted" former employees in the active voice: "We'll pay", "We'll accelerate", "We'll cover", "We'll be supporting" etc.

I think they actually seem to be doing a pretty good job supporting the staff they terminated. I just think if they actually want to take responsibility for their actions, both bad and good, they should talk in a way that acknowledges when they're the principal actors.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2017/06/01/using-the-bu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon#Specifics


This is a cynical take. If you assume for a minute they are half decent guys, it reads differently - they accept responsibility and give some context.




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