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Comment by yequalsx | Hacker News Reader

It's the "less than 20 people" that rubs me the wrong way. I think something along the lines of feeling bad at having to do this would go over much better and sound sincere. Writing "less than 20 people" makes them seem insincere. The last part of the sentence is nice. I wish they had reworded the first part.

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"less than 20 people" also implicitly assigns a value to 20 people. Should read "fewer than 20 people."

(ok im sorry for nitpicking)

As with a lot of such corrections, the fewer/less dichotomy is wrong:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/003775.ht...

I agree. Even just writing "We thank the X affected people." would have been better. The "less than 20 people" interjection makes it sound like they're trying to minimise the importance of it and making a point of it being such a trifling little firing-round that they couldn't even be bothered checking the exact count.

That statement is a case study in poor corporate communications. It would have been way more elegant if they said something along the lines of:

'We thank the 20 persons affected by this change for their contributions and we are committed to doing as much as we can to provide them with a respectful exit from our company.'

Not perfect, but at least this way it doesn't seem like like they're trying to minimize those who are affected. But, I'm a technical writer and my hobby is to make fun of the material folks in the communication and advertising departments churn out.

>It's the "less than 20 people" that rubs me the wrong way. I think something along the lines of feeling bad at having to do this would go over much better and sound sincere. Writing "less than 20 people" makes them seem insincere.

Being insincere is a professional requirement for writing a press release. A press release is meant to reflect the company and make it look good in its actions, not reflect the sincere feelings of the person writing it.

And to me the company seems insincere. I now have a negative association in my brain for the company. Prior there were no negative associations in me with regard to this company. The company does look good with this press release. At least not in my mind.

Twitter was looking good to anyone after maybe their first 2 years or so?

I think it is rather hard to fight a rumor of 100 without sounding a bit insincere to the 20..

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