There were companies going public then with zero dollars in revenues that were now worth over a hundred trillion dollars.
and
Jerry Levin might very well have been at the table next to us buying AOL right in front of our eyes.
Make me cringe.
Am I being an idiot to assume that anyone with this kind of success (sure, this story didn't end well for him, but still extremely successful in his attempts to bring in money) ought to be able to write it up in such a way that it doesn't read like a schoolboy's work of fiction?
>> "I was visiting with an ex-student who’s now the CFO of a large public tech company."
>> "(By coincidence, the CEO was an intern at one of my startups more than two decades ago.)"
Admittedly, this isn't adding to the discussion at hand. Just one amateur writer picking apart another's writing style, but...
Is it just me, or do those lines serve no purpose except to boost the author's own ego and sense of self-importance?
I feel like they don't serve the reader in taking away the lesson in the least. They really strike me as an attempt to remind the reader of the writer's own value and importance.
Came here to point out just this. This article is a great example of convoluted syntax and flagrant wordiness.
I mean, come on:
>All this had come rushing back because once upon a time, I had lived through it too, in my late, unlamented career as an online news executive in that labyrinth of high-octane managerial passive-aggression known as Yahoo News.
This is about as ugly as English journalese gets. And it is also stupid because the implication is that this person should have been interning as a copywriter instead of wending his way through that high-octane managerial labyrinth of passive-aggressive knowledge that once upon a time was Yahoo News, natch.
My takeaway is that Yahoo News failed because it was run by amateurs.
I didn't say the subject was bad, I said the writing sucked.
The excerpt I quoted was isolated like a paragraph, but I don't remember a paragraph being 2 poorly written sentences.
How would I have worded it? For one I would have presented one side of the entire story, and then an opposing view-point (i.e. the view point of Theranos execs), instead of "person a said x. person y said x'".
I guess I'm sorry I'd prefer writing hidden behind a pay wall to be a little more elegant than what an 8 year old could write.
From a business writing standpoint? that whole sentence is superfluous. The whole thing is an insertion of humility, something that is important when speaking about yourself to other nerds, but is essentially social fluff.
My takeaway is primarily not that I did verbosity wrong, though certainly that comment wasn't right, but that the verbosity itself is the problem.
Take, for example one of the bits of writing I'm most proud of:
We had a real editor, and my co-author had significant writing skill, but even so: Look at the Scheduling for providers section; that was mostly me.
This is about what I had been aiming for in my business communications, and while I still think it's a reasonable bit of writing for a semi-technical audience, it is far too verbose for a business email.
If I was sending that same passage to a business person, I suspect the optimal format would be something like:
"We will allocate CPU based on how much ram the user purchases."
The rest is technical details and fluff. When dealing with a businessperson, the technical details are my job, not something they care about.
I think that my primary self-destructive impulse here is that I want to throw out technical details, in part to prove that I actually know something. I need to restrain that bit of ego, as worrying about the technical details is what I'm (hopefully) getting paid to do.
"Today it's almost obvious to state that good written communication creates a business advantage."
That sentence has a problem with its words. It's very far from good writing. It also sounds like the piece will be business-related, which I didn't expect.
[But maybe that's a "shallow dismissal", I shall return and read more.]
Ah.. I noticed it's talking about good business writing, and that the submitter has mysteriously deleted that word from the title. Well, I never would have clicked had I known that.
>Steve Jobs was not a futurist. He just built the future one piece at a time.
to be almost hypnotically devoid of meaning and disrespectful to the reader. Why not just say what's true? A good reader can be stunned by the truth, without needing to be lead through a difficult contradiction for dramatic effect.
I'm glad to know other people are annoyed by this rather perverse style of writing. I associate it with "web business guru" / "side-hustle tutorial" / "how I made X amount of dollars in Y months", and it reeks of ultra thirdh::) xx
For a while, I
Not for me, at least. My eyes jump to the all-caps words, they jump to the repeated letters in "weeeeelllll....", and I find the unqualified binary assertions and fake dialogue utterly unconvincing.
All these writing techniques combine to set off my crackpot and scam detectors.
I agree with the article's premise, but it takes conscious effort to not dismiss it based on style issues.
This fluff piece was written so quickly that the author did not correctly comprehend a two-word quote that he uses:
> Coming out of college, Warren Buffett wanted to work for Benjamin Graham to learn to be a value investor. Buffett offered to work for free, and Graham responded, “You’re overpriced.” What that means is you have to make sacrifices to take on an apprenticeship.
No, what that means is that, as a fresh college graduate, Buffet added negative value to Graham. (Hence, even at $0 he was too expensive.)
Blog posts are often a bit like code: They take more effort to read than they do to write. In this case, the author spends so little time trying to produce something worth reading that I couldn't finish the article.
I truly feel for the author and the emotional toll these past few years must have taken on him. And as others have pointed out, the market certainly isn’t what it was a few years ago for any job seeker in the “tech” industry.
But reading both the write up, and the various versions of his resume left me immediately with a sense of genuine anger - not for the situation, but at the author. As a somewhat self reflective person this naturally caused me to seek the source of this visceral reaction, and the conclusion I’ve come to is something nobody must have told him, or he was simply unwilling to hear. The problem here is his language / presentation. Now, I don’t mean his command of the English language, which is certainly quite good (especially considering that the author is likely multi-lingual, and English may not even be his native tongue).
As someone who has been working with seasoned executives for multiple decades, what struck a nerve with me was they nature in which the author chooses to express himself. It doesn’t “feel” like the way a seasoned executive would be expected to write. It seems much more like a crypto-bro, or a 20-something year old trust fund kid with delusions of grandeur. It’s perfectly possible the author is a genuinely professional, capable, and approachable person. But he doesn’t come across this way in both his blog or his resumes. And the truth especially a marketer should know, is that presentation often counts for a lot more than content.
Who uses language such as “findictators”, “COMB-shape hands-on doer” and “Pain Recognition”? And what’s with the infinity symbol graphic on the first resume? My favorite part is the long list of self-described “ABCs of me” at the bottom of the resume. It reads like a self-help guru book for business “wannapreneurs” with zero actual experience (which is in contrast to him actually having experience, and that contrast is the issue). Even the picture on top of the blog signals “bro” in every way. The feedback form the high-profile career coach was simply code the author couldn’t decipher - “you have nothing specific to offer” just means “you’re presenting like you swallowed a dictionary of cool business buzzwords which gives you no real shape or form, but leaves an impression of self importance and overestimation”.
Changing this is incredibly difficult, even more so because VCs used to pump funding into plenty of leaders with this kind of presentation, which infiltrated social media and normalized the appearance. And certainly losing some of the artifice of “traditional business” has long been a hallmark of the tech industry (I recall a time when Bill Gates was considered “edgy” because he didn’t wear suit and tie). And authenticity is increasingly encouraged and needed in modern business. But even then, you need to be able to read your audience, and the author simply is missing something there.
> “This is absolutely novel in history,” Ramstead told me as we sat on a bench in Queen Square, surrounded by patients and staff from the surrounding hospitals. Before Friston came along, “We were kind of condemned to forever wander in this multidisciplinary space without a common currency,” he continued. “The free energy principle gives you that currency.”
This is bloviation and crankery. I am not the target audience for this kind of reputation-building.
> He laid claims to a number of our designs such as our website utilizing a top navigation bar, our photo of the designer operating a sewing machine, etc.
> In short, the claims are as outlandish as we perceived
If the claims are so ridiculous why haven't they posted the claim? Why are we supposed to trust what they have to say?
Also this line reads very curiously:
> the mentor gave them words of blessing for future success.
it's as if they're trying to say "he said it was okay to take the work we did there and use it in the future"? I don't get that sentence.
Something about the way this is written feels weird.
I have no opinion on the technical correctness of the sentence. But I know I would do a lot to avoid writing such sentence in my own writing, and that I would stop reading anything that hits me with such a monstrosity in the opening paragraph.
I'm still trying to decide if this was written by someone who knows nothing about technology or nothing about business. Both, I think.
At one point:
"The kinds of programs American and others are installing are neither terribly expensive nor "a great leap" in technology, and thus could have been in place years earlier,"
Then, 6 paragraphs later:
"And as American was preparing to make big investments in computers, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred, and sent the airline industry into a deep decline."
Huh? Why the need for "big investments" if the solutions are not "terribly expensive"?
This is not a programming problem. Not even a business problem. It's a MANAGEMENT problem. Stop looking at your portfolios long enough to decide that you want something and what you want and WE WILL BUILD IT FOR YOU.
Maybe that's why so much energy is going into Web 2.0, social networks, etc. Because big business is either too dumb or too lazy to articulate their business problems well enough to get a solution.
Hell, input this problem into a Y Combinator start-up in January and get a solution in March.
"But I don't trust these companies, and I especially don't trust Apple or Google with my writing work. I can see a day when what I write has to be approved by someone who works for Steve Jobs before it can be read publicly."
When I read something like this, it makes it harder to take the surrounding article seriously.
Am I being an idiot to assume that anyone with this kind of success (sure, this story didn't end well for him, but still extremely successful in his attempts to bring in money) ought to be able to write it up in such a way that it doesn't read like a schoolboy's work of fiction?
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