[mdb31]

Ah, yes, the same kind of guide that brought us "how to professionally respond to outages"... With classics like "We recognize the incident", "a small subset of customers", "degraded performance" and "the next update (which will be the exact same meaningless drivel as the current 'update') will be in 60 minutes". Don't we just love those? So let's add more of that to the shared vocabulary of IT professionals!

Or... let's just not? In writing, always avoid clichés. Whether it's "do the needful", "by utilizing" or "we did not live up to our customer's expectations", there is one simple rule: if you've seen the exact same sentence or expression before in the exact same context in the last week or so, you should probably avoid it.

And if that makes you unsure what exactly to say, just type what you mean, then get an editor before posting it to your blog or incident report. And if it's time-sensitive, then just ask for forgiveness later, not permission upfront (which is also a cliché but reworded, see what I did there?)

[omginternets]

I’m so glad I work in a place that emphasizes benevolent directness.

In fact, I’m so far removed from this kind of lingo that I have to ask: is this website an accurate depiction of how people communicate in other organizations? Or is this a caricature?

[mdb31]

Nope, not a caricature. Read, for example https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/post-incident-review-a...

This is held up as a great example of transparent communication. For me, this is true, but only for the meaning of 'transparent' which equates to 'you can see right through it, to the extent there is effectively nothing there'.

But as per the article this comment thread is about, this kind of response apparently the 'professional' state-of-the-art.

Yes, I despair too...

[omginternets]

I think I was unclear. I always assumed (perhaps foolishly) that this kind of communication was the result of some sort of PR committee, and was mostly found in outward-facing communications. Are you saying that colleagues interact this was amongst themselves too? Because _that_ would indeed be despairing.

[mdb31]

Nope, people communicate like that internally as well, because "that's what's professional"

In some cases, you can fix this by asking the sender to be, like, normal. This works half the time, the other half involves referrals to HR...

[omginternets]

> In some cases, you can fix this by asking the sender to be, like, normal.

I was about to be tongue-in-cheek and ask why the “professional” way of asking that question might be.

… then I saw the very next sentence and chuckled aloud.

What a nightmare :/