Thread by @jlericson

Something has been gnawing at me all week and I can finally put it into the form of a question today: Why wasn't there a communications plan for when Shog and Robert were let go? Two beloved employees (including employee #5) leaving the company and nothing to explain it?

Maybe there was a communications plan that I was not aware of, but it seems to me an answer to a user question on Meta and especially this answer is rather anemic.

meta.stackexchange.com/a/342045/1438

By the way, Juan has been treated rather unfairly since he stepped into his current position. He's a good person in a bad circumstance. (See below.)

It occurs to me that the company controlled the timing of the action, but didn't bother to control the narrative. Maybe there are forces I don't know about that require people in the company to act with more haste than is wise. Maybe.

Then it occured to me that the communications plan for my departure, which leadership knew about for more than two weeks, was also surprisingly ill-prepared. Although other people were supposed to be involved, it was basically Juan and I working without direction from outside.

I wrote my own farewell post, Juan made a couple of small suggestions and that was it. Other than the two of us, I don't know if anyone thought much about how to position this with the community. It was a nice change of pace, actually.

I suspect part of the reason is that ever since the 2017 layoffs, the company has solidified its policy not to discuss departures publicly. For many reasons, that's a good policy in general, so I'm not saying Stack Overflow ought to air dirty laundry.

meta.stackexchange.com/a/303006/1438

I also suspect our departure was not considered particularly momentous to people within the company who are tasked with communication. It was not unusual for a tweet to be flagged and for the people triaging such things to point to the small number of followers and ignore.

Meta users and moderators will obviously notice, but they make up a tiny percentage of all Stack Overflow users. I think the calculation was made that most everyone else on the site wouldn't particularly care. And that logic, I think, sound.

And then I got to thinking how communications plans were created within the company. Lately the focus has been on blockbuster blog posts, social media and podcasts. These are high impact (by the numbers) communications.

In other words, mass communication. I'm not in marketing, but that makes quite a bit of sense. Focus on messages and mediums that reach a lot of people.

Meanwhile, everything I've learned about community management tells me the important communication focuses on important relationships. I'm looking for leaders within the community to connect with so that when I need to communicate something, I know who should hear it.

That sort of communication is a lot more work. I frequently need to tell several small groups of people similar, but not quite the same, messages. It's a pain, but I want to honor our relationship and personalize what I have to say.

Anyway, I'm no closer to an answer to my question. If you've read this far, I urge you to consider the fundamental attribution error. The person you are frustrated with is probably motivated by their bad situation rather than bad character.

medium.com/accelerated-in…