> the draw to elite signalling

I don't feel like that's why we all sometimes do this (though that might be an inside view and I might really be signalling along with everyone else.)

I feel like the internal thought-process that motivates this kinds of inside-baseball writing is twofold (depending on the stage of the project):

- early on: "the only people who could possibly care about something this new are people with the exact problem it solves, who stumbled onto it when jamming google full of enough keywords that there are zero other results; they already know what this does before reading; and they just want to confirm that it isn't fatally flawed. They're deploying this project in anger. (Of course they are; if they didn't desperately need it, they'd never rely on something so early in development!)"

- later on: "We're selling this to customers. We've picked a specific target market that has specific use-cases and needs, and we try to think about things the way they think about things 100% of the time, because talking to those people is what gets us money. We don't do any inbound marketing—we aren't trying to passively educate anyone outside our target market to get them interested. We're having enough trouble capturing the pre-qualified part of our funnel with in-person conversations. Converting people who haven't even fallen into the funnel yet? Who cares! They might get converted by accident if someone who already uses us takes the time to explain our product to them; but otherwise, the only time they'll hear about us is when we reach out to slowly warm them up for a million-dollar enterprise deal."

Or they don't care about what you (the engineer) thinks as long as your non-engineer manager is impressed and convinced your team needs it to grow.

When the manager asks the engineering team about their thoughts on the product, the marketers are banking on the engineers to say anything above an "ehh, it could work I guess..." so the manager makes the purchase.

I'm assuming you are a developer / engineer with what follows, but you are likely not a decision maker with purchasing authority in the type of company they are targeting with these posts. I also don't think it's in Google's interests to market this in clear engineering speak because they are after consulting dollars as well.

Being an developer myself however, yeah it's difficult to to get at the technical substance of what any of this means, as there is certainly lots of vaporware out there <cough>... <watson>... <cough>..

I hadn't considered the consulting angle. Thinking on it now, if I were in their position, I would definitely sculpt my phrasing to dazzle and amaze and convince the reader that Google's already got it figured out so just hand 'em the reins.

> Unfortunately not even Googlers are immune to the draw to elite signalling

Haha! Good one. Google practically invented elite signaling.