It's written like a prologue for an RPG. Main Quest, Side Quest, Crafters... that's dedication.

It is indeed. Not my bag at all but I've edited my original comment because a lot of the stuff further down, RPG references aside, is decently written, and there clearly is some compassion there. Severance terms are, as these things go, generous as well, and certainly a lot more than many companies would have done.

To prove it was not written by ChatGPT because no AI is that psychotic, not even SkyNet?

Not going to defend it, but apparently gaming vernacular is a company thing:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/04/how-shopify-bungled-its-la...

To be fair, it shows some character/culture/? which makes it stand apart from all of the other corporate releases out there. If it were good news it'd certainly hit different.

> Why do companies write like this? It's just awful.

You aren't the audience, that's why.

This. Not to say companies always get comms right, quite the opposite, but there's entire org structures filled with people dedicated to crafting these communications and the decisions about wording and audience are probably debated to death internally. My personal hell, but I have to acknowledge it's existence and purpose.

Who honestly is the audience? Algo traders (not joking here)?

It's a publicly traded company - mainly investors/analysts.

I don't know; every time one of these corpy announcements comes out, I check to see if I have Bingo:

https://1fish2.github.io/buzzword-bingo/corp-bingo.html

none yet. Jerry's working on adding weights to the buzzwords.

This looks worse out of context. The next sentence is pretty clear on what's going on.

There are a number of consequences to this, and I don’t want to bury the lede: after today Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics; this means some of you will leave Shopify today

> Shopify will be smaller by about 20%

So are they going to fire 20% of the C-suite and upper management as well? :)

No, they're the heroes going on the main quest!

C-Suite are appointed by the Board.

If the board doesn't think they are not doing their job, they will be fired.

How is it not difficult to understand for a self-appointed smart crowd?

Shopify is a bit weird in that the CEO Tobi has controlling shares in the company. Short of embezzlement or intentionally destructive behavior he's effectively unaccountable to anyone but his own stock portfolio.

Important to note, Tobi's controlling share was voted upon.

> they'd taken this text and asked GPT-4 to rewrite it in a compassionate tone they'd have got a better result

Today, we're making some substantial changes at Shopify, all with the aim of focusing more intently on our mission. We believe these adjustments will help us better serve our community and we're excited about the journey ahead.

I agree; there many odd writing choices. For example, this is a very confusing end to the first sentence:

> to pay unshared attention to our mission

...unshared attention?

This might be a bad direct translation from the German saying "ungeteilte Aufmerksamkeit" which can also be translated as "undivided attention"

As someone who was laid off by Shopify today, I can say this: the document was written well for the audience it was meant for.

It was genuinely Tobi. That's how he talks and writes. That's exactly the analogies he would use. No PR person anywhere would write this letter for him.

Also, he is wildly obsessed with LLMs. I would place a large money bet that he did have GPT help him edit this document.