As a veteran of the aerospace industry, I’m very familiar with layoff notices. During the almost-decade I spent working for Boeing, I survived probably a dozen major reductions in force, and they all had two things in common: a plainly stated promise of an open and transparent process and a hilariously terrible lack of actual transparency.

Well, congratulations to Satya Nadella and the Microsoft HR and communications teams, because you’re stealing from the best—or maybe you all took the same course in corporate doubletalk and truthiness as part of your MBA programs. Microsoft this morning announced far and away the largest round of layoffs in its history , and Nadella’s e-mail drips with that familiar mixture of faux sympathy and non-information that is so typical of carefully managed corporate communication.

There’s a name for this kind of uninformative spin-talk: it’s known as "ducking and fucking."

Verbose obfuscation

The e-mail was almost certainly not written by Nadella alone. He might have provided the outline, and he might even have penned a few sentences, but the final draft sent to all employees that we get to see was likely cobbled together by a small army of HR specialists and corporate communication flacks using carefully chosen phrases that both reinforce Microsoft’s brand messaging and also limit Microsoft’s legal liability in case one or more of the to-be-fired employees decides to sue the company over their termination. This, sadly, is not a Microsoft-specific issue; it's standard all across not just the tech industry but essentially every large American company.

The first sentence of any story sets the tone—and look at the robo-sentence the Microsoft layoff notification e-mail starts off with:

Last week in my email to you I synthesized our strategic direction as a productivity and platform company.

Leading off with a sentence like this immediately creates distance between the reader and the speaker—the kind of distance necessary to dehumanize both parties so that the big blow to come hurts less. The corporate-speak continues with creaky euphemism after creaky euphemism, including using the phrase "workforce realignment" instead of simply saying "staff reduction" or "layoff." People and corporations both use euphemisms to cloak unpleasantness; however, it's much more honest and personal to simply speak the unadorned truth when dealing with people's livelihoods. "We’re going to realign our work force" might sound a lot better than "we’re firing 18,000 people," but the latter more properly informs employees that jobs are going to be lost and lives are going to be affected.

Presumption and a lack of empathy

Throughout the e-mail, anonymously collegiate phrases cloak unpleasantness in a thin layer of reasonableness and friendliness. Most disturbing is the schism brought about by using "we," "our," and "us"—all pronouns that imply ownership and agency while at the same time discussing how that ownership and agency is being stripped. The most head-spinning part of the note, though, is in its second paragraph. The e-mail includes the following two contradictory statements:

My promise to you is that we will go through this process in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible.

[T]he vast majority of employees whose jobs will be eliminated will be notified over the next six months.

So: we’re going to fire almost 20,000 people, but you might not know if you’re one of them for six months.

Having gone through this same type of exercise at Boeing, cloaked in the same sickening half-truth of "transparency," I find this utterly contemptible. Companies like Microsoft and Boeing that use this tactic are attempting to have their cake and eat it, too. "We’ll disclose everything we can about the layoffs up front," they say, "except for who’s actually being laid off." Transparency and employee privacy collide, and the end result is company-wide panic—everyone knows that thousands of layoffs are coming, but no one knows if they're one of the unlucky ones.

Behind the scenes, employees will be evaluated by managers and stack-ranked against each other based on some manner of HR-approved retention criteria. The lowest-scoring employees in the affected areas will be laid off (or, more likely, will receive a 60-day notice so that they’ll be driven to seek new jobs and quit before they’re laid off, saving the company money), and the actual retention criteria will be kept totally secret. To-be-fired employees will likely be told that they were picked not just based on job performance, but rather through a combination of factors. There will probably be a paper "appeal" process they can try, but it will go nowhere and do nothing, like the "door close" button on an elevator. Managers responsible for choosing employees to be laid off can blame an inscrutable "process" rather than their own judgment. Everyone passes the buck.

A torrent of meaningless messaging

Nadella’s e-mail stretches to almost 600 words in six paragraphs—too long by at least half considering the content. It’s bloated by stock corporate phrases totally devoid of meaning—Microsoft will "drive greater accountability" and will have "more productive, impactful teams." The company will "accelerate the flow of information." The e-mail even manages to drop in hyper-double-super buzzwords like "agile" and "lean." I heard and read the same words at Boeing, and the same phrases show up in every big company's layoff notices. They're the corporate version of the "Oh, it's not you, it's me" break-up response.

The last sentence takes the anonymous could-be-from-any-company cake, though: Microsoft will "focus on breakthrough innovation that expresses and enlivens…digital work and digital life experiences." If you parse that, it turns out that what the e-mail says is "we will try to sell more things by making good things that people like."

Well… yeah.

There's a second audience below the first, though. This message isn't just for employees—it's also for analysts and shareholders. E-mails like this serve double-duty in speaking to both Microsoft internal employees who might be affected by the layoffs and also to thousands of watchers on the Web and elsewhere, who comb through CEOs' statements looking for indicators of what their companies will do next—and how it might affect their earnings and quarterly guidance.

Many of the more obscure or stilted passages in the e-mail are present to "close the loop" with investors and analysts—the verbiage about "going forward" and "innovation" and many of the other odd word choices are all part of the elaborate public Kabuki that Nadella and other corporate officers must undergo to ensure that a stray unplanned word doesn't get misinterpreted, which might tank the stock price.

Courtesy and decency: Not in this e-mail

In the end, the e-mail’s key ironic sentence is this one:

Everyone can expect to be treated with the respect they deserve for their contributions to this company.

This ersatz expression of thanks could be cloned from every other layoff e-mail from every other company ever—it manages to be both patronizing and vaguely malevolent at the same time. What, precisely, does an employee "deserve" in this instance? There's an argument to be made that employees deserve to be spoken to rather than spoken at, but down that path lies the potential for liability. Like an unreadable, thick EULA, companies almost invariably choose to use the kind of messaging in this e-mail rather than normal-person talk.

Put another way, the offensive part here is not that Microsoft has to lay off 18,000 people—that kind of thing happens in business, and sometimes companies have to cut employees. That’s not the problem. The problem is that this is an inhumane, inhuman way to let those 18,000 people go.

This kind of insultingly indirect messaging plagues most large businesses—and it's horrible no matter where it shows up. Companies should "align their synergies" with the humans they're firing and do them the courtesy of not pissing on them and telling them it’s raining. There’s a decent way to let people go, and this ain’t it.