Comment by CBLT
1 day ago
Article aside, I generally always use the "we" pronoun at work when writing prose. Saying "I" feels too adversarial when talking about negative effects, or too self-aggrandizing when talking about positive effects. For example: "We discovered a bug shipped at the end of the merge window, so we will restart validation with the rollback applied." I think in school they say the business-safe way to write is instead with the passive voice but I just can't do it.
"We had a bug in our code, I fixed it"
I've seen this so many times where the same individual introduced and fixed the bug, it is now funny.
This is corporate team level equivalent of "Socializing losses and privatizing profits".
I am reminded of the speech analysis of the Bush administration talks before the Iraq war. Colin Powell and others knew the intelligence was bad, so predominately shifted to passive voice so as to diffuse blame. “I” am not starting Iraq has WMDs, but there is credible intelligence on which we must act.