Spin in subtext: a worked example
I seem to have gotten some implicit knowledge from writing about “spinning” things, so that the connotations imply the desired conclusion. Here’s a sample essay with the spin made explicit. The subject is Google, and the goal is to encourage Google to give more latitude, more management responsibility, and higher salaries to their top employees. The essay text appears in the bordered blocks; the running commentary is the “subtext”.
Google, like a lot of tech companies, wants to hire very smart, hard-working, driven employees — people like the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Subtext: I start off by invoking the names of the founders, Larry and Sergey, so that that’s the image people will have in their heads when they read. If you visualize “generic Google employee”, then the implicit connotation is that this is a middle-class guy who should have a typical middle-class life; if you visualize “Larry and Sergey”, the connotation is that, well, these are supergeniuses who obviously deserve billions, so the reader is more likely to agree with me.
To attract top people, Google famously provides great perks like free food, shuttles to work, and flex time. This approach works decently well.
Subtext: Here, I show that Google is already trying to achieve the goal I’m encouraging them to go after (get top people), just with different techniques. This is an important general principle — if your sales pitch is “you should do X instead of Y”, the implicit worry is that you might have some selfish motivation for wanting me to do X. If you want me to switch to Foo Printers instead of Bar Printers, you might be honest, or you might just be a salesman for Foo. But if your pitch is “You’re awesome for doing X, and here’s how I think you could do it better”, then you’re agreeing and cooperating instead of disagreeing — you’re just a friend who’s trying to help them out.
But I argue that a Google job offer lacks a key element — the chance for the ambitious to realize their ambitions — and this drives away the very people Google wants to get.
Subtext: “The chance for the ambitious to realize their ambitions” is a very classic positive spin on the sort of thing I’m arguing for. It brings to mind all sorts of good connotations, like Horatio Alger, rags to riches, movies where the protagonist makes it big, the American Dream, yadda yadda yadda.
Look at Harvard, arguably the top school for ambitious young people. A lot of Harvard’s graduates go to work for Google.
Subtext: More text of the “well, you’re doing great, but we think you might be able to do better” variety.
Yet, most don’t — X% of Harvard students go to work in finance, consulting, and similar fields, while only Y% are even computer science majors. Why is that? Is a Google job offer less appealing?
Subtext: Here, I try to answer the obvious alternative (non-desired) response in advance. Generally, if a lot of effort is being spent on doing B in response to problem A, any mention of A will bring B to mind, at least subconsciously if not consciously. For example, if one talks about the low quality of public education in the US, the default response is “spend more money!” or “hire more teachers!”, since those are what everyone’s been trained to expect. At Google, the canonical solution to “hire good people” is “make the job really cushy”; this has to be answered before I can present my own solution.
Not really. Consider two entry-level job offers, one from Google and one from Goldman Sachs. Both are at top companies. Goldman pays somewhat more, but also expects you to work longer hours. Goldman is more prestigious, but Google’s perks are better. It’s mostly a wash, probably coming down to individual preferences. So why is the Goldman offer much more popular?
The answer is probably that, while both fields might have the same average pay (adjusted for hours worked), the variance is a lot higher in finance. You might get laid off tomorrow when the firm goes bust — or, you might make millions. It’s high-risk, high-reward. And high rewards attract the ambitious.
But what if it’s just about individual taste? What if Goldman workers just don’t like programming, and Googlers just wouldn’t like finance? That might be somewhat true for Goldman, but there’s a Goldman-like competitor right in Google’s backyard: the startup and venture capital industry. Like finance, starting a company is high-risk, high-reward. And Google is willing to pay millions for these companies, showing that (a) it wants the people who start them badly, badly enough to pay through the nose, and (b) it’s not getting them.
What can Google do to get them? I think it’s simple enough — offer a high-risk, high-reward option to Google employees. Currently, a job at Google is quite safe; there have never been layoffs in engineering, and it’s very unlikely Google will go bust. But there’s also virtually no upside. Salary figures are confidential, but do the best programmers at Google make twice as much as the average? Probably not. Certainly not millions.
However, instead of assigning everyone to a team, Google could offer people the option of starting their own teams. People could come up with ideas for products, and, after a quick reasonableness review by the Director of Internal Startups, just start building them. If they aren’t practical or can’t get built, they get abandoned, and life goes on as normal. If, however, they launch and become popular, the maker starts getting paid a million or two a year, and gets the option (if they want) to go into a management position. These are, roughly, the rewards that Google already gives to outsiders who write successful applications. Why not offer them to Googlers too?
Does Google do this already? I don’t really know, and couldn’t say if I did. But I suspect not. Almost none of Google’s big-name managers got their positions after starting such a project. Instead, they went into management by virtue of being old, famous, early employees, or having their companies acquired.
Would it be worth it to spend that much? I think it would. Google already spends more on startup acquisitions, and there are a number of advantages to doing it in-house — you don’t have to integrate technologies and teams, you get to take advantage of pre-existing Google infrastructure, you can verify in advance that products are something Google could use. And Google, sitting on a huge pile of cash, can afford it if anyone can.