Tuesday, May 23,2006
High School 2.0
This is old news, but I finally decided to stop holding my tongue after seeing all the feathers flying.
Just over a week ago, the TechCrunch website was kidnapped and is currently being held hostage by leprechauns. Oh, wait, the design was intentional.
News of the redesign quickly spread through the blogosphere and suddenly, everyone had an opinion. Mike Rundle of BusinessLogs doesn’t like the redesign. Neither do I, but it really doesn’t matter. N@W tries to explain why it doesn’t matter what people like Mike or myself think of the redesign, but it tapers off into some unorganized diatribe aimed at Mike Rundle.
I’ll sum up what N@W said in one sentence: As long as the website works and meets the requirements of the target audience, it doesn’t really matter what designers or other people who aren’tthe target audience think.
Agreed. To a degree, but I’ll leave that for another day.
Since I have the luxury of not knowing Michael Arrington or Rachel Cunliffe personally, the following advice will be as an unbiased third party.
Watching this entire scenario unfold is like watching a presidential election. You’re either on the far left — love Rachel and think Michael Arrington’s an ass, or on the far right — love Michael and think Rachel’s a flake. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground, except for Darren trying to be impartial.
Looking over the entire situation again, both Michael and Rachel behaved like asses (plural).
Michael, you were wrong for posting the screen shot from another designer and proclaiming to the world that you thought it was cool and that you wanted to steal bits from it. Sure, you didn’t slam Rachel’s work on the redesign and yes, it’s true that you even praised her work in previous entries, but you implied that you were not 100% satisfied with the quality of Rachel’s work with that single entry. What you should have done is take the bits you liked to Rachel and discussed the changes you’d like to make privately with her. After that, feel free to roll out those changes and offer your eternal debt of gratitude to the leech who sent the design to you. Instead, you post a shill of an explanation?
Rachel, you may have had every right to quit the TechCrunch project, but you come off looking flaky, unprofessional and hypersensitive. You may be a great designer, but if you can’t handle yourself professionally and take the high road, people will not want to work with you. Firing a client should be done with finesse, and not a blog entry penned in the heat of the moment. Couldn’t you at least wait 24 hours for Michael to actually read the e-mail and respond?
I’ll finish up by stating that I don’t know the whole story. No one does except Michael and Rachel. All I have to go by are the speculations floating around online and the comments made by both Michael and Rachel on their blogs.
When, exactly, did the blogosphere revert back to grade school?
Technorati Tags: techcrunch, techcrunch redesign, techcrunch resignation, rachel cunliffe, michael arrington, crunchnotes
May 23rd, 2006 at 4:50 pm
I remember grade school too. People gossiping about this, that and the next thing and end up with a flawed opinion because they haven’t taken the time to learn all the facts.
I would have thought that posting about this more than a week after it happened that you would have had more than ample time to read everything that has been said. Obviously not. I’m not sure how many times it has been said but Rachel didn’t fire her client via her blog. After she had resigned from her position she made a brief statement that she had just resigned - a simple press release to state something that had ‘already happened’.
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:17 pm
Thanks Regan for stopping by and commenting, but what is obvious is that you didn’t carefully read the blog entry above.
In case it wasn’t fully clear by that statement, yes, I read that Rachel sent Michael a resignation e-mail. But, by blogging about her resignation without allowing Michael ample time to respond (or even see it) was unprofessional no matter how you spin it.
You’re her husband, I understand your need to defend her, but sometimes I believe your love blurs your better judgement.
May 25th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
I’m sorry, I fail to see how announcing that you’ve resigned is unprofessional. Why does the other party need the opportunity to respond? It was a resignation, not a “I’m thinking about resigning and I’d like to know what your thoughts are on the matter”.
May 25th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
Announcing that you’ve resigned isn’t unprofessional. How Rachel conducted it was.
Or, does business etiquette become a moot point when we’re on the internet?
May 26th, 2006 at 1:40 am
This entire situation stemed from poor business etiquette. Rachel provided two weeks notice as per their contractual agreement and then announced that she had resigned on her blog.
I find it somewhat amusing that Rachel’s resignation was viewed as hypersensitive. I would make the same comparison to anyone who cried foul at not being able to make the first public statement.
So Michael found out from reading the trackback from another blog. Big deal. It wasn’t Rachel’s fault that he read that before the actual message. All this fuss is just tears over spilt milk to me.
May 26th, 2006 at 11:52 am
Let’s get something straight, I don’t view Rachel’s resignation as hypersensitive, I view it as unprofessional.
Rachel posted nothing about giving “two weeks notice” when she announced the resignation and your mention of it now is the first time I’m hearing of it out of the hundreds of comments left between you and others on various blogs.
Had she given proper two weeks’ notice, a resignation e-mail would have been unnecessary and redundant. (Or are you saying that Mike didn’t check his e-mail for two weeks?)
All the companies I’ve worked for normally have a process whereby an employee tenders his two weeks’ notice, the boss acknowledges it, and on the final day we bid him adieu. No second resignation letter necessary.
Instead, she posts a curt notice on her blog linking to a post he published showcasing another designer’s mock up less than 24 hours after sending Mike an e-mail. Quite frankly, she reminded me of a teenager storming out of her job at McDonald’s during the lunch rush because her boss pissed her off. Hardly proper business etiquette.
How difficult would it have been to simply write:
or, even, when she gave her two weeks notice and had it acknowledged by Mike:
and leave it at that? Not waiting for any amount of time to pass from e-mail to blog post and linking to the post she did certainly showed that Rachel was not in the best of moods.
I stand by my statements. Both Michael and Rachel behaved unprofessionally in this situation and much of this could have been avoided if one of the two parties had just taken the high road. Period.
Hindsight is 20/20 — take the advice you’re given, learn from it, and move on.