They let the ad guys write grants and then wonder why they donât end up getting them
Comment on elucidating đ¤đź
leisesprecher@feddit.org â¨1⊠â¨week⊠agoMost âprofessionalâ writing is just a bunch of phrases interspersed with a few chunks of information.
Iâm involved with bidding and grant proposal stuff for software and itâs 90% empty words. I draw two diagrams and a page of text, sales deletes 60% of the text, misinterprets the rest and then puffs it up to 30 pages.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world â¨6⊠â¨days⊠ago
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net â¨1⊠â¨week⊠ago
It doesnât have to be like that. Sure, context is important, but parroting phrases or other crap that the client has in the RFP is bullshit. They donât want you blowing smoke up their ass, they want a technically sound product that addresses the exact issues they asked you to address. They also want you to show them how youâre going to get there, and achieve the objectives they set out.
I realize youâre on the tech side; Iâm just venting my frustrations with the corporate/PM spheres.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world â¨6⊠â¨days⊠ago
I thankfully donât have to deal with RFPs anymore, but when I did, Iâd either go line-by-line or ignore the prospectâs text entirely. There is an in-between, but itâs wishy-washy crowd-pleasing nonsense and even the people entrenched in those bureaucracies see straight through it
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net â¨6⊠â¨days⊠ago
That, and parroting makes it sound like you donât know what they want, or that youâre stupid, and the best that you could come up with is their own text with slight variation
leisesprecher@feddit.org â¨6⊠â¨days⊠ago
Well, actually youâre kind of wrong, at least in some contexts.
So Iâm not sure, how that works in other countries, but here in Germany, a large bid for some public contact has to parrot the requirements. The process includes a bloke essentially ticking all of the boxes in their request, and if you say (just for example) âwe will deploy that in our k8s clusterâ but they require a cloud ready solution, the bloke will not tick the box. Yes, thatâs incredibly stupid.
Apart from that, who reads the bid texts? Not technical people, but bean counters and MBAs. The technical people on the other side are only asked for comment, they have no say.
I wish you would be right, but in a world full of people desperately trying to justify their existence, fluff is essential.
superkret@feddit.org â¨6⊠â¨days⊠ago
I work in IT, and by now, every single 3-letter-abbreviation makes my eyelid twitch.
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net â¨6⊠â¨days⊠ago
My industry is three-letter-acronym (TLA) heavy