Ten years after she first analyzed how San Francisco and Seattle differed in the language used in tech job posts, former Textio CEO Kieran Snyder is getting a fresh read on popular phrasing in the age of AI.
Snyder stepped down as head of the Seattle-based augmented writing startup in January 2024, and is now filling her time diving into data at Nerd Processor, a website/newsletter that explores varying aspects of AI, startups, and teams.
Snyder said that in recent months, in Seattle and during recent trips to San Francisco talking to tech execs about AI transformation, she’d noticed “some small but significant differences in how people talk about it.” The Nerd Processor in her couldn’t help but check the data by analyzing job posts.
In a new post on her site, Snyder explains how she looked at 1,000 AI-related job posts in the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, and Austin, Texas, analyzing roles for six classes of language. Those classes include “hype” — which covers vacuous words like “disruptive,” “innovative” and “cutting-edge” — and “responsibility” — which includes discussion of concepts like “ethics,” “responsible AI,” and “sustainability.”
Other classes included “enterprise,” “speed,” “transformation,” and “research.”
According to Snyder, “No one spikes higher on hype and speed than San Francisco. No one talks more about responsibility than Seattle. New York is enterprise central. And in every dimension, Austin is like San Francisco’s little sister.”
In 2015, in a post for Textio, Snyder first wrote about the prevalence of the word “awesome” in San Francisco job posts. Out of 53,523 jobs she looked at for that city, 1,662 — over 3% — included “awesome.” Out of 36,469 jobs she looked at for Seattle, 552, or 1.5%, of them included the word.
For its part, Seattle came out ahead on ethical language, Snyder wrote, with phrases like “values,” “honesty,” and “integrity” showing up more in Seattle than anywhere else.
“The language that you use in your job listing changes who will apply,” Snyder wrote at the time. “But the phrases that work best depend where you live. What works in New York doesn’t always work in San Francisco, even for jobs that are listed by the same company.”
Snyder’s takeaway this week? “Tech may ostensibly share an industry and a language, but culture is still deeply local.”
Read more at Snyder’s Nerd Processor website, and on LinkedIn where Snyder also shared her findings and has sparked a discussion about it all.
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