> Tony was an early fan of the magic/comedy team Penn and Teller. A friend and colleague attended a show and hung out afterward to ask the duo to sign a photo for his friend Tony. “He was on the team that did the red and green squiggles in Word.”
That’s some heavy duty corpo-brain to be introducing your friend with ”He was on the team that did X”.
If you know somebody from work, and that person built something most people on earth have seen and can identify, that seems a fine way of introducing that person.
I think everybody likes to be part of something big. I would definitely be proud of having worked on something so well-known.
This feature is from a different time, though. The people working at big tech these days clearly don't care as much about the output of the stuff they work on.
"Heavy-duty" calls for exaggerated impact and prestige.
"Tony pioneered the famous red-and-green squiggles of Microsoft Word, empowering millions of users with a spell-checking revolution."
Would it also be corpo brain to say ”He was the guy that landed on the moon”? That was Neil’s job, after all.