please... please stop. i really don't care for all this inclusive language crap and all it is is an attempt to shame people. if you get that easily offended by the way people talk you need to look deep at yourself and see what is the true reason for it. maybe you have deep down self trauma, anger issues or something else that needs to be sort out in therapy. btw... there is _nothing_ wrong in admitting that you have a problem and getting help for it.
what's even funnier is that this whole inclusive language shaming is something i only see in the tech world. perhaps this is because this industry is more ego centric than any other industry, i don't know, but i know a slew of people in the financial world who roll their eyes every time i have conversations about this.
I appreciate your opinion. And maybe there is some truth to your statement.
But in the professional context, none of that really matters IMO. If someone in your team is offended (and yes, it might seem stupid to you), then the dynamic of the team is thrown off. And ultimately, productivity suffers. That's how I'm thinking about it these days.
If you have a member in your team who's offended because of "guys" in "hey guys", then you need to question your hiring process, not the team dynamics.
I found that the fact these people get offended by such issues says more about themselves than the fact "guys" is sexist in some way.
i would rather offend one person than cater to one person. if everyone else is fun loving and easy going, you do the entire team an injustice by pandering to one toxic person and keeping them on the team... get rid of them. that is what a professional does... professionals value the team more than one person. one person can be replaced easily, a team cannot.
If you think inclusive language is an attempt to shame people, then YOU might have to look deep at yourself.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the point of inclusive language is so that people who identify as female or non-binary have less reason to be offended, and can generally feel more safe in an environment because less trigger words are used.
edit: I would also appreciate that the people downvoting me would comment as to why they think my post does not contribute to the discussion in a respectful manner?
Saying "guys" in no way affects someone's safety. It's potentially rude maybe if someone showed displeasure with the phrase yet you persist, but no threat of harm comes from it.
Well that's easy for you to say. The whole point of political correctness is not to assume that no one can get offended, but to avoid certain types of speech which have either been proven to be offensive or where society has agreed upon that they might be offensive in some circumstances.
The political correctness debate reminds me of the 'Covid etiquette' debate happening around the world now.
I guess it's possible for both sides to be at fault - one side should be sensitive to others' preferences and proceed carefully perhaps by wearing a mask when they know it isn't required, perhaps by using pronouns carefully even when they don't know which are preferred. The other side needs to recognize that their preferences are not universal. People tend to want to bend all others to their particular risk assessment, and bend everyone to their usage of English to differentiate human beings from each other. Do they have a point? Sure. Is it worth the relational damage to impose this viewpoint on everyone? Maybe? Maybe not.
Define “society”. And define “offensive”, in particular to whom is it offensive and how offended are they. And who makes these definitions and why should we trust them to do it properly, e.g. scientifically? Without these definitions and clarifications, your statement lacks persuasive power.
And PC can backfire. Making a point of not using a PC-speak word, when the PC word is clumsy or silly, makes the not-PC-speak word a very effective cultural code word to those who want to reinforce the very things the PC police are trying to change.
And arguing over words has almost zero possibility of any positive impact. There have been a few exceptions (say, for example, the N-word [no, no, don’t say the N-word]).
I will refer you to the wikipedia articles about political correctness and gender-neutral language as they probably do a much better job of defining the matter than I would.
I understand that you feel like "someone" making these definitions should have some kind of authority to be trustworthy. However, what happens is that someone makes a claim and then a large portion of society agrees. This is what gives them authority. And that is just how change is done usually in the democratic process. For example, at some point someone decided that women should vote and large portion of society agreed. And now, a few years later, we live in a society were women voters are the most normal thing you can think of.
> And arguing over words has almost zero possibility of any positive impact.
You just say that but you don't cite any scientific sources?
I agree with you whole-heartedly. I tend to find those who feel the need to "fight against this" are the ones who are not on the receiving end.
Sure, there are plenty of radicalized people who take this as an opportunity to shame, but I do not see the harm or difficulty in changing "guys" to "folks" or "team" if it makes someone feel more inclusive.
I've hired and work with a number of trans and marginalized people, it was extremely simple for me to start saying "hey folks" without the need to throw a tantrum over it.
> If you think inclusive language is an attempt to shame people
It's not an attempt - it's used that way all the time, and the demonized are generally the ones who haven't had the privilege of attending college.
It's a great way to other-ize all the "uneducated" among us. The ones who don't live a comfortable sophisticated city existence with a service-sector job.
someone explain to why if this was a commercial product for all these years and the _numerous_ (my god that list is impressive) clients that are using it, they need $100K to make it open source? Last I heard github is free. am i missing things?
> someone explain to why if this was a commercial product for all these years and the _numerous_ (my god that list is impressive) clients that are using it, they need $100K to make it open source? Last I heard github is free. am i missing things?
Well, it is the author's source of income. Presumably, those customers will stop paying him if the code is released under a permissive license like MIT. I'm not certain what the financial impact would be of a GPL release.
i mean, as long as they include the license, they don't have to give any credit whatsoever.
remember this, companies do things according to their legal department and i'm almost certain that their legal department said flat out that if they credit the author they could set themselves up for a lawsuit down the line. so they followed the license requirements to the book.
if the author is pissed about a big company using his project and them not giving him a props, he should have used a license that requires an attribution of the original author.
everyone has to get out of the house and making actual friends in life. co-workers aren't friends, bosses aren't friends, clients aren't friends, work relationships aren't friends. we all need human interaction... join a club, a gym, yoga, bike club, whatever, just interact with people that doesn't involve talking about work. and sitting home and playing video games while good, isn't getting outside.
It really saddens me whenever I see this (apparently common) sentiment on HN. Through every job I've had, I've met some of my very best life-long friends. My wedding party is over half people that I met at work. A couple of my former bosses are people I see every couple of months (pre-covid) and are invited to my wedding. Even one of my past clients is someone that I keep in touch with regularly (for nothing related to work).
Not everyone at work is going to become your best friend, but if you're automatically assuming that anyone you meet through your job is completely "off limits" for friendship, you're really hurting yourself. I can't imagine working at a place like that.
HN takes it a bit too far, but there is some wisdom in maintaining a boundary between work and personal stuff. like suppose you are struggling to recover from alcoholism. you might want to confide in your close friends. you might not want to share this with friends from work. you almost certainly should not share this with your boss, even if you consider them a friend.
I treat work friends as a sort of "probationary friend". I'm happy to meet up and do stuff outside of work, but I'm a bit more guarded than I would be with someone I don't work with. I might hesitate to introduce them to some of my more "out there" friends (for whatever reason I seem to attract a lot of very weird people). once we no longer work together, they can just be a normal friend.
>like suppose you are struggling to recover from alcoholism. you might want to confide in your close friends. you might not want to share this with friends from work. you almost certainly should not share this with your boss, even if you consider them a friend.
I would absolutely share this with my "work friends" and even my current boss. When one of my previous bosses shared with me that he was having trouble at home with his spouse, it wasn't like he suddenly became a bad boss. If anything, it helped our work because it gave me the opportunity to be more understanding when he seemed more worn out or needed to leave early for the day to go spend time with his family. If he had told me he was struggling with drinking, then I would know that maybe we should go play sports rather than to our weekly happy hour. We build each other up, both inside and outside of work, because that's what friends do, and it has the nice side effect of making our professional careers better, too.
Perhaps I just have had a lucky stream of working on unicorn teams, but I would hate to work at a company where I couldn't share details of my life with the people that I spend 40-60+ hours a week with. Obviously every workplace and relationship is unique and you aren't going to share everything with everybody (I'd share the above details with my current boss but by no means with all of my bosses), but I don't understand this attitude that you shouldn't share anything with anyone that happens to have a common employer.
To me, work is just another facet of our relationship alongside the many other facets, no different than if we had met through volunteering or went to the same gym. I don't share everything with every coworker, just like I don't share everything with every other person that visits my gym. But I also don't shy away from sharing things with someone just because they are my coworker, just like I wouldn't shy away from sharing things with someone just because they also use the same weight set that I do.
I'm not saying you shouldn't share anything with anyone, but there are some things where the upside of sharing isn't worth the potential downside. when dealing with someone who is responsible for evaluating your job performance, it's unwise to volunteer reasons for them to doubt that. it's hard to judge productivity, especially for engineers. if you go through a rough patch but say nothing, people might never notice that you were less productive for a month or two. if you tell your boss you're having an issue with alcohol/drugs, they might perceive a drop in productivity that didn't even exist! unless your issue is so severe that it can't possibly escape notice, and/or you have a good plan to fix it very soon, there's just no reason to share this kind of stuff.
also, I would say work is quite a bit different than a gym. it's a lot easier to find a new gym than a new job, and it's much less disruptive to your life if you have to do so.
> when dealing with someone who is responsible for evaluating your job performance, it's unwise to volunteer reasons for them to doubt that. it's hard to judge productivity, especially for engineers. if you go through a rough patch but say nothing, people might never notice that you were less productive for a month or two. if you tell your boss you're having an issue with alcohol/drugs, they might perceive a drop in productivity that didn't even exist!
My boss and I have a good enough relationship at work where I'm 1000% confident this wouldn't happen, and if said boss did "perceive" some kind of drop in productivity, their response would be to help me with that rather than turn it into a negative. Indeed, during COVID when I expressed to my boss that I was having a tough time, his immediate response was to ask how he could help and to offer me a couple days off to recharge.
And the reason we have that relationship is specifically because we treat each other as friends that also happen to have a working relationship, rather than letting the work relationship dominate all else.
Not everyone will have that kind of relationship with their boss, but I believe it is something everyone should aspire to rather than immediately rejecting it as even a possibility.
there is always the exception to the rule and i'm glad that your workplace is an environment you can share stuff like that. however, for most of us, we would get fired or condemned if we spoke freely like that.
It makes me even sadder when people's social circles and even their entire social network align strictly with work.
I've met plenty of good friends at work, but I'm very happy my social network includes mostly people doing different things with their life. It means there is much more breadth of perspective, and you realize very easily that work isn't everything.
It sounds like you also might not have had much experience in the current "everyone is friends!" startup office culture. There's a pretty strong pressure to socialize all of the time, during lunch and after hours, with everyone. The people get laid off and they are erased from that social circle, typically people won't even communicate with them anymore. It's repulsive.
I think all of what you are describing is a symptom of letting the "co-worker" facet of a relationship dominate all other facets. In other comments I've been using the term "work friends", but I use that term loosely because the reality is that they are first and foremost "friends", it just so happens that our friendship was first kindled through work.
For me, being co-workers is just one small facet of our friendship. We do talk about work sometimes, just like sometimes we talk about sports teams we have in common or other hobbies. But we don't only talk about work. I don't feel that my perspective is limited at all because my co-workers have introduced me to their spouses, who might be in totally different industries, or to new hobbies such as surfing or soccer, or brought me along on trips to new places or encouraged me to volunteer. All of these things have expanded my perspective greatly, and if you trace them back far enough, all of them are originating from my co-workers.
In your startup example, I have been on teams where this culture was the case, and certainly with some people I have completely lost touch after they/I left the team. But for others, even though we worked together work was not the dominating reason that we were friends. When I left the team we lost that one facet of our relationship, but our friendship still survives because we have many other facets that facilitate it.
So I think the problem isn't when someone's social circle aligns strictly with work. I think that's fine. I think the problem you are describing is when it turns into a "work-dominant social circle" rather than "a social circle that just happens to have the same employer in common".
Furthermore, I think the "anti work friend" attitude is counterproductive to this. People are saying "don't spend your time building friendships with co-workers because if you leave work you will lose your friend". But if you carry this attitude and don't build a friendship that is strong outside of work, then of course your perspective is going to be limited to work, and of course you will lose your friendship with that person once your work ends. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.
I think it's important to make the distinction that while you can be friends with your colleagues it's very important to also have friends outside of work. Having friends from work is great, but if you only have friends from work then you have nothing outside of work which isn't healthy (for example, if things start going poorly at work then it can feel like you are trapped).
I disagree. At any of my previous jobs when work started going poorly, my friendships were, if anything, a boon to me because I had a support system that immediately understood my work situation and challenges. They were immediately in a position to help because of their close proximity both to me and the challenges at work I was facing. After leaving one job, the relationships with my "work friends" were invaluable to me in helping me find another job since they were in the same field and had connections I could leverage.
Outside of work, my "work friends" and I go out to eat, go play sports together, hang out at each other's houses, etc. We talk about work sometimes because it's obviously a common interest, but our friendship doesn't revolve around it, and if someone severs their relationship with the employer that we have in common, it does not mean our friendship also severs.
I would look at this from a different angle. Work friends have extreme pressure to be around you. They get paid to be around and collaborate with you. You can't easily determine the extent of a relationship standing on its own merit if someone is literally being paid to collaborate with you. With that said some of my best friends came from former jobs as well, but if we're talking about emotionally vulnerable people they especially need relationships outside of work. Imagine all of your relationships being tied to work and inevitably you get fired (as most people will experience in their life). That would be devastating without support outside of work. What if it turns out your friendships only lasted because of the financial incentives to be around each other and common in-office conversations?
tl;dr; relationships outside of work are important and that's not sad to me because it doesn't prevent anyone from also having friends inside of work.
I consider my coworkers to be my friends and it's one of the reasons I like working at my current company.
I agree that having lots of different outlets for connection is great, and I also acknowledge that there are a variety of ways in which work can complicate friendships. But, if I'm going to spend 40+ hours per week on work, I'd like to do it alongside people I genuinely like and care about.
i did that for almost 20 years where i previously worked. i thought of my co-workers as family and friends and it got me no where and caused lots of stress (its hard to say no to someone when they are friends). i don't know, maybe it had more todo with co-dependency than anything else.
now i've been working at a place for almost 3 years and i'm not friends with a single person here. i don't let these people know my business and have a complete separation of personal and work relationship. i honestly have less stress cause i can say no without giving a crap if my co-worker gets mad at me or doesn't want to talk to me (which i prefer). i do my job and go home to be with my friends and family.
also, if another opportunity comes my way, i have no problem giving my 2 weeks notice and packing my bags. life is a lot better now.
I have friends in my running club, cycling friends, Peloton (half virtual, half local) friends, friends from cities I used to live in, friends who have moved away.
two words... baby f*cking yoda. seriously, i have tons of friends who hate star wars but love baby yoda and they watch it for the cuteness.
if there is one thing that disney knows how to do is to create a story around a product, that product being baby yoda. netflix isn't even in the same universe as disney when it comes to content creation.
"Please be aware there is no guarantee that the samples would be bug-free. Remember to act with caution and make sure to avoid targeting important files. Regardless, we strongly encourage you to have a valid backup of your critical data."
this is a great idea... tell everyone that its a simulation while really being ransonware :)
The best tutorials I've seen for both Flexbox and Grid are from Kyle at Webdev Simplified. Seriously check out this dude's channel. He explains everything perfectly.
sorry to say, but most of the people that i know that don't like working from home are micromanagers (who have to know what every employee is doing at every second of the day), people who like to gossip (usually the people that hang around the water cooler all day) or warm bodies (co-workers who do nothing all day anyway but want to be at work so they can act like they do something)
people who are self-motivated or like to GSD, don't want the distractions that come along with an office or waste their time commuting.
I work in management consulting. Between fifty and eighty percents of my work each week is having meetings with my customers to figure out exactly what their problems are and work on solving them. You lose so much by being remote: body language, less formal moments like coffee breaks and lunch. It makes everything more complicated.
i do the same thing over the phone and through google meet. i don't ever have to go to see a client face to face. some clients i have are even across the country and i have never personally met them.
point being is that if you can navigate your clients through the correct questions, cut down on the small talk and have focused, guided meetings, there is no reason to have to meet someone face to face.
