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Racist Computer Engineering Words and the Fight over Offensive Terms
- JoeyBananas 6y agoThis article is a new low for the New York Times. Only a journalist could take something as uninteresting as the half-baked liberal crusade against benign computer jargon and write an article as politically charged as this one. You can tell they're desperately trying to squeeze the last drops of attention out of this mundane non-story. It's as if journalism school graduates are only taught how to write the genre of "left-leaning social justice outrage," and they're absolutely incapable of writing anything else.
- hw-guy 6y agoA clue for the NYT: none of these words have ever been used by engineers with reference to anyone's race, so it's absurd to call the terms "racist." The terms "master" and "slave," for example, refer to machines, which don't have any feelings to hurt. Slavery is an unfortunate (but nearly extinct) practice of an earlier period of human development, and people of all races have been masters AND slaves.
- ipsocannibal 6y agoFrom what I understand at least one FAANG company has an entire team writing software to change these terms in their entire document and code base. These companies are now willing to sink money and engineering talent to implement right speech campaigns. Unfortunately, these campaigns are usually headed by non-tech folk, re HR, marketing, DI, which don't use these terms on the first place and don't take kindly to pointing out that the project and replacement vocabulary are based in a racist view US cultural superiority and narrow interpretations of US history.