7 ms·
The only effect of a Code of Conduct I have ever personally witnessed was that people were being bullied for greeting others. The greeting they used was "hey gu
by theepauk 3y ago
The only effect of a Code of Conduct I have ever personally witnessed was that people were being bullied for greeting others. The greeting they used was "hey guys", and instead of recognizing that language is fluid and different to different people they tried to impose their linguistic views on others. The people who encouraged this behavior were people on the Code of Conduct committee and at the top of the project's hierarchy, and to this day nobody has apologized for this behavior, but the behavior was silently dropped.
- Ekaros 3y agoI wait for the day soon to come when AIs will "actively" participate in. And we have to find a term that encompasses both humans and AIs. And anyone not using the currently correct one will have their lives destroyed. Or if someone finds recording from using previously correct one and does the same.
- asylteltine 3y ago[dead]
- bragr 3y agoI'm from a part of the US where "guys" is used as a gender neutral collective noun. My mom and grandma would call out "guys, dinner is ready!" to the whole family to call us to the table for example. So it's definitely whiplash inducing for the same group of people preaching inclusion and tolerance, and how we need to accept regional and racial dialects in the workplace, to then turn around and implement slackbots that nag and shame me for my regional speech patterns.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoI'll buy this when I hear a straight man talk about the guys he's dated. A thing that I have still never once observed.
- nkuttler 3y agoHere's a shocking concept: language has context.
- woodruffw 3y agoThe person you’re responding to is providing an example of context-sensitivity.
- dingnuts 3y agoThe person he's responding to is choosing to be obtuse in order to police other peoples' language based on rules derived by their political ideology, and does not care about context I wish you guys could understand that
- woodruffw 3y ago"Context for me but not for thee" is not a principled argument. The rest of the comment is speculative: you don't know anything about their politics, or have any reason to believe they're being obtuse.
- GunnarSturla 3y agoI don't think this example counters the gender neutrality of "guys". Have you ever observed a straight man talk about the people he's dated?
- giraffe_lady 3y agoYes.
- Volundr 3y agoIt's an interesting bit of context. I also grew up with guys as a generic plural, but it's not really generic, rather it's a mixed group plural. It would feel just as natural to say "the people I date", as "the women I date", but never "the guys I date. Even that's a weak rule though. For example if a girls soccer team performed really well you might hear someone say "those guys really gave it their all today" (though I'd say this usage is mostly dead, I don't think I've heard it this way in a long time), but never "THE guys really gave it their all today". I'm sure some linguists have studied this and have a term for this kind of thing.
- that_guy_iain 3y agoWhen non-native English speakers are taught English, they are taught that "Hey guys" is gender neutral. So you'll meet lots of non-native English speakers who will be completely shocked at that it's not. I have so much fun joking with some of my women friends that they're sexist because they're using "guys" instead of "folks". To me, it's one of those things where someone is always going to be awkward and say "that doesn't include me". They may jokingly say something but some take it as a personal insult and just assume the other person is being sexist. While I always use "folks" just to avoid the hassle, personally I wouldn't be too bothered if the people who take "Hey guys" as a sexist insult don't talk to me.
- nkuttler 3y agoThe fact that it was white people bullying people from all over the planet only made it worse.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoI've noticed that white people as a group regularly get abuse in anti-woke HN threads. Seems bizarre to me. I guess it is some kind of "gotcha", intended to undermine "woke" people but it seems a bit self-defeating. "White people are so racist they're even racist when they're trying to be non-racist" seems more woke than anti-woke to me, but that doesn't seem to be the intention.
- woooooo 3y agoIt's specifically the phenomenon of rich 1-percenters trying to cancel each other that's grating. Is there injustice in the world? Clearly. Are these people insufferable? Also very much yes. In the tech context specifically, we are very international in a way that doesn't map to US culture wars, which makes the white woke people look even more out of touch with reality.
- klipt 3y agoAnd of course, complaints about white people are one of the things that wouldn't be punished under these code of conducts despite the "no racism" clause, because they're usually not evenly enforced.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tjpnz 3y agoI work in Japan - naturally I've Japanese colleagues, and a significant number from other Asian countries too. The "you guys"/"hey guys"/"that guy" thing is practically universal. The idea of a native (probably white) English speaker lecturing them on it being sexist or non-inclusive is repugnant to the extreme. At that point they've lost the argument, and can frankly get fucked.
- colpabar 3y ago> The idea of a native (probably white) English speaker lecturing them on it being sexist or non-inclusive is repugnant to the extreme It really is amazing how those people don't see it that way and instead think they are really helping anyone. English was forced on a lot of the world. Now it's sort of happening again, in a different way and with infinitely less violence, but the justification remains the same: to civilize the savages.
- bananashazama 3y agoTo what Japanese phrases are you referring? Most of the various phrases I'd expect to use to refer to a group (minasan, [name]-san-tachi) are gendered at all in typical use, and the ones I can think of that are gender only one member of the group (e.g. kanojo-tachi to refer to a group including one known female). And it's not like Japanese doesn't have similar sexist norms baked into its own vocabulary either (if anything, to a rather greater extent than English). No, an everyday modern speaker probably doesn't mean anything by the fact that it's danna-sama but oyome-san, or the fact that formal speech (as one would use with a superior) is read as feminine-coded in casual contexts. But that doesn't mean there's not something behind those norms, either. Whether the lecture is counterproductive is an entirely different question to whether the usage is sexist.
- Anthony-G 3y agoAnother data point: I’m from Ireland and grew up in the 80s. For as long as I remember, the plural form “guys” always referred to groups of any gender. I’d be just as likely to use it to greet a female-only group of colleagues as a mixed or male-only group of colleagues.
- duped 3y agoHaving a CoC is what gives moderators of a community the ability to drop the ban hammer and give a decent reason (in other words, establish some rules and keep out people who routinely break them). Enforcement is rarely public, for the same reason you don't fire someone in front of the entire office.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI mean CoC violations can also result in people losing their jobs; it's better to handle things in private. That also removes any cool factor from someone who's blatantly being a troll, the "us vs them" mentality that's easy to pick up.
- woodruffw 3y agoCan you provide more details? I’ve been working on open source projects for about a decade now, including years of professional work, and I have never seen or heard someone chastised for using “guys” informally. This includes in communities with established, formal codes of conduct. It strikes me as something that most people wouldn’t even notice, unless the speaker was intentionally using it in a way that implies gender.
- nkuttler 3y agoI'm not sure what kind of details you're looking for?
- woodruffw 3y agoYou said you personally witnessed something; I'd like to understand more about it. In particular: did you witness the instigating incident, the bullying, or both? Did the bullying actually weaponize a CoC, or is it your impression that the presence of a CoC empowered the bully? Is "bullying" your characterization or someone else's? And so on.
- nkuttler 3y agoI witnessed everything, the bullies used the CoC to justify their behavior and told me their committee encouraged their enforcement of the CoC in this way. People on the committee have published articles on the matter calling for such enforcement. Bullying is well defined https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying, I specifically mean it in the sense of repeated abusive behavior by people with more power.
- darkwater 3y ago> The only effect of a Code of Conduct I have ever personally witnessed was that people were being bullied for greeting others. They probably means you should name the opensource project that "bullied (people) for greeting others".
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
- RetpolineDrama 3y agoI personally never contribute to an OSS that has a CoC, and if I find my organization is using OSS that has a CoC I actively work to remove it and ban my employees from contributing to it. CoC's are poison, and if your project has a "Code of Conduct committee" it is dead to me. I fully admit this hasn't been possible for everything, but I'm making great progress
- asylteltine 3y ago[dead]
- beej71 3y agoDoes your organization have a code of conduct itself?
- zeckalpha 3y agoHN? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html