Comment by _iie2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _iie2 | Hacker News Reader

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I work at 18F, here's my hot take:

It's been pretty well established that needlessly (male) gendered language makes people feel excluded. Actually, that's too nice. That kind of language excludes people. Period.

It communicates that the speaker does not contemplate a non-male audience. I do not know about the communities that you moderate, but constantly assuming a male audience at a place like 18F is wrong factually and is disrespectful.

I've triggered the slackbot by using "guys" many times and I've never felt that this was aggressive in any way. It's usually a chuckle-worthy experience for all involved. And that's why I love the bot. I do understand concerns over "policing" language. No one wants to feel pestered into writing/talking in a way that feels unnatural to them. However, instincts should not be above criticism. And a silly bot[0] is a great way to gently, politely, and humorously help people unlearn behavior that excludes.

[0] We have other silly bots, too. The one we probably love to hate the most is angrytock (https://github.com/18f/angrytock), which will remind us to submit our time cards (using our open source time tracker, Tock. https://github.com/18f/tock).

This is turning into a debate, so let me apologize; it was meant as a one-off comment on how silly and counterproductive it is (imv) to write a bot for such things.

If this bot isn't actually negatively affecting anybody, more power to you. I certainly won't be the one to tell you what you can and can't do within your company.

Putting myself in those shoes, I would personally find it incredibly rude, and I highly doubt I'm in the minority holding that view, which means in my mind it's highly likely that other people at your company hold the same view (loudly or silently), which will contribute to making communications worse.

Putting passive-aggressiveness aside (which is a real problem)... I never contemplate "male-only" audiences, regardless of what I say. A somewhat-recent example: I've had some insecure guy come up to me being offended at my usage of "us gamers", as if saying "gamers" somehow excluded women.

There is something that really bothers me in such cases: The person is assuming ill-intent on behalf of the speaker. To me, it is extremely discriminatory to assume I don't include women when I speak. Why wouldn't I include them? Because they're women? Isn't that exactly the type of backwards thinking feminists are against?

shrugs I better just stop here. Whenever political correctness gets brought up, people on here seem to forget all logic and act completely irrationally - feminism really is the "for the children!" of the tech sector. I see even your post got downvoted for whatever reason; I brought it back up...

> The person is assuming ill-intent on behalf of the speaker.

This is where these kinds of issues typically go off the rails. With male-gendered language as the default, I doubt very many people intend to do anything wrong. It's how I learned to speak and I'm sure it's how many others did, too.

A silly nudge from a Slack bot, is just that--not an accusation or a judgment of character.

I was thinking about this a bit more last night, and I thought of another reason why the bot is great: it doesn't discriminate. It doesn't matter if you are in leadership at 18F, a guest user in our Slack, an employee who started two weeks ago, male, female, or something else. The bot doesn't care.

There's a bit of politics to how people get "called out"--e.g. who wants to pull the boss aside and correct their behavior? The end result is likely to be that certain employees get corrected and other employees don't. A bot avoids all of this.

I've been thinking about it a lot and there's something seriously off in this "prevention-based" approach to political correctness.

People can get offended at all sorts of things. Maybe some girls will be offended at people saying "guys" gender-neutrally. A lot of women won't.

Are you going to write bots to prevent all possible verbal offences? What if some of those bots offend people themselves, what do you do then?

I find it interesting you mention the nondiscriminatory aspect of a bot as a feature. To me it's one of the most disturbing parts, and it's what creates the "passive aggressiveness" I was talking about. If you have a problem with the way I say something, you can be upfront about it with me and I'll change my behaviour. Writing a bot for it is quite a backhanded way of getting me to do something, with less chances of succeeding (and if anything, more chances of continuing out of spite).

Like I said though, all this is personal take. Maybe everybody at your company is fine with this. However, I did show this little post around and got a near-unanimous reaction similar to mine, which reinforces what I thought before: It is highly likely there's people at your company who think this is far more than "a silly nudge", and the bot would then have a completely counter-productive effect to its original intent.

My objection isn't to the cuteness of the bot - it's to the waste of taxpayer's money. Could you really look an elderly taxpayer in the eye and tell them that building slackbots with their bottom dollar is a great idea without feeling a tinge of guilt?

Employees who are happy and feel included are going to produce better work (and a better return on the invested tax dollar) than those who aren't. I'd also expect second-order benefits such as helping us recruit from a wider, more diverse pool of applicants.

Of course there are boundaries to the happiness-increases-productivity dynamic, but quickly coding up a Slack bot seems well within the safe range.

> Employees who are happy and feel included are going to produce better work

Sure, but to what degree? Does the 'gained productivity' actually pay for the cost of maintaining 'happiness infrastructure'?

Tech is pretty insular, isn't it. Like how your site uses "gov", a top level domain for the whole WWW restricted to be used by government-specific entities in the UNITED STATES (of America)[1]. Moreover, "The U.S. is the only country that has a government-specific top-level domain in addition to its country-code top-level domain." (Wikipedia)

[1] The point isn't that other governmental entities should be able to use "gov", though. Since English is not a universal language.

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