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Comment by pixelkicker | Hacker News Reader

These guys are wasting taxpayer dollars.

Did you mean drones ?

I work at 18F, but am speaking for myself. It takes about a minute to add a Slackbot response, and posting the article helps us attract better candidates by showing our commitment to a good working environment.

I would argue that this article may actually harm your efforts at attracting better candidates.

The slackbot responses are equivalent to public shaming for using a widely accepted gender neutral phrase to address a group of people.

This makes 18F seem like a highly PC environment to work in.

Yeah, I would never work there after reading this. This makes it look like a place where passive-aggressively policing behavior is common.

I'm not even one to say racist or do sexist things! This just smells ... bitchy I guess?

I appreciate the feedback, and I don't consider 18F to be "highly PC" (at least to other places I've worked). I guess personally, while "guys" is a common term, it doesn't seem like a truly gender neutral phrase - I wouldn't ever call a woman a "guy," so why would the plural work?

In reading further about this just now, one interesting note is that "guy" is not neutral, and "guys" in the 3rd person is not neutral, but "you guys" (the second person) is used more generally.

Here are some links: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11816/is-guy-gend... https://www.quora.com/Is-the-word-guys-gender-neutral http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/10/slang https://www.reddit.com/r/genderqueer/comments/2kr0m0/is_the_...

> helps us attract better candidates

I'd be curious to know if better programmers recoil at the gender-neutral "guys."

Doubtful, but this generates controversy, which in turn exposes members of the tech community to the brand.

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