This Generation Is Most Likely to Swear at Work | Hacker News Reader

This Generation Is Most Likely to Swear at Work

bloomberg.com

42 pointsBWStearns55 comments

Maybe it's just me, but I don't give two shits about swear words. They are the same as other words to me and have almost no negative connotation. I don't think twice about swearing at work, and neither do the other people my age (24) that I work with.

I think it's about the attitude it fosters and enables. It enables and fosters 'bro' culture and 'bachellorette' culture. And that can lead to people thinking it's okay to refer to others as bitches and duchebags etc.

There's a difference. I swear profusely at work, but never at people.

Careful with that slippery slope! I curse profusely and I think referring to people as bitches is 100% unacceptable. I think there's room for respectful swearing. Swear about ideas, don't swear about people.

I suppose. I do see the difference, but go into a sales meeting after the client leaves and tell me how they speak about the client. The expletives are directed at both animate and inanimate entities.

You can insult and belittle people without swearwords, the two are just commonly used together, not necessarily related.

I don't agree with this. We swear about situations, problems, issues and so on, but when you attack people, with any type of words, you've stepped over a line.

Nope.

I am a sysadmin, I frequently swear in the most vulgar and crass way. However I do not and will not tolerate 'bro' culture.

If you are acting like a cunt to my fellow worker, I will make your work life a fuck sight more testing.

Do not pick on my fellow man/women, for I shall haunt you like a wet fart.

Oh a sysadmin who is proud to be an asshole to people. No one saw that coming

firstly its "arsehole"

Secondly its not proud of being an arsehole, its proud of standing up for people. No one bullies on my watch.

More and more people in the UK are adopting the north American variant. So looks like you prefer retaining tradition over change and are reticent to accept change, that said, good on you for bullying the bulliers.

Swearing is fucking lazy. Fuckig thing adds bloody nothing to damn sentences. No fucking value.

Observe.

Swearing is lazy. It adds nothing to sentences. No value.

Which version was clearer?

Caveat: swearing used strategically can be fucking beautiful.

Your lazy form of swearing only involves using them as adjectives/adverbs.

Something being 'fucking lazy' might not add more than something being 'lazy', but something being 'fucked' is an altogether different use.

The lazy part here is your writing and argumentation, not the fucking swearing.

If you're typing or saying extra words for the same result, surely you're not being lazy.

I know that in my environment swearing does have a tone to it, it isn't a taboo but it isn't something you throw in to every sentence either. It's useful to sound more aggressive/assertive/confident - but if you use it all the time it loses weight.

The vulgar spectrum (darn -> poop -> ... -> shit -> fuck -> ... -> cunt) and context are hugely important as well

I'm 40, and I feel exactly the same, personally. However, I don't swear around others until it's been established that they're swearers too. That said, I don't think I've ever worked anywhere where people didn't swear pretty commonly. And when I was your age, the 40 year olds were swearing too.

I'm sure there are plenty of words you think are beyond the pale, they're just different from the ones previous generations did.

Exactly. The shade of the pearls may have changed, but certain words will _definitely_ still cause clutching of said pearls.

I'm in my mid 30's and generally agree with this attitude.

However, I have a couple of rules:

1) Avoid swearing with clients/customers/investors, at least wait until a relationship is established and they signal they're okay with it.

2) Avoid swearing in written communication, e.g., in emails or commit messages – don't even really like seeing it in team-wide slack channels, though I do it occasionally.

I don't mind swearing personally, but I do think it can be rude or unprofessional. Part of it is just signaling that you understand business etiquette and how to be polite in that setting – i.e., "professional."

For example, if I'm interviewing someone who immediately starts dropping tons of f-bombs, I'm going to judge that negatively – not as a deal breaker but as a warning flag.

I guess it would be similar to how I'd react if somebody immediately launched into a diatribe about religion or politics (regardless of whether I sympathized with their view). Like swearing, they're fine in a conversation between acquaintances, but they can easily veer into offensive territory if you don't know the other person. If you don't understand or don't care that you might be offending someone, I would be concerned about your ability to communicate effectively.

Misleading headline: the article reports only analyze the responses by millennials; it do not compare them to older demographics, or to changes over time. (Unsure if this is the case with the original survey, which Bloomberg does not link to.)

EDIT: The article seems to more accurately argue "This Generation Has A 50/50 Probability of Swearing at Work."

Replacing millennials with snake people is especially funny in this article.

I wonder if millennials are more likely to replace words with other words using browser plugins.

> especially funny in this article.

So it's marginally funny at best?

on topic:

I swear occasionally, not that often, in conversations with people.

I mutter swear words under my breath at my computer in a constant stream some days.

> marginally funny

Yeah, my bar is pretty low for this.

Comment about the form rather than the content: It's an interesting choices of colors for the chart. Women are in Blue on the left and Men in Pink on the right.

Because of stereotypes and the fact that I didn't pay attention to the legend, I read all the charts the wrong way the first time.

I'm also slightly confused by the first graph. If I'm reading it correctly (and I could be completely wrong, so somebody please correct me), it seems like both the men and women's percentage add up to over 100%. So unless some people gave multiple answers, there's something not quite right in the representation of the data.

I can't recall where I read that but back in the days blue was considered girl's color (because it is the color of some delicate flowers, not to mention sky), and pink was considered boy's (because it's vauge resemblance of blood, preferably of his enemies slain in battle).

I think it's important to also point out that this generation is also a little more sensitive about using derogatory / racist / sexist terms towards others that target specific groups and/or individuals. So you could say it's a wash -- some words (fuck, shit, etc) just don't have the same negative connotations anymore and are used very frequently even in professional settings, but other types of speech have become more taboo.

I'm late GenX. I used to swear like a sailor at work (and everywhere really) until I had a kid and I actively had to mitigate the use of my preferred expletives. A lot of fricks and dangs these days. My favorite? "Poop on a stick."

I learned about "get your poop in a group" from a coworker who works with children.

That's a good one, I'll have to remember to add it to my repertoire.

Whenever I see these "this generation does such-and-such" article, I have to wonder if it's really a generational thing or just an age thing. Do 20-something millenials really swear more than 20-something Gen-Xers or 20-something baby boomers did? I think probably not, but maybe people just tend to swear less as they get older.

A lot is age, though an underappreciated element I've noticed is economic climate.

Boomers, relative to other generations, had everything on a platter. GenX started relatively strong, but with some stumbles. Early millennials walked straight into the dot-com crash, then early 2000s boom.

Late millennials came into a complete shitshow, SV and finance being about the only real exceptions.

Having watched a bunch of early bloggers get really quiet, the FB generation oversharing strikes me as probably time-limited. About when the first wave of divorces starts, I figure.

Fuck everyone, I just want to ship product.

Then get back to work and stop dicking around on HN.

That is a good fucking point, thank you for the reminder :)

Take it to ao3.

“Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.” ― C.S. Lewis

If you swear infrequently (and get a reputation as such), you'll have something to say on those occasions where you really need everyone to stop and listen to you.

Has it ever been otherwise? I am sure when snake people have kids they'll be the most likely to swear and so on.

There might be correlation between workplace stress and the amount of swearing. Health care coming out on top at 64 % closely followed by finance at 62 % suggests this pattern to me.

This article doesn't make sense at times. It says young women are more likely to swear in the workplace and follows this up by saying millennial men are more comfortable with workplace swearing compared to millennial women (hypocrisy alert). They follow this up with a histogram that shows that men are more uncomfortable with workplace swearing. Huh?

I went from my second deployment, straight into the work world, and I brought along the vocabulary to prove it. To be fair I don't swear "at" people, only at technology, but I'm sure in some environments I'd need to clean it up a little.

Click bait I'm not clicking on. Advice from an almost-millennial (born 1981) and someone that's hired and fired countless programmers: don't swear at work, it makes you sound stupid. Some days you will swear more than others because some days and situations fucking suck.

Don't call people names regardless of your stance on swearing.

Know the audience, all communication should be tailored to who is listening, you should know if the person(s) you are talking to will tolerate swearing or not.

Swearing and using bad grammar or spelling are probably equal in many regards. Sometimes you can get away with it, but know who you are talking or typing to.

I agree with the "know the audience" part.

As in: much of your audience here isn't American, and you obviously are.

Well, I guess that's true. Given the site is an aggregator for a SF-based incubator I figured a reasonable enough number of people would be a American.

I'm also not sure why my comments have anything to do with being an American. I think not swearing at work would be universally good advice. I guess if swearing at work is integral to your identity you may be offended by someone declaring that you shouldn't swear at work. But it's generally not a good idea if you're wanting to optimize your career progression.

At least when it comes to startups this makes total sense. Work is increasingly both your work and your life. Your friends are increasingly your colleagues.

Traditionally you don't cuss in the work place b/c you have to stay professional - ie. you have to not be emotional about your work. Cussing is a form of injecting emotion into your speech. If you are at the office 12 hours a day with your friends, then the lines get blurred.

Personally I don't like the trend, but to each his own. There are pluses and minuses to each type of workplace

I don't find value in cussing in any setting personally. I don't mind when others cuss, but I just don't really feel it necessarily when I speak. I find it ironic at my place of work.. we're told not to wear headphones working long term at a clients office, but my CEO has no problem cussing in a pitch meeting with a new client.

Years ago, I stopped using profanity at work, unless it's in private conversations with people I really trust and/or consider close personal friends.

It's partly out of simple respect for my coworkers, but a big motivation is the personal risk involved. These days, there are more than a few people who will complain to HR about anything and everything that might offend them. And I simply don't want to be on the receiving end of any of those complaints.

And what's ironic, is the people I'm referring to, at least in my company, are by and large millennials, who, according to the article, are big users of profanity in the workplace. I've had complaints lodged against me for simply speaking bluntly, well within my authority, and not using the "praise sandwich" when correcting someone who had totally screwed something up. Both times I was fully exonerated, I'm happy to say. But it might have gone a different way had I laced my blunt statements with profanity.

I dunno, the old French guy at our office swears like a sailor, most of the younger peeps are quite tame in comparison.

In the grandest tradition of Anglophones, I have at times borrowed words like "merde", "schiesse", and "cào nǐ mā" (with atonal pronunciation) from other languages, whenever I'd like to express something in colorful metaphors without other people necessarily understanding it to be vulgar.

So if I were you, I'd probably take notes.

This might one day get me into trouble while traveling outside the US, which generally only knows English and Spanish.

I hate to tell you, but Spanish speakers can probably understand "merde". It's fairly similar to their counterpart.

Pretty sure my productivity level is measured in MCPM: Muttered Curses Per Minute.

High productivity : low MCPM

They also seem mostly likely to complain about politics in a loud voice, using phrasing and concepts that indicate they have a surface understanding of the system at best. Also they think they invented the blowjob.

Moderators: can you please update click bait title?

No shit.

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