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Comment by lightbyte | Hacker News Reader

This reads and looks like it was written by a teenager. Quite ironic that it is preaching professionalism.

Edit: I did not mean this as "only girls are unprofessional" so I removed that part. Teenage boys are equally as unprofessional, but I don't think they express it in the exact same way. If this was filled with dick jokes and the like I would have written "teenage boy".

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Did you get this far? This explains a bit:

"Trust me I know this already. I’m like barely 22."

The second sentence there feels like it's missing a set of commas for, like, emphasis.

As another commenter pointed out, this off-hand comment is harmful to girls. In my own experience growing up, girls were just as "professional" (if that can apply to teenagers) as boys. They were serious, thoughtful, ambitious, and worked hard in school. Now I'm older and my friends have kids, and their girls are going to Maker Faires, studying hard, etc.

We should not accept the meme of a "teenage girl" being a silly thing that doesn't know how to behave right, because it's just not true.

Sorry, what about being a girl conveys unprofessionalism?

"teenage" girls aren't the height of professionalism, I think was the thrust there. The use of the word "like" frequently denotes this. Nothing wrong with girls, period. But teenagers aren't looked up to as the paragons of professionalism.

Are teenage boys the height of professionalism? I think the gender comment is unnecessary, irrelevant, and harmful.

Oh, come off it already. It is clear what he meant, you are just trying really hard to be offended by something.

This was so unprofessional, it's like it was written by a black teenager!

...is that better?

Or is it more obvious now that the original comment was an insult to girls?

No, it was unnecessarily sexist and demeaning.

Yes it was clear the poster was being derogatory to girls. It's also clear you are trying to normalize and justify such behavior. Both are unnecessary.

There are negative traits about both teenage boys and teenage girls. The writing style more closely matches teenage girls in this instance, so that's why the connection was made. Sexism exists in tech but this is not it.

Clearly the poster was talking about the excessive use of `like` which he deems as the typical vocabulary of a teenage girl which is what you're attempting to be upset by. It had nothing to do with teenage boys being significantly more professional than teenage girls, or anything of the sort.

You're making a mountain out of a molehill.

Not to mention the wacky animated GIFs every other paragraph.

Well, those are all content marketing techniques, GIFs and casual language speak to the author's target demographic I suppose.

This is a fair comment and I don't think it ought to be downvoted. It should have been "teenager" - that's not a criticism of the original commenter - but I think something worth correcting.

While we're encouraging edits within HN's 1 hour edit window, in your shoes I'd have de-escalated the last word:

> something worth [improving].

fair enough

Your comment reads like it was written by the kind of person who'd blow off a meeting with a potential designer hire 4 times.

The animated gifs are a nice touch saying "I have no idea what Im talking about but have feelings too"

I'm pretty sure teenage girls can make more professional posts than this. (Also, thanks for the sexism?)

This sort of attitude sexist attitude towards women is exactly why our industry is in such state.

You are basically echoing the idea that women = unprofessional at such a young age.

We certainly do not want our teen girls to grow up believing that they are viewed as unprofessional in our industry.

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