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Comment by _xnmw | Hacker News Reader

I hate that these kinds of Orwellian phrases "Welcoming X to the Y Family" have now become idiomatic of corporate English. Ugh, no. There is no "family" involved here, not by any stretch of the word.

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To be fair, if a “parent corporation” is a thing, then logically it has children and can be a corporate family.

Intent matters. The phrase "parent corporation" has no PR or emotional intent. "Welcoming X to Y family" has a clear emotive intent.

Maybe the intent of the writer was to make the new hires feel welcome aboard to their new company.

That's also not mutually exclusive of the emotive intent you are describing. What makes that Orwellian though?

The parent comment seems to be criticizing the higher-level corporate trend to use this lingo, and isn't talking about Friedman or Github specifically.

Github has a cartoon cat-octopus all over the site I would expect as a baby toy. Clearly linked to "emotional intent" "Github is so fun, guys!" I think they've outgrown that style (the black and white one in the header is ok)

Welp, guess it's time to bust out the "I'm offended and we need to change this lingo" card because corporations aren't people and we should stop referring to them that way

I mean, in all seriousness, aren't they a little bit like people? https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-...

They are slow AIs: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

It actually took me a while to understand that the announcement likely meant that they had acquired Semmle...

They have to say that anyway, because Microsoft is acquiring Semmle, not GitHub. It is joining the GitHub "product family".

If they had said "Welcoming Semmle to the Github Family of Products" instead, that would've been much more tolerable.

When I read the headline I assumed it meant that GitHub was hiring an employee named Semmle, which confused me until I realized Semmle was a business.

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