Twitter Engineering:We’re starting with a set of words we want to move away from
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The biggest problem was that the company became the arbiter of what was offensive and what was not. We felt like we came up with a comprehensive list when we started, but a few people became very good at finding new words that might possibly be offensive to someone, somewhere, in some context. Eventually the company has to draw the line and decline to remove potentially-offensive words, at which point the company is effectively declaring that topic not offensive enough to take action. This doesn’t go over well, and some people are very eager to make a big deal about it on social media.
The second problem is that declaring certain words to be possibly offensive is easily misinterpreted as declaring those words as always offensive. We had problems with people assuming ill intent when interview candidates and new hires accidentally used words on the banned list with no ill intentions. Marking the words themselves offensive instead of the person’s intentions creates a lot of traps for people who don’t know about or haven’t yet fully memorized the bad words list. This created a lot of divisions and cliques within the company where people were hesitant to interface with certain other groups for fear of being mistakenly marked as offensive. When the safest option is to keep to yourself or a small group of peers who you know won’t misinterpret your words, cooperation and coordination decreases.
The third problem was the long tail complexity of eliminating these words from the business. Doing a search and replace on the codebase and documentation is easy enough. But you’re still left with third party open source projects and services that contain the bad words. Once you reach the point of people suggesting to fork open-source services just to rename parts of the source code, the complexity and cost grows exponentially. At the worst point, we had a team trying to justify creation of an Ubuntu fork that used the phrase “manual pages” everywhere instead of the possibly-sexist “man pages”. The amount of engineering time, energy, and dollars spent debating these topics and implementing solutions spiraled into far more complexity than any of us imagined at the start.
Companies already have to do this and they have done this for a long time. There are undoubtedly offensive words, phrases, and actions which a company actively discourages or will not tolerate.
The problem is that society progresses in disjointed ways, and common vernacular often lags far behind that as well. Instead of waiting for the overwhelming majority of people to understand that some words which once were perceived as neutral actually carry a darker, less-desirable connotation, Twitter (and others) are working to get ahead of that.
Sure, the lines may be blurry now, but that's no reason to claim that companies weren't arbiters of offensive words or actions in the past.
Moderate behaviour and speech, not words and people.
Setting aside that you've honed in on a peripheral part of the OP:
You're missing something that should be obvious here. What you're attempting to claim here is that engineers second-guessing themselves at every turn as they write code and being dependent on high-level authority to make low-level decisions at the level of word choice is normal and desirable.
It's neither. It simply doesn't happen and it's incredibly boneheaded. Same as ever: Get woke, go broke.
This seems like an enormous waste of time.
Edit: I was corrected below about why Grandfather is considered objectionable. I think the general point still stands. Nobody is using these terms with the intent of excluding anyone. Interpreting them that way takes a deliberate effort that would probably be better spent elsewhere.
This is plainly false.
Even wiktionary[1] considers it a dated phrase.
I'm just one data point, but you said "no one actually associates the modern use" and that's untrue.
With that said, as others are noting, it does, for some people, evoke the Reconstruction-era practice, so is a bit more complex than it might seem.
I feel like racists are far more empowered by things like this than simply allowing the etymology of the word to be forgotten, like it basically had been. And now, it's just another line in the sand for people to argue about on social media. I think if I were a racist activist, I'd be finding things like this to start arguing about under a false flag.
It’s not a deep dark secret. I grew up in the south, I know the history and the racial connotation for it was always there for me. That it’s not there for you or that you never thought about it before doesn’t mean that nobody did or that everyone here is making it up.
This would be like British people removing French-derived words from their language, because they were the result of Norman conquest and subjugation. At some point, history is just in the past and language moves on.
What is actually in the repository? Is the code correct? Is it efficient? Is there sufficient test coverage? Well, who knows. We spent all our person-hours fiddling with terminology. This will last for a few years until someone finds something to be offended about with the new terms.
Words have a history and carry their original intentions with them alongside their current meaning. When you're using a term someone might find offensive, that person might also know that you mean no ill. In cases like those, they can ignore the possible subtle connotations your words could've implied.
In other situations, the hearer is unaware of your possible ignorance or motivations, in which cases they might be unsure if you're directly or indirectly trying to imply something offensive or dismissive on purpose.
Removing that doubt is simply streamlining the efficiency of communication, making sure that both parties understand each other and what they're saying and meaning.
Respectfully, I disagree. Words are fluid and shift meanings constantly throughout time. Words are not sentient and do not carry anything in and of themselves. Meanings are assigned by people based on context. It is quite clear from the context where these words are used what meaning is intended. To discern another meaning based on an obsolete and irrelevant context requires deliberate misinterpretation.
Jack Dorsey spent his last holiday on a private meditation retreat in Myanmar, while the people in the streets were organising anti-muslim mobs on social media. Maybe they ought to work on that if they're looking for racism on their platform
I am completely okay with removing words which imply domination and subjugation without moral judgement from day to day vocabularly.
Slavery is a horrific, barbaric practice, and if the word only ever comes up in one context with all the moral and emotional weight that should carry, then that's an improvement.
Erm, it's probably best if the word "slave" kept its highly negative and polarized meaning...
to talk quickly and nervously in a high voice, saying very little of importance or interest
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/twitter
Twit
a stupid person
1 step forward, 512 steps back.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/negroprogrammer/status/1278728952...
A black person appropriating a term of abuse for themselves is very different than a white person using it against them. Their username is not offensive.
Therefore everyone must be allowed to use his nick: negroprogrammer, or risk the above violation.
I think it smart if for free speech, and not just used as a sword or shield against others.
Likewise we no longer use the word retard as in I need to retard this engine's timing so it runs richer.
Yet both of these are words I grew up with and guess what? We're still here and our engines are running just fine, thank you. I'm old enough to have heard with my own ears that language evolves. The set of words used today are a different set of words than were used when I was growing up and the set of words that were being used when I was growing up was a different set than were used when my grandparents were growing up. You'd think a bunch of technology people wanting to "change the world" would understand this better.
Anyway, to my ears griping about language changing is like griping about loud music: you're just getting old. As my father always said getting old stinks but it sure beats the alternative. Now get off my lawn!
P.S. - when I was growing up you heard the word stinks a lot for where you'd now use the word sucks. But sucks used in such a pejorative manner was considered a 4-letter word due to its reference to fellatio. Like I said, language changes and evolves.
Lest we forget, “retard” used to be the kind way to describe mentally challenged people when earlier phrases became offensive.
If nothing else, improving clarity and understanding among each other and making communication easier as our workforces become more globally and linguistically varied is-if nothing else decent and appropriate, right?
To me "legacy status" sounds like "deprecated", as in "the system is still there but we plan to get rid of it". Grandfathered means "we wouldn't add it today, but since it's there it can continue as a first class citizen indefinitely". A house that doesn't follow new building codes isnt torn down, it's grandfathered in. But it's definitely not a "legacy house", it's still just a fully functioning house that doesn't match what new construction would be but that's ok.
Compare:
The use of fax for the transmission of medics records is grandfathered. The use of fax for the transmission of medics records is exempted.
Both are true, but grandfathered, as noted above, implies that it really wouldn't be allowed in today but gets to exist because some people just can't move on and look for a better technology.
(In fact, many of the reasons I hate fax are features for it's die-hard users. It's fire and forget, open loop, low quality, and as easy as dialing a phone entry. Also, there's no security attached to the sender or receiver.)
so sanity check would be checking if the behavior is reasonable and rational.
I'm talking about having to put in gratuitous checks to make sure that the given data is plausible given the expectations of the business logic. My background is mainly in "legacy" applications where bad data can be a real concern. The intent is to make sure that the conditions are right to continue processing the data, with the alternative being either correcting the data or raising an error strong enough to get the bad data noticed.
The problem with "sanity" in this context has to do with social stigmas about mental illness. As someone that is mentally ill, I get it. Yup, my brain processes things incorrectly according to the world. Yup, this makes life difficult for me. But I am not "insane" despite my brain's broken data and twisted business logic.
While I am not personally offended or put off by the use of "sanity" in this way around software engineering, I agree with the general principle that judging "sanity" in code can be problematic. There are ways to express the same idea without implying judgement about mentally ill people.
Some unintended consequences there given how the term is used by them in forward-facing contexts.
But have no illusion: this doesn't actually count as doing something, and you get zero accolades for it.
If you want to do something useful, and I highly encourage it, here are some ideas: fix your platform (start by kicking the Nazis off), fix your hiring process, and call your city council rep to ask what they're going to do to ensure the police treat all members of the public fairly and professionally.