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Comment by worker767424 | Hacker News Reader

> Being an early retail employee in the Bay Area, we had very close ties to Cupertino. I worked when Steve was still alive.

Steve Jobs actually interacted with retail underlings?!

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Their post doesn't say that, and I too read the chosen wording twice. Their employment overlapped with Steve Job's lifespan, that's it. That's important to them to say, and is completely useless to us. That's all.

The way I interpreted is, this torture culture is not a recent development. It already existed during SJ watch.

Can we please not call people who work in retail “underlings”?

It seems like perfectly good English to me. Please let's not micromanage each other's language.

(I don't think the OP implied any particular interaction with Steve Jobs, but that's a separate issue.)

My first interpretation of "underlings" tends to have it be a somewhat derogatory term towards someone who is of some sort of lower status, which I took to assume (having much experience with this happening while working corporate and on other online forums) that retail employees were somehow lesser/less worthy of being listened to since they were generally further removed from decisions that the rest of the company made (as in, multiple interactions where I would see a conversation like "When working in Apple retail…"/"Shut up, you don't know anything, you just work retail"). The commenter has clarified their position so in good faith I would be willing to believe them but hopefully that gives you a bit more insight into why the way that was phrased was evocative of this to me.

I'd call engineers underlings, too. It's more honest than "retail associate."

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