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Comment by jacobsenscott | Hacker News Reader

Can we please retire this "sweet summer child" thing? It is annoying af, rude, and likely never written by anyone over 30.

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> and likely never written by anyone over 30.

Well, George RR Martin would be super happy to know he's under 30 :-)

For what it's worth, I'm not under 30 either.

It's light-hearted and slightly irreverent. Whimsical, one might say.

Once you turn 30, the only thing you tell engineers is "winter is coming"

This is the way.

You're right, and this is in the guidelines. Swipes like these (even if they feel jovial by the writers) sap credibility from posts and civility from the threads.

Do the guidelines not also say something about ignoring such immaterial swipes and focusing on the matter at hand?

Sure. If there wasn't already a sprawl from this, I'd have kept quiet. But like, the "summer child" thing really is super annoying, and the parent commenter is mostly right, if off-topic.

I'm only here because we're all here. But summer child seems like the most prosaic insult possible, if one can even call it that, and it serves as a sort of useful shorthand. With a certainty approaching 99%, I think there is something better to be annoyed at.

I don't think it's super insulting or anything, it's just a condescending swipe. When you take a condescending swipe, you set a ceiling on the tone for everything that follows.

It’s not so much an insult as a dumb overused meme popularized from a show that ended years ago in ignominy. It is known.

Bless your heart.

My brother in Christ.

So say we all.

Under his eye

> and likely never written by anyone over 30.

As someone in my 30s, I've always thought of it as an "old-timey/old person phrase", same as sibling comment's "bless your heart".

It's a new expression to me (in regular use, I had heard it before but not often) but it also works fine. I disagree that we need to get rid of it just because it's old fashioned.

So far as I know, it's also not common amongst those of us who are over 50.

It's a very apt phrase. Young people whose only experience of professional life has been in the "summer", e.g. the good times, and have no conception of what it's like to find employment in the proverbial winter.

ZIRP has created an entire generation with absolutely no clue about the very existence of, let alone the harshness of, cycles.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Attacking the phrasing is not what we're looking for here at HN. The meaning of their comment is clear.

I found the sweet summer child thing to be snarky as well for what it's worth.

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