It's a shame too many of these product announcements subtly discriminate against women, and frequently minorities.
Why not a more descriptive title such as "Upverter Releases Sophisticated Circuit Layout Tool"?
Congratulations to the Upverter team, but try to be more sensitive next time.
The joke is at least sophomoric, if not crass as others have pointed out.
Those are virtues in a joke.
But...
I don't think Upverter was trying to discriminate, nor do I think anyone should take real offense at their title. I just think that little jokes like this often recurring does have a negative impact on our ability to attract women to (and have them thrive in) technical roles.
Given that, would you use that product and service if only people who dress like 12 year olds use it? I suspect you might avoid it, assuming you were the sort of person who cared about that sort of perception.
Or here, let me try it in terms of variables:
A: The people who are always talking about B
B: The product, service, or career they're talking about
C: The group they appear to be part of
D: You.
E: People who might look at you (D) and think you are a (C) because of your association with (B), because of the presentations put forth by (A).
If you don't make any of these connections, you may not be affected by this. However, it could still affect those who do make those connections.
It raises the question, which is worse, false flagging of gender bias where there isn't any, or widespread gender bias? Obviously the latter. But the former does seem weirdly counter productive, if you want to avoid putting people off, then don't put people off by false flagging things that aren't there.
In trying to see the other side of the debate: I'm sure a woman has written such a headline before, but I would imagine it's been targeted at female audiences(this could be gender bias on my part though). I might imagine the likelihood of a male writing an inappropriate bla bla "gets you laid" headline at a supposedly neutral audience is higher than a woman doing so(my gender bias again?).
I suppose also as a man writing a "gets you laid" headline, you're making assumptions about the high male/female ratio of your target audience. Most men I know, know such talk can make them unpopular with female readers. (although this could just be presumption and not actual fact, maybe female readers wouldn't give a hoot)
So those assumptions made by writing such a headline, will be obvious to the reader and off putting. Even if it wasn't obvious whether the writer was male or female, between industry stereotypes and gender bias, most people would assume such a headline about a cloud based circuit cad tool would be written by a man,(again possibly my bias).
What's my point? I don't have one, but best to play it on the safe side.
Induction is much more likely to convert the person you're talking to than deduction, as it gets around values to a degree.
When I saw this headline, it elicited a minor "groan" from me, since it reminded me of some less-desirable elements within the greater community. It, on some level, reminds me that sometimes I wish I was doing something else.
This plugs into what I said before.
Both men and women get laid.
Sources:
[1] PCB layout: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:srb7R1n...
[2] Page 41: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/dsmith/dsmith.html
[3] Google Groups Discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.cad...
[4] PDF: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/CLASS_573/Asynchr_Febr_200...
Sure, layout is common terminology in EDA. Getting laid is not.
Did you read your references? This one has nothing to do with electronics.
The other three all use "laying out a circuit". None of them used "laid". Luckily there are very many search hits for "laid out a circuit" (some about cycling, etc) or "laid out a PCB", so it's common usage. But "Gets your circuits laid" is clear sexual innuendo.
My rhymes and my records they don't get played / because my records and rhymes, they don't get made / 'cause when you rap like me you don't get paid / and when you roll like me you don't get laid.
More seriously though, the title is extremely childish and doesn't really help to make me want to trust their service with my company's valuable data...
I request you swap to trying to make another language dowdy and unfun. I (and most English speakers the world over) love its capacity for wordplay.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit...
</sarc>
Source:
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20121026/local/Cou...
First impressions count. Upverter is really cool. How many people have missed the opportunity to be upverter users because of this bad pun? Perhaps more importantly, how many customers did upverter not get because of the bad humour?
They are free to use whatever language they like to talk about their project. Other people are free to be disappointed at the choice of language; or to be put off by the words used; or to not care about the language.