- 5+ year Ex-Googler
EDIT: I'm done with this fucking site. You won't have weareconvo to kick around anymore.
Internal tools & developer infrastructure have gotten noticeably better since 2011, which was when Ms. Meckfessel took over. As engineers, we routinely use tools that were dismissed as impossible when I joined in 2009. If you're thinking about the gconfig/mk-debug days, the developer experience is orders of magnitude better now.
In an earlier comment, OP mentions leaving Google before Go was released, which was quite a while ago now, so not sure why he felt the need to chime in. He just sounds like he wanted to be an asshole, honestly.
I don't have to go past that word, to have a problem with your comment in this context.
The factuality of your comment has nothing to do with it.
Calling her a "chick" is like calling Larry Page a "boy toy" -- the word is used largely in sexual situations ("picking up chicks"), and is incredibly unprofessional and demeaning in a professional context like the workplace, or Hacker News.
And talking about the Internal Tools team as "that shit" is equally unprofessional and demeaning to everyone who works on it.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Then why don't you just ask what I meant by "chick" rather than insisting I was being sexist?
> And talking about the Internal Tools team as "that shit" is equally unprofessional and demeaning to everyone who works on it.
More demeaning than the comment itself, in which I actively demean the team by pointing out that everyone else in the company laughs at them?
Really? Did you go around and ask everyone who works there if they feel "it's unprofessional and demeaning"? Or is it just you who feels that way?
Please don't blow this out of proportion.
By the way, if anyone's inclined to fucking ASK why I used that word at any point in the next century, I use words like "dude", "chick", and "radical" because I enjoy the delightful throwback. Such idioms are definitely in my wheelhouse.
I think outside of common terms like "chick flick", this is just like using "girls" to refer to adult women - think to yourself, if you replaced the term with something like "boy" or "dude" how would you sound?
I don't really go on crusades about these particular uses of words because I feel there are better fights to fight, but I would never refer to a man in this particular context as a dude. Maybe I'm overly politically correct, but I try to be respectful to everyone.
As far as I can tell, the OP is not trying to make a misogynistic comment on purpose and biting his head off and shouting at him is not going to help the community, or the OP, or your point. If this was an actual misogynistic comments - "A girl in Google? Fire her!" - then the outrage would be well placed. A very commonly used colloquial term, however, at most deserves a polite request to use better language in future.
Because simply referring to her as "the chick who..." basically implies that she is principally a "chick" -- not a smart woman, not a capable professional, but just a "chick". Outside of professional contexts, it can sometimes be fine, but in commenting on a professional article, it absolutely is demeaning and there is no place for it.
No, it doesn't.
I think you should invest in a good dictionary. You're walking on very, very thin ice.
But, thanks to mostly people like you, that word has been hugely trivialized to mean not much more well... than anything really.
Let's not burn the OP at the stake just because he used a word that you think is somehow improper. That's something you have to deal with all on your own.
So is this something problematic about Tools, or about Google's culture in general? It sounds like you're criticizing the idea of using "releases" as a benchmark when inappropriate, yet you are disparaging someone else's work (what would you do?) because they have to adapt to the (dysfunctional?) corporate culture… Seems like making the best of a bad situation.
As far as relative status goes, "hackers" need to care a little bit less about other people's accomplishments or lack thereof. I've heard this kind of trash talk before (both direct and indirect) too many times in tech circles, and no matter how justified you may think it is… it just reflects badly on the person saying it.
- Promotion is largely driven by launches
- Erego, people launch unnecessary shit
- That's ridiculous
- ???
- The New Hangouts
"... she brought a “product perspective” to Google’s developer tools, insisting that, although they were only used inside the company, they should be treated like like products used by the world at large. “She bootstrapped a new charter for the team,” he says. “We had to think of these as products used by other Google engineers — and she brought that attitude. We had to think of them as cohesive things, to give them a nice presentation. That had not been the focus before.”"
focus, perspective, think of as product, bootstrap, charter, cohesive, team... 7 large ones in BS-bingo.
The Gtalk one is particularly ridiculous if you buy into their disingenuous arguments about combining disparate forms of messaging, especially given the spectacular failure of Wave, which tried to do the exact same thing. But if you view it through the lens of "Gtalk hadn't launched anything in a while, and their engineers wanted to launch something" it makes perfect sense.
com'n, man! From high moral ground these lemmings here tar-n-feathered Swartz, and you're getting emotional over their inability to hear word "chick" without getting their heartbeat racing and palpitation.
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...
And several people and sexes are well represented with their very individualized take on the meaning of the word.
In my experience in Southern California "chick" is more or less synonymous with "dood" when referring to a third-party casually.
However it was probably a poor word choice to comment on an article that many seem to interpret as a gender discussion piece.