Words are Hard | Hacker News Reader

Words are Hard

hackerschool.com

43 pointsmgeraci49 comments

Words are easier once you recognize that the official title of a person, product or organization actually communicates very little to people outside of the organization.

Working in communications, I've seen many instances of groups using acronyms and catchy titles to brand (or rebrand) themselves. For example:

- After much deliberation, a health care center decided to call its members "HARP," which stood for Health Advocacy Resource Personnel, to emphasize that they were focusing on preventative care.

- A law enforcement unit changing a job title from Community Outreach Officer to Street Worker in an effort to show that they were concentrating on gangs in high-crime neighborhoods.

Not surprisingly, no one outside of health care ever found out what "HARP" meant. And former gang members didn't build relationships with the police because some of them were called Street Workers.

My point is this: changing a title can entice someone to learn more about your organization and its members, but the title itself cannot - and will not - communicate all the nuances of a position. That's the responsibility of a messaging campaign.

I like that Hacker School has distilled the nuances of its members' roles into a blog post. The next step should be to develop focused messages that paint a picture of these students / hackers / developers / HackerSchoolers and what makes them unique.

You are describing positions of leadership -- a leader doesn't need to communicate downwards (with their title) to the street gangs or to the patients. They are going to lead those people, so it is unnecessary.

The people from hacker school are going to be lead, and mostly not hired straight into a position of leadership, so it is necessary to communicate to the leaders-to-be a title which communicates well what that person has been up to, because everything that person does will be taken into account by that leader-to-be, and more closely inspected than the gang member or patient will inspect the title of the person helping them.

I totally agree with this. Knowing absolutely nothing about Hacker School, it was a great surprise to me that their customers aren't students and that they are uncomfortable with calling themselves a school in the first place.

The thing is, I was very comfortable in my ignorance, because "Hacker School" has an extremely strong connotation that I didn't really have any interest in, and so I didn't go and look to their webpage to find that they're actually a "writers' retreat for programmers" -- which sounds MUCH more intriguing to me!

If they had instead gone with some acronym or made-up word or something to which I can't immediately assign a definition, I'd have taken the time to learn.

OP here. After reading through the reactions to this post, I think the biggest thing I missed is explaining why we need a word at all.

The primary reason to have a word is that we can have something to refer to ourselves (where "we" are members of the Hacker School community). I think most communities come up with words to refer to their members. It certainly happened in ours: there are a handful of words that people at Hacker School use to refer to themselves and new ones come up regularly.[^1]

The things to consider when figuring out what to call someone who does Hacker School is not what the outside world will think, but whether people who do Hacker School will feel comfortable wanting to use the word to describe themselves and whether we would be alienating anyone who would otherwise enjoy coming to Hacker School.

[^1]. The question of how much we as facilitators should try to influence that process is probably out of scope for this discussion. Let's just assume we've decided that we want to have some input. I can't resist footnotes, even in comments. Yeesh.

>whether people who do Hacker School will feel comfortable wanting to use the word to describe themselves

>and whether we would be alienating anyone who would otherwise enjoy coming to Hacker School.

Maybe you just need a big thesaurus and someone who has a good feeling for the political atmosphere of your group.

I could have sworn that something was in Hacker School's explicit social rules that specifically says to beware of solutions that contain the word "just." Turns out there's not, but: when you phrase things that way, you imply that a person is puzzled over something trivial.

Nope. Words are hard.

I didn't imply that it would be easy to understand the political atmosphere of the group, or that finding the words would be easy. From a different perspective it is essentially the same thing as asking everyone with a formal/informal survey, or observing the common phrases used. It could be done many different ways.

Random question: why is there a random-length HTML comment in your blog post?

https://github.com/meldium/breach-mitigation-rails

One alternative to existing words, and inventing completely new words, is to combine elements of existing words to create a new, unique, yet familiar sounding word. For example, Intel called their 586 chip a Pentium -- Penti being the prefix for 5. So, how about something like Hackranaut, which would imply someone exploring the Hacking arena?

I once built a community on Facebook titled "\(n_n)/". The idea was to have thoughtful, philosophical discussions, but I didn't want to name it "Philosophy Group" or whatever because that sounded pretentious. We'd call ourselves "n_n'ers" or "nners"- which, of course, can't really be pronounced. In person, we'd say "I met her through 'N'."

I think this is one of those things where something will emerge out of necessity, and it'll just stick, and a bottom-up approach will probably be best. Let people figure out their own "desire paths" to what they want to be called. If communication is necessary, people will find a way.

A persistently missing name is often a sign that the concepts haven't been fully worked out yet. In you guys' case that could be exciting. It could mean that what you're doing is newer and more emergent than you've yet realized. If so, your job is not to name the thing, but to follow it as it emerges and let it teach you what it is. Names come almost as a corollary. Until they do, lack of official names for the core concepts (what could be more core than "student" and "school"?) is an asset, not a liability.

You probably already have a laboratory running natural experiments in this area: the conversations of the people in your groups. If they lack official language for what they're doing, they have no choice but to make something up. Those can be good creative conditions. If I were you, I might try to get them to tell me what the names are, by listening closely to the words they use in conversation and to which formulations feel easiest and most alive. This often works better when people aren't consciously trying to come up with names but do it spontaneously when talking about something else.

By the way, maybe you shouldn't be down on "school" for what you're doing. It's true that people have a lot of preconceptions about school. But it's also true that your usage is historically deep. "School" didn't originally mean "child processing factory" or whatever it is now. Here's what Etymonline has for it [1]:

"place of instruction," Old English scol, from Latin schola "intermission of work, leisure for learning; learned conversation, debate; lecture; meeting place for teachers and students, place of instruction; disciples of a teacher, body of followers, sect," from Greek skhole "spare time, leisure, rest ease; idleness; that in which leisure is employed; learned discussion;"

That seems pretty close to what you're doing. Historical meanings often have resonance and sometimes make comebacks. I wouldn't relinquish this one if I were you. Imagine if you are part of a resurgence of the original meaning of schools. How cool would that be?!

[1] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=school

p.s. You might consider "mentor" for what your web site calls "resident", and then "resident" instead of "student"...I think "resident" could go either way.

What about "Fellows" or "Scholars"? Both imply learning is involved, but in a more active, unstructured way.

OP here. Both of these words do a good job of describing what someone does at Hacker School. I think the reason we've shied away from them is because they can sometimes come off as a bit pretentious. Given how young we are as an organization, we want to make sure to be humble.

I don't know if you know Jake from Insight Data Science, but he calls his students fellows and his program a fellowship: http://insightdatascience.com/

Per the point you were making in your essay, though, he does this because most of his students are post-docs and (1) they understand what a "fellowship" is and (2) do not necessarily want to be a "student" again. To a postdoc, especially, student implies having to pay for it.

The other folks upthread are sort of missing the point, honestly, because when it comes to a word like "student," it touches on issues of identity and association. When someone (e.g., a friend) asks your students, "What are you doing?" they're going to respond with, "Oh, I'm an X at Hacker School."

You want X to be something the students feel comfortable saying to friends, families, and co-workers. Whether "fellow" is too pretentious or not depends on who your students are and who they'll be saying "I'm an X" to.

I do know Jake! "Fellows" and "fellowship" are really good choices for Insight, though, to be honest, I hadn't spent any time considering the choice until you brought it up. I almost certainly should have. I think your analysis of that decision is totally on point.

Thank you for taking the time to make such a thoughtful and considerate comment. You have gotten to the nut of what I was thinking when I wrote the post and said it more eloquently than I did.

I think that's a very insightful point, and I agree.

As a side observation, I think you can actually make "fellow" in particular a bit more cool/casual, especially since it is a rather ambiguous term anyway and there are many kinds of fellows working on many levels out there. All it reliably seems to connote a learning environment, some degree of selectivity in participation, and less structure than a traditional school program.

For those who dug this essay, check out Wiio's Laws: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html

So after being reminded of this, they should just call it the NY Hacker Apprenticeship and have their logo be a young female hacker. Too good?

To whoever downvoted this, their name right now is Hacker School (commonly politically correct, male "Apprenticeship" terminology avoidance) and the symbol is of a computer (commonly politically correct, neutral/male symbolism).

"NY Hacker Apprenticeship w/ a young female hacker as the mascot" would essentially flip it around, where the Apprenticeship term is used (its an old world male symbol, lets get over the passive aggressiveness) and a modern symbol of equality is used (a female hacker, yes there is political tension over this as we all know, lets get over the passive-aggressiveness)

Yes it was light-hearted because that is essentially two politically provoking things from the wrong vantage point; but sometimes two things which are politically diverging can cancel each other out with the right dose of comedy, fun, and respect.

One could take it plenty of other directions, but I thought it would be cool. Maybe "Hacker School" wants to avoid the political scene altogether out of self preservation, maybe they'll downvote me and take my ideas anyways, or maybe they'll just downvote me and dislike me, who knows?

I have nothing against any person or group, and I respect everyone equally. Cheers.

That material is very interesting. I'll have to find some time to look at it more closely. It reminds me of John Gall's classic Systemantics (now published as The Systems Bible).

In one way, words are hard because it's difficult to communicate all the ways your program is unique just through its two word name. In another way, words are easy because in just a few hundred words, you did exactly that.

What about "learner"? Or "scholar"? I like scholar.

I like scholar too. It's derived from the Greek word for leisure. School and scholarly things were thought to be leisurely activities because they were for people not required to till the fields or fight wars. It's truly a fortunate position to be a scholar, and I think the people at this school should relish in it.

Yeah, but work meant ascholia in Greek, which is the opposite of schole, and at an Apprenticeship you are possibly lectured at your leisure, but you are also working, so the term scholar fails in this regard.

I feel like you're already using the right term, just applied to the wrong group of people in your organization.

When I read your post, I thought about Resident Advisors in college and it seemed like an apt comparison. When I was an RA, I wouldn't say that my residents were my students. They learned things from me, but I also learned things from them too. I had some wisdom, but it didn't really come from a place of power. We were mostly peers, just I had the keys to their rooms when they were locked out and mediated disputes.

I feel like you should call your current residents advisors and your participants residents;residents of the hacker school

Hey, hackers of hackerschool, can you help me out? I'm trying to populate opinions about the school here: http://schools.techendo.co/schools/hacker-school

It will help out others to decide where to attend and offer some advice from an insider's perspective on these types of schools.

I like the word "workshop" instead of "school" as mentioned in their FAQ under "Experience" (src: https://www.hackerschool.com/faq ). However, that implies something like a makerspace, which doesn't seem to be the type of thing they're going for.

Some martial arts use "practitioner".

I like the term 'sabbatical' although it does sound very academic.

Apprentice, journeyman or fellow, and Master

edit: The real question is, how do you get this far without knowing you are running an Apprenticeship? https://www.hackerschool.com/about

I don't think "apprenticeship" is a fitting label. It implies that participants are newbies (some are, some aren't) or that there is some kind of structure or training.

Calling the whole thing an apprenticeship is humbling, as there are obviously journeymen/fellows and masters involved which would be given titles according to merit as you said.

I was about to suggest ‘apprentice’ as a reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnons_du_Tour_de_France but then again, I realised I had little idea how Hacker school approaches their role. A similar binomial role is found at the same period (i.e. early Middle-ages until now) among some monks, generally travelling ones: the younger ones are ‘novice’.

(For geeky reference: either presumably inspired the Jedi/Padawan structure.)

You never explained why you need to refer to them as anything. So they can feel part of a team? To refer collectively to them easily in meetings? Why not just use:

    Participants
    Attendees
    Customers

But really you should just refer to them as people. The people who take courses with you are just people. Not hackers, or students, or WildCats or Urban Achievers. People. People and customers. Customeople.

As for the school thing, if what you think you're running is a school, call it a school. Words aren't hard, marketing is hard.

Let's conduct a simple thought experiment.

I'm attending Hacker School. A friend I haven't seen in a few months comes up and asks, "So, what are you doing these days?" I respond with something like

  Oh, I'm an X at Hacker School
  Oh, I'm Y-ing at Hacker School

So, it's not a matter of "need" — X and Y are going to be filled with something even if Hacker School has no opinion on the matter. What's more, no student is ever[1] going to say "I'm a customer at Hacker School"[2] or "I'm a participant in Hacker School," and if we insist on referring to students as "customers" or "participants," we're just asking for students to invent their own, contradictory vocabulary.

They might say "I'm attending Hacker School," but that immediately implies that one is a student, i.e., you'd expect their friend to respond, "Oh, cool! What's it like being a student there?" Or if said friend were to ask, "Ah, so you're a student there?" I'd of course reply affirmatively. If they seemed open to it I might elaborate on how being a student at Hacker School isn't like being a student as they think of it.

Perhaps one way to think of it is this: by giving the students at Hacker School a way to refer to themselves, Hacker School is helping them tell a more compelling story to both themselves and those people who care about them.

[1]: You might disagree, I suppose, but I'm not going to argue the point. :)

[2]: Also, the students at Hacker School are not their customers. Hacker School is free for all students and they (presumably) make money through job referrals. This means those companies are their customers, not the students.

For all X and Y, there's still the problem of the speaker being associated with something called "Hacker School." Just like "Beefcake School," "Baller School," "Stud School," or any other "Positive Connotation to a Certain Demographic School," it doesn't pass the laugh test.

Is this the "username223 Laugh Test" or something more universal?

It's kind of like a matter of forcing acquiescence versus offering traditional dignification to the eventual employer. I cant really say I take a side.

It's fairly general, like the saying that any science with "science" in its name probably isn't. It's good to be skeptical about things whose made-up names consist of buzzwords appealing to their target demographics.

"Programmer" seems as good a word as any.

"I'm a programmer at Hacker School" sounds like they're employees of Hacker School.

From the article, that seems like the most accurate description you can get in one sentence, especially since the conversation will go,

---I'm a programmer at "hacker school"

---Cool, what's "hacker school?"

This is more than a bit self-aggrandizing.

Enrollee.

If someone is participating in your program you can always just call them a participant. It comes with a light load of connotation and while boring, is descriptive enough to indicate the relative equality of the relationship.

"Colleague" is the term used in some European languages. But really--get over yourselves. No one really cares.

There's no need to be rude. Some people care. I think it's an interesting verbal conundrum.

Are you alright? I ask this because- in my personal experience, I've found that people who use the phrase "no one really cares" tend to be deeply frustrated or bothered about something. Are you feeling powerless about something, or otherwise having some sort of trouble?

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