A rant-y personal opinion: I hate when people say “Product Guy.” | Hacker News Reader

A rant-y personal opinion: I hate when people say “Product Guy.”

blog.ellenchisa.com

18 pointsASquare18 comments

Really, really good points, especially about "guy" and its corresponding lack of a casual, female equivalent. Unfortunately, "girl" conveys a sort of latent, sexist diminution, such that the phrase "Product Girl" is dismissive. As a man, I'd cringe if another man described a female coworker as "Product Girl," in much the same way I cringed in the Entertainment business whenever a female creative exec was referred to as "Development Girl" (or its even more diminutive form, "D-Girl").

"Gal" feels hokey and anachronistic to me, and I'm sure it falls tinny on a lot of this readership's ears. For whatever it's worth, though, I've been noticing that the word is making a steady comeback. I have no personal n-gram analyzer in my daily life (and I wish I did!), but I could swear I have heard "gal" more times in the last two years than I had in the preceding 20. I've heard it from men (and the first time I did, it struck me as weird and Mad Men-esque), and I've heard it from women (most typically, women currently in their late '20s to mid '30s).

In a weird way, I'm almost rooting for it. Our language needs a casual term for women that is not latently diminutive and, thus, a micro-aggressive power play the way "girl" often is (whether its user intends it to be or not).

I feel awkward having correctly guessed that the bulk of the post would be a complaint about the gender in the informal "guy." Surely there's more interesting things to complain about.

So instead of seeing it as personally disinteresting and moving on you painted the issue as not interesting, or not worth talking about, which is an age old silencing tactic[1], and add no critical points of your own.

[1]http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/This_is_boring

It may not be interesting to you, no one is tell you it has to be, but silencing other people's issues because they're boring to you is really, really lame.

It's not a silencing tactic, good lord, stop suspecting people have hidden agendas about trivial garbage like this.

Like the blog author, stop attempting to control what people say. Someone saying "I'm a product guy" is in no way a slight or a problem in the world. "I'm a product expert." There, solved.

I'm not trying to control what you say. I am critiquing what you said. I also didn't assume you had a hidden agenda. Again I just pointed out that your response is a common trope used to discredit people's opinions.

> Someone saying "I'm a product guy" is in no way a slight or a problem in the world.

In your world. Is it so inconceivable to you that other people might feel different things are problematic in their lives? Who are you to decide what is and isn't a problem when someone has just expressed that they are conflicted about something.

>In your world. Is it so inconceivable to you that other people might feel different things are problematic in their lives?

It's not inconceivable, but I find it absurd that this is topic that a rational actor would feel is worth getting frustrated over.

>Who are you to decide what is and isn't a problem when someone has just expressed that they are conflicted about something.

Here's the thing: when you say "yeah, the thing you said is a tactic that is commonly used by jerks," the other party is going to take offense. Especially when it comes to feminism, in which being a chicken little just ends up trivializing the problem domain.

I am a bit confused why you'd immediately dismiss me as a "non-rational actor" because I wrote this.

I chose to publish a rant-y personal opinion for a very rational reason. Many of my male friends happily share drafts of writing, or writing that's done in a short period of time. I've always felt uncomfortable doing that because I'm afraid it will reflect badly on "women in technology" or be viewed as a larger signal. I wanted to do it as an experiment to see how it was received. I've actually been pleasantly surprised by how it's been received overall (thanks, commenters!)

On top of that, I feel like it should be clear from the piece that it's not something I view as being the biggest issue ever. I labeled it as a "rant-y personal opinion" for a reason. It's just something that annoys me. Many of my friends didn't know it was a pet peeve of mine, so it was shared primarily in that context.

There are many issues I care more about. The one most similar to this piece is a much longer take on how we view women in Product Management: http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/04/06/portraying-women-in-pr...

> rational actor

What does economic theory have to do with it? Rational choice theory is about making assumptions about what economic choices people will make when reasoning about people in general. It is a very limited view of human decision making, and have nothing to do with you deciding weather or not someone is rational for getting frustrated over something you don't experience.

But it's nice that you dismissed the author as being irrational. That's another common silencing tactic.

If you think something is trivial, ignore it.

Just because you were offended doesn't mean the criticism isn't on point. Nice dig at all of feminism though, again implying the small issues aren't important.

>Nice dig at all of feminism though, again implying the small issues aren't important.

No part of that was a criticism feminism. If anything, I was defending it from you.

If you think that blogs like this are a threat to feminism, I don't think we're working with the same definition of feminism. Can you please explain how you are defending feminism right now?

Surely, there are more interesting things to comment on.

I have "product guy" in my profile :) so just a counter-point:

> Working on "Product" could mean you’re a PM, a designer, an engineer, or a bunch of other things I’m probably forgetting right now.

All of this is exactly what I did when I started my company, so I'm not sure how else to convey what it is I'm actually good at. Now, I was not the best at any of these, and we subsequently hired people who are to replace me in all of those roles, but for many months I had end-to-end responsibility for our product: the feature-set, design, engineering, QA, etc.

I do think that being a "jack of all trades, master of none" is a unique skill set as well. For example, I'm not a good designer, but I was good enough to build a decent looking MVP, and also to identify and hire a designer who is actually great. Same goes for engineering, QA, etc.

And the "guy vs. gal" thing... well, "product person" just sounds awkward, and "jack of all trades" sounds arrogant, so I'm not sure what else to use.

Yeah very true! For that, I tend to say "I'm building X" vs. attributing it as "I am an X."

hello! First time I've been on HN (thanks for sharing it). FWIW - this isn't one of my favorite things I've written. It's just something that annoys me personally, so I wrote it down.

To avoid this, I often say "I really like product", which has the added bonus of neatly sidestepping most of what I do (engineering) and focusing on what I like to do.

The lack of a casual, neutral way to refer to women is a long-standing problem. I don't know what the solution is, but there's a group of women who argue that "lady" is the best term. I think it depends on the context whether "lady" is seen as being casual or formal; xojane often uses it casually: http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/where-the-hell-are-our-c...

In point one the OP complains that the term "Product Guy" is too vague and generic (which I agree with), then in point two she complains that people using the term makes her uncomfortable because there isn't an informal female equivalent.

If "Product Guy" is such a vague, generic term that myself, OP, and others feel it is, is it really a big deal that there isn't a similarly vague and generic female equivalent?

Yeah, I totally agree. And it's not like you could say "gal" either. That's just nerdy.

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