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Comment by makeitsuckless | Hacker News Reader

I'm now over 45, and I've never, ever worked for a company like that.

So ask yourself: how do bloggers that rant about such companies get this wisdom?

It's always the people that play the game and fail that loudly blame the game.

I expect it is unfair to generalize that "people that play the game and fail" blame the game. Rather there are a number of people who do not understand how communities work, and never have, and so they don't recognize when they are being antagonistic to the very people they want to be friends with.

I remember having a conversation with a relatively new programmer who was ranting they were "fed up with all the political BS and just wanted to write code and be left alone." That is a sentiment I completely resonate with, but in this case the "political BS" was folks trying to help this person become more effective in the organization.

What was impairing their efficiency was that this individual wrote code in a vacuum. people trying to integrate with it were frustrated when this developer decides on Friday night that they don't like how they structured the APIs with an opaque handle and convert everything into a callbacks which appears as the new API to the rest of the organization on Monday. It wasn't "political BS" that was causing these folks to be angry with this individual, it was that this individual was actively making their job harder than needed.

But when it became clear that more people where being hindered than helped, I was asked to step in and see if I could help this person see what the real issues were. I was only 50% effective, they understood the issue but decided to leave rather than slow down to listen to the needs of the other engineers. To this day they assert they were 'forced out' but nothing could be further from the truth.

> I was asked to ... see if I could help this person .... they understood the issue but decided to leave .... To this day they assert they were 'forced out' ....

Off-topic rant: For the love of God, will everyone please STOP with the use of they as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. History shows us a better way: Decades ago, feminists coined the term Ms., which has all but totally replaced the old-fashioned Miss and Mrs. Those concerned with gender neutrality should do likewise, instead of inflicting ambiguity and inaccuracy on the rest of us by (mis)using they.

</rant>

I understand your rant, and I've been around for a while, I explicitly use the gender neutral pronoun because of a post I made here where someone took my LinkedIn history, gender of the person, and subject and back tracked it to an individual who later, and quite reasonably, chastised me about sharing in public.

Since that time, I've paid more attention to whether or not I can share an example at all given how easily the Internet allows one to deduce such things. Not surprisingly, the Internet doesn't like obviously fictionalized examples either so it limits my sharing to things about me and things which I can make reasonably opaque.

> I explicitly use the gender neutral pronoun because of a post I made here where someone took my LinkedIn history, gender of the person, and subject and back tracked it to an individual who later, and quite reasonably, chastised me about sharing in public.

That's certainly a valid concern. Another approach would be simply to keep repeating "the person" instead of they, as in: I was asked to ... see if I could help this person .... the person understood the issue but decided to leave .... To this day the person claims to have been 'forced out' .... That's a bit jarring, granted, but at least it doesn't promote linguistic abomination <g>.

On a related note, I was recently at a church service where the prayers had been changed to eliminate any pronoun for God. EXAMPLE adapted from Psalm 103: Bless the LORD, O my soul, And all that is within me, bless God's [vice His] holy name.

Getting mad about singular 'they' is like getting mad about singular 'you'.

no clear cut misuse and has been in use both informally and in English literature for centuries - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Acceptability_and...

> no clear cut misuse and has been in use both informally and in English literature for centuries

But disapproved by most style guides, school English teachers, etc., because it's inaccurate.

And yet thou does use the word "you" routinely in its singular, which is also inaccurate, bearing the same relationship with "thou" as "they" does with "he", "she", or "it".

> And yet thou does use the word "you" routinely in its singular, which is also inaccurate

The singular you is seldom used as such in written language intended to be read by numerous others, so it's far less likely to be jarring or to cause confusion.

Thou comest at the king, as it is said, and thou had best not miss:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h...

See my comment down-thread about Jane Austen and bloodletting.

(I'll stop now; we've hit diminishing returns.)

Just to be clear, it's Language Log that's Omar in this silly little metaphor. I was making an appeal to authority, but of a different sort than "yet another famous author using singular they". :)

I'm going to use that first sentence as my stock rebuttal to everything from now on.

If it's good enough for Jane Austen, it's good enough for me.

> If it's good enough for Jane Austen, it's good enough for me.

Imagine that your doctor wanted to bleed you to cure an infection, on grounds that bloodletting was accepted medical practice in Jane Austen's day. [1]

(This is also a reply to Thomas's up-thread shoot-at-the-king comment, which has no Reply link for me.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

My argument was, of course, rather flippant. To put flesh on the skeleton, but remove the wit of brevity:

I cite Jane Austen here not so much because her English was seen as exemplary in her time, but because we widely hold her as a premier role model today.

> it's inaccurate

Not according to Stephen Pinker, who I believe is considerably more authoritative than either of us when it comes to grammar and etymology.

If it helps, the inaccuracy argument never really held water. 18th century grammarians (who wanted English to be more like Latin) argued that generic he was better because it agreed with its referent in number. But even if you accept that premise, all they did was trade an inconsistency in number for one in gender. That's certainly not a win and arguably a loss for accuracy.

People may not have noticed that at the time, but we do now for obvious reasons, which is why singular they has made a comeback, not that it ever went away. It's just idiomatic English reasserting itself. Soon we'll forget it was controversial.

> all they did was trade an inconsistency in number for one in gender. That's certainly not a win and arguably a loss for accuracy

It's not progress to revert to a previously-fixed inaccuracy solely because of changing tastes. We wouldn't admire it in programming unless it were clearly necessary, or at least a useful kluge on balance. Here, it's neither.

The better approach would be to coin another word, along the lines of Ms. vice Miss and Mrs., as I suggested above. Quoting Wikipedia: "For example, abbreviated pronouns have been proposed: 'e (for he or she) or 's (for his/hers); h' (for him/her in object case); "zhe" (also "ze"), "zher(s)" (also "zer" or "zir"), "shi"/"hir", and "zhim" (also "mer") for "he or she", "his or her(s)", and "him or her", respectively; 'self (for himself/herself); and hu, hus, hum, humself (for s/he, his/hers, him/her, himself/herself). [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...

Yes. In my experience, co-workers who complain about management sociopaths are more likely to be the ones coveting their jobs.

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