Comment by _huayra_
5 years ago
I worked on a small team with a very "code bro" culture. No toxic, but definitely making non-PC jokes. We would often say "Ask your doctor about Premature Abstractuation" or "Bad news, dr. says this code has abstractual dysfunction" in code reviews when someone would build an AbstractFactoryFactoryTemplateConstructor for a one-off item.
When we got absorbed by a larger team and were going to have to "merge" our code review / git history into a larger org's repos, we learned that a sister team had gotten in big trouble with the language cops in HR when they discovered similar language in their git commit history. This brings back memories of my team panicked over trying to rewrite a huge amount of git history and code review stuff to sanitize our language before we were caught too.
Wait whaat? I am not from USA and hail from a much more blunt culture, what's wrong with those 2 statements?
To me they're harmless jokes but maybe someone will point out they're ableist?
Those aren't particularly bad, but dick jokes have no place in a professional workplace imo. I'm so very weary of it. And yes, in the past I was part of the problem. Then I grew up.
It wasn't just these phrases, but we took them out to be safe (thinking that them being jokes about male... "performance", like from pharma ads on TV with an old man throwing a football through a tire swing).
The biggest thing is that we used non-PC language like "retarded" very casually, not to mention casually swearing in commit messages e.g. "un-fucking up my prior commit". Our sister team got in trouble for "swears in the git commit history", so we wanted to get ahead of that if possible.
In a healthy company culture, we'd just say "okay we'll stop using these terms", but the effort was made to erase their existence because this was a company where non-engineering people (e.g. how well managers and HR liked you) was a big factor in getting promoted.
Once I realized how messed up that whole situation was, I left as fast as I could.
If you were "caught", what would happen? You probably have a couple of zoom calls and get forced to watch sensitivity training videos. Who cares.