Comment by _huayra_

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.