Comment by kirab
20 hours ago
> I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
and then
> I was encouraged to use "y'all" [..] I thought that was a bridge too far.
I wonder if there might be a small bias on your part. The criticism you deem constructive everyone shall endure, but the other criticism you deem a bridge too far you yourself shall not endure.
There’s a difference between feedback regarding your work and language policing something like “you guys” which some people have just suddenly decided is offensive as of 2016 or so because I guess we’ve already solved the rest of sexism.
This is/was absolutely a thing and I saw it happen to others and switched to y’all, I got called out for using “dude” and come on dude, dude is extremely gender neutral in this sense.
I have not been able to bring myself to use y’all, it just seems so fake and performative. I am not a southerner, why am I y’alling people?
1 reply →
No one decided it was offensive. Show me anyone saying they're offended by the use of "guys" as a gender neutral term.
People get lumped into "guys" and feel excluded. That's such a different bar than feeling offended.
It's ok for you to say, "I'm sorry my language makes you feel excluded, but I'm not going to change" and it's ok for someone to think less of you as a result.
Why does everyone jump to the idea that people who want more inclusive language are offended? Or that the critique being offered here is that the language is offensive?
(Granted, sometimes that is the critique. Plenty of casual racism or ableism is offensive. But that's not the case with "guys".)
This really feels like splitting hairs.
As a woman in this industry, being told that using “guys” to address mixed groups is non-inclusive/insufficiently considerate/worth thinking less of me for (just wow) is much worse than being addressed by “guys” when I’m in a mixed group.
Like… we have real problems with equality in tech, right?
55 replies →
Eh, happened to me. Decades ago, before all this wave of preformativeness. To be fair, I _was_ addressing a small group of girls my age; at the time the gender of the people involved was simply not relevant to the topic and I didn't consider it at all.
The original story about not handling criticism well was someone crying after a kind question, not merely saying something was a bridge too far. (FWIW if I saw someone cry once, I would consider it might be a one-off due to stress at home etc, not necessarily a constant personality trait I'll have to deal with regularly.)
Because he was saying “hey guys “ naturally without thinking twice.
Now you make him think twice about what he’s saying, of course he’s going to nitpick everything.
The start of the "electric company" started with I think Rita Moreno shouting "Hey you guys..."
anyway I have always considered Hey guys as gender neutral.
Merriam Webster seems to agree by listing this as a secondary meaning.
used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex saw her and the rest of the guys.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/guy
There's probably bias on my part. But I didn't cry about the criticism as the person I was replying to mentioned. Technically I abided by the criticism. I didn't agree, but I liked having the social capital with my employer more than I cared about how I felt about the policing. It's all just words in the end, I just thought it was nitpicky.
You appear to be German so I will assume you lack the cultural context to understand why these two things are not comparable. Asking someone born outside of the deep south to refer to a group of people as “y’all” is so absurd my immediate assumption would be that my coworker was playing a joke on me.
I'm very much not from anywhere resembling the American south, and "you all" is very much a part of my lexicon.
“You all” is distinct from “y’all.” The former is atypical but doesn’t sound weird, the latter was appropriated by turbo-liberals in the mid-2010s to signal that they listen to Kendrick Lamar.
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Somehow you missed: Not all critiques are equally valid or valid at all.
and then
Somehow you missed: They did deal with it. The one they criticized did not.
The difference being that telling someone they are not allowed to use "guys" is not a valid criticism. It's just someone being a bully and trying to language-police others.