That's not even the worse part. The refusal to make a change that costs you nothing in order to stick it to people you don't like is much worse and indicates all sorts of behaviors you do not want on your team.
I was mentally and physically abused as a child by my stepfather.
If, in the middle of him choking me unconscious someone had given me the choice between "lots of people tell him he's horrible" and "someone gets him off of me", which do you think I would choose?
Do you think those who are disadvantaged due to their race would rather you worry about helping them get on their feet or not hiring someone for not wanting to name a branch "main".
You add to the hurt of this world in the name of victims who would rather you do something more useful. This is about you, not about them.
> You add to the hurt of this world in the name of victims who would rather you do something more useful.
Wrong. Maybe try talking to people that don't want that kind of verbiage instead of making bad assumptions. Removing terminology associated with slavery has high support among those that actually were descendants of slaves.
Am I hire-able? I aint white, so presumably you SHOULD hire me to help with racism. yet I rename my main branch to master on all personal projects.
So the question becomes, do the above posters hire me or not? Presumably no since I have the wrong opinion but if they refuse to hire me they're furthering racial inequities so then presumably yes.
Of course, this paradox goes away the second you acknowledge both are stupid reasons to hire or fire anyone.
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Here's the real problem with the other posters.
A complete and utter lack of respect for the effects of their decisions on the lives of other people.
It's why I'm such a fan of the following C.S Lewis quote
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
It really is not about that. The problem is that some people feel the need to bend over backwards, making symbolic gestures that do not change the underlying issue. As if renaming 'whitelist' to 'allowlist' is going to turn any neo-nazis into angels.
> As if renaming 'whitelist' to 'allowlist' is going to turn any neo-nazis into angels.
As if that's the point?
What do you think a hostile workplace is? Do you think being consistently subjected to verbiage that negatively impacts your mental health is a good thing?
Seems odd to me that so many people want to hold onto things that hurt other people and justify it by saying it doesn't solve anything despite the fact that those people are telling you that it will help them.
I don’t think the idea is to convert neo-nazis. People feel pretty powerless to help fight racism and doing small things like this help them feel a bit better.
Also, changing language that explicitly says “white good”, “black bad” can’t really hurt. It takes very little effort and “allow list” is actually clearer anyway.
> Also, changing language that explicitly says “white good”, “black bad” can’t really hurt. It takes very little effort and “allow list” is actually clearer anyway.
That isn't what they say at all. The only way that argument holds any water is with profound ignorance.
It's the same line of thinking as saying that "red team" is offensive because "red" used to be a derogatory term for native Americans. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816
For the same reason black card is considered exclusive and prestigious.
Maybe you are the problem, associating everything with race and in if in your mind black is inferior, then everything using black as an adjective would be negative for you.
It does cost something, quite a lot actually, my company (correctly) refused to bow to the pressure to migrate because it would have been too expensive to update our tooling.
And acquiescing meekly to absurd demands is a much worse behavior for a team.
Even worse behavior in a teammate would be trying to browbeat their coworkers into wasting energy on performative nonsense to score social status points.
In a just world anyone who suggested this would be fired immediately.
Does that shift not regularly annoy other people? I work on several projects throughout the week and not all had their primary branch moved from master to main. I end up getting the branch name wrong a few times a week when context switching..
Is there a better solution than updating some of the older projects and automation?
Not diving into the debate about whether this is a useful change, but I do want to push back on the notion that this "costs you nothing." It costs effort, which means it costs billable hours, and therefore money. The question is if that spend pays dividends.
It also creates downstream impacts. Reddit famously had a major outage caused by this; my team had all of our builds break because a transitive dependency changed methods from "blacklist" to "allowlist".
I was mentally and physically abused as a child by my stepfather.
If, in the middle of him choking me unconscious someone had given me the choice between "lots of people tell him he's horrible" and "someone gets him off of me", which do you think I would choose?
Do you think those who are disadvantaged due to their race would rather you worry about helping them get on their feet or not hiring someone for not wanting to name a branch "main".
You add to the hurt of this world in the name of victims who would rather you do something more useful. This is about you, not about them.