I've always been curious about folks who use this phrasing and tone.
"Are you aware" always seems condescending to me. It's a weird assumption to make that because someone made a choice, that they weren't aware that there were other choices.
It's like walking up to someone who drives a Honda and saying "are you aware you could have bought a Ford?"
Please help me, us there another interpretation of this kind of phrasing?
I hate the "not all" argument. It falsely accuses us of making a claim that all X has property Y. It falsely implies that we cannot comment about a feature unless we expand the comment to the universe of other features. The "didn't you know" barb ties in here, as it presupposed that we somehow agreed to this "must include all" rule and broke it.
You could take it at face value. I have no idea if this was a 15 minute off-the-cuff effort, or a larger researched project. Rather than assume they either did or did not know, I asked. If they knew, they can explain their choice more. If they did not, they have something new to look into.
If you are taking it as condescending, that is on you. It was simply a question.
The best way to look at it is that "are you aware" is always condescending. There are two answers; yes and no. If they say yes, they have to apologize for not adding your feature. If they say no, you're calling them ignorant. There isn't an out that deescalates and reduces the toxicity, so you're forcing everyone to now be as rude as you.
Phrasing your statement like "my corporate year starts on November 15th; is there any way to offset the start of the year?" would sound nicer. If the author was aware of that and didn't add the feature, then they can say so. Or if they weren't aware, they can say "good idea". Now nobody has to get defensive and the heat of the conversation can generally decrease, keeping everyone happy and polite.
> If you are taking it as condescending, that is on you.
Tone is an essential, unavoidable, yet undefineable thing. There's a geek fantasy that humans communicate logically and explicitly using only literal meanings of words, but the reality is that most human communication is in body language, tone, emotion, context, and more - and there's no way to define exactly how all those work or what they mean.
I got the same impression as the GP. I'm not always great at it myself but unless I make sure my tone conveys what I want it to convey, I'm rolling the dice.
I would like to integrate with 30 bespoke SSO providers; is that something that I could be charged $100/user/month for after spending 8 hours of my time in some Zoom calls with people that aren't sure?
A quick Google shows 65% of public companies use calendar year as their FY.
At our startup, it's even more complicated :) we use calendar year for official financial / business metrics, while our planning quarter is offset by 1 month (Q1 = Feb/Mar/Apr).
At least you're using the actual months. I've recently had to deal with 4-5-4 Retail Calendars. Explaining to my coworkers why the data for September includes dates from both August and October, and that's Working As Intended.
I can't remember the last time I worked at a corporation that used the actual Gregorian calendar.
Most of the times it's some shadow-Greg calendar that's slightly out of phase. E.g., I think my 2025Q1 starts on 1 Mar? I've never been entirely sure.
Intel used some "work week" concept that I never figured out the rules for, in the entire time I worked there, beyond that it wasn't ISO weeks.
The spirit of the idea is neat, though, and I should build something like this internally but using whatever esocalendar we're using… then I'd be able to remember whether we're +1 mo, +2 mo, 1Y-1mo … or whatever … out of phase with normal people.
> The International Fixed Calendar divides the year into 13 months of 28 days each. A type of perennial calendar, every date is fixed to the same weekday every year. Though it was never officially adopted at the country level, the entrepreneur George Eastman instituted its use at the Eastman Kodak Company in 1928, where it was used until 1989.
"Are you aware" always seems condescending to me. It's a weird assumption to make that because someone made a choice, that they weren't aware that there were other choices.
It's like walking up to someone who drives a Honda and saying "are you aware you could have bought a Ford?"
Please help me, us there another interpretation of this kind of phrasing?