Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tayo42 4 days ago
You never had a list of banned words at work? You missed the whole master/main thing? Words prefixed with black/white weren't given alternatives?

I had a manager once go thorough one of my slack conversations and go line by line with how I could rephrase things with softer corporate jargon.

There's books on leadership, books like crucial conversations, books on managing up. The industry is obsessed with staff engineers now and there's on that and the differentiator in that role is getting people to do things.

If you really don't deal with that, let me know where I can send a resume I'd love to work with normal people.

2 comments

where i am from, such policing is illegal. germany has a different approach to freedom of speech. no institution is allowed to even monitor, let alone censor private conversations (that includes overhearing something). private conversations at work are private and legally protected. the only time when a company can interfere is if the manner of communication (not the content) is disruptive. and getting fired for being disruptive in most cases leads to a lawsuit from the employee against the company, and so courts will decide if there actually was a disruption, and if it was bad enough to warrant dismissal.
No, I never had any of that. I worked as the dev at a family-owned printing company, around 100 employees.