[weareconvo]

The chick in charge of the Internal Tools team? That shit is widely regarded within Google as a dead-end ghetto, devoid of opportunities for promotion and looked down on by the other focus areas.

- 5+ year Ex-Googler

EDIT: I'm done with this fucking site. You won't have weareconvo to kick around anymore.

[kgrin]

You can make the point about tools being a dead end (which I have no particular insight about, so I'll take your word for it) without being unnecessarily dismissive of the individual as a "chick".

[shadowmatter]

As another year ex-Googler, I'd say this is BS. Everything that superseded the "gconfig" days was pretty amazing, and IIRC the team behind it in NY did quite well for themselves. Steve Yegge wrote GROK, which is an internal tool, and I'm pretty sure no one around here looks down on him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTJs-0EInW8

[magicalist]

Steve Yegge is probably a better example, but another that comes to mind is that Guido wrote the code review system there. He left for dropbox, but he was at Google for years, so clearly something was worth the 50% or whatever of his time left over from python dictatorship duties.

In an earlier comment, OP mentions leaving Google before Go was released, which was quite a while ago now, so not sure why he felt the need to chime in. He just sounds like he wanted to be an asshole, honestly.

[weareconvo]

I think the fact that I worked there for over 5 and a half years should afford my opinion a bit more weight, but as I despise the Argument By Authority fallacy, I'll concede that any other Xoogler should be able to chime in and contradict me here.

[nostrademons]

Current Googler here. When did you leave? A previous comment of yours says that it was before Go was released, which was in 2009.

Internal tools & developer infrastructure have gotten noticeably better since 2011, which was when Ms. Meckfessel took over. As engineers, we routinely use tools that were dismissed as impossible when I joined in 2009. If you're thinking about the gconfig/mk-debug days, the developer experience is orders of magnitude better now.

[SeanDav]

This is a spiteful and misogynistic comment - you do yourself and this community, a large disservice.

[RyanZAG]

Calm down a second. You're obviously taking offense of the phrase "The chick in charge of the Internal Tools team?". While the word is often used in the fairly female hostile line of "I'm off to pick up chicks", it also has a very common usage for an (attractive) young woman in certain demographics.

As far as I can tell, the OP is not trying to make a misogynistic comment on purpose and biting his head off and shouting at him is not going to help the community, or the OP, or your point. If this was an actual misogynistic comments - "A girl in Google? Fire her!" - then the outrage would be well placed. A very commonly used colloquial term, however, at most deserves a polite request to use better language in future.

[crazygringo]

I understand your point, but even according to your second definition ("an attractive young woman"), it comes across as misogynistic.

Because simply referring to her as "the chick who..." basically implies that she is principally a "chick" -- not a smart woman, not a capable professional, but just a "chick". Outside of professional contexts, it can sometimes be fine, but in commenting on a professional article, it absolutely is demeaning and there is no place for it.

[mixmixmix]

>> ("an attractive young woman"), it comes across as misogynistic

No, it doesn't.

I think you should invest in a good dictionary. You're walking on very, very thin ice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

[weareconvo]

Says the guy named "crazygringo".

[weareconvo]

Thank you for the benefit of the doubt. Admittedly, if I cared about being taken seriously, I would've chosen my words more carefully. However, I just felt like dashing off a quick comment to let people know that the core tone of the article is at odds with reality.

[eblume]

Agreed. Even if it's true, I hope that the HN community can all agree that comments like this reflect poorly on us -- lets certainly not reward them.

[weareconvo]

Or let's just not put words in my fucking mouth by declaring what connotation I had in mind by my use of the word "chick".

[Kylekramer]

Words have connotations whether you mean them or not. It is hard to see how you could not foresee a negative reaction to calling a woman being featured in a professional context a "chick".

[weareconvo]

Surprisingly, nobody jumped on "crazygringo" when he attacked my usage of a word with a negative connotation.

By the way, if anyone's inclined to fucking ASK why I used that word at any point in the next century, I use words like "dude", "chick", and "radical" because I enjoy the delightful throwback. Such idioms are definitely in my wheelhouse.

[mixmixmix]

Once upon a time the word "misogynistic" actually had real meaning.

But, thanks to mostly people like you, that word has been hugely trivialized to mean not much more well... than anything really.

Let's not burn the OP at the stake just because he used a word that you think is somehow improper. That's something you have to deal with all on your own.

[ionforce]

I doubt you would have said the same thing if the post started with "that dude" or "that guy".

[jamesaguilar]

Maybe because neither of those words connote vapidity?

[sliverstorm]

What's the feminine alternative to "dude"?

[jamesaguilar]

None that occur to me off the top of my head, at least not when speaking about someone negatively. You could always go full-ninja-turtles and call her a dudette. Chick certainly isn't it, though.

[paulrademacher]

According to wikipedia, either "dudette" or "dudess."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dude

[wikiburner]

Just curious, how offensive is "chick"? I catch myself accidentally using it every once in a while (a vestige of shitty, all-boys Catholic high schooling). Should I be mildly embarrassed or mortified?

[jamesaguilar]

It depends. If you're using it in a negative statement, it tends to connote a woman who isn't very smart. If you're making a positive statement, I think it would be roughly equivalent in formality to calling someone a "babe," without the connotation of being pretty. So still don't use it to talk about someone in a professional context.

[silencio]

Probably older, probably more experienced, subject of a news story, in a fairly professional context? Kind of offensive (IMO).

I think outside of common terms like "chick flick", this is just like using "girls" to refer to adult women - think to yourself, if you replaced the term with something like "boy" or "dude" how would you sound?

I don't really go on crusades about these particular uses of words because I feel there are better fights to fight, but I would never refer to a man in this particular context as a dude. Maybe I'm overly politically correct, but I try to be respectful to everyone.

[brown9-2]

In this context it reads as highly dismissive.

[pekk]

About as offensive as "geezer" or "cracker".

[sliverstorm]

Absolutely depends. Some people find "chick" just about as offensive as "nigger", while some people don't care in the slightest. I've known a number of women who freely use "chick" to refer to themselves or their friends.

[weareconvo]

If you're a PC douchebag who actively seeks out opportunities to be offended by things, then, sure. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend it.

[weareconvo]

No, it's not. It's the truth.

[crazygringo]

I'm only responding to this because your comment is #1 on the page right now.

The factuality of your comment has nothing to do with it.

Calling her a "chick" is like calling Larry Page a "boy toy" -- the word is used largely in sexual situations ("picking up chicks"), and is incredibly unprofessional and demeaning in a professional context like the workplace, or Hacker News.

And talking about the Internal Tools team as "that shit" is equally unprofessional and demeaning to everyone who works on it.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

[mixmixmix]

"And talking about the Internal Tools team as "that shit" is equally unprofessional and demeaning to everyone who works on it."

Really? Did you go around and ask everyone who works there if they feel "it's unprofessional and demeaning"? Or is it just you who feels that way?

Please don't blow this out of proportion.

[weareconvo]

>Calling her a "chick" is like calling Larry Page a "boy toy" -- the word is used largely in sexual situations ("picking up chicks"), and is incredibly unprofessional and demeaning in a professional context like the workplace, or Hacker News.

Then why don't you just ask what I meant by "chick" rather than insisting I was being sexist?

> And talking about the Internal Tools team as "that shit" is equally unprofessional and demeaning to everyone who works on it.

More demeaning than the comment itself, in which I actively demean the team by pointing out that everyone else in the company laughs at them?

[pasbesoin]

"chick"

I don't have to go past that word, to have a problem with your comment in this context.

[weareconvo]

Maybe you should be more open-minded then.

[eclipxe]

How is it misogynistic?

[ezy]

I don't get this. You mentioned in a subsequent comment that it's hard to be promoted inside google unless you "release", then go on to trash others by saying that Tools has unnecessary releases.

So is this something problematic about Tools, or about Google's culture in general? It sounds like you're criticizing the idea of using "releases" as a benchmark when inappropriate, yet you are disparaging someone else's work (what would you do?) because they have to adapt to the (dysfunctional?) corporate culture… Seems like making the best of a bad situation.

As far as relative status goes, "hackers" need to care a little bit less about other people's accomplishments or lack thereof. I've heard this kind of trash talk before (both direct and indirect) too many times in tech circles, and no matter how justified you may think it is… it just reflects badly on the person saying it.

[weareconvo]

I'm mocking the situation:

- Promotion is largely driven by launches

- Erego, people launch unnecessary shit

- That's ridiculous

- ???

- The New Hangouts

[VladRussian2]

yep, i've seen too many times how such things happen at various places to imagine that it can go any differently:

"... she brought a “product perspective” to Google’s developer tools, insisting that, although they were only used inside the company, they should be treated like like products used by the world at large. “She bootstrapped a new charter for the team,” he says. “We had to think of these as products used by other Google engineers — and she brought that attitude. We had to think of them as cohesive things, to give them a nice presentation. That had not been the focus before.”"

focus, perspective, think of as product, bootstrap, charter, cohesive, team... 7 large ones in BS-bingo.

[weareconvo]

It's hard to get promoted at Google unless you launch things, and the Internal Tools team never launched shit. So they just latch onto any excuse to launch whatever they can, even if it makes no fucking sense. You'll see this a lot with other Google products too, Gmail being one of the worst offenders (totally unnecessary UI changes that piss everyone off, changing Gtalk into Hangouts just to have a chance to launch a new app, etc).

The Gtalk one is particularly ridiculous if you buy into their disingenuous arguments about combining disparate forms of messaging, especially given the spectacular failure of Wave, which tried to do the exact same thing. But if you view it through the lens of "Gtalk hadn't launched anything in a while, and their engineers wanted to launch something" it makes perfect sense.

[spudlyo]

I would gladly give half my karma to downvote this comment into oblivion. I wouldn't have thought that this kind of dismissive misogyny would stand on HN.

[VladRussian2]

>EDIT: I'm done with this fucking site. You won't have weareconvo to kick around anymore.

com'n, man! From high moral ground these lemmings here tar-n-feathered Swartz, and you're getting emotional over their inability to hear word "chick" without getting their heartbeat racing and palpitation.

[circuiter]

Relax and hang around. Those complaining are most likely poseur male-feminists. They might as well protest in 'chick-lit' sections of bookstores.

[aresant]

Although it's from the distance past (1995) this article sheds a bit of light on the word "chick"

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...

And several people and sexes are well represented with their very individualized take on the meaning of the word.

In my experience in Southern California "chick" is more or less synonymous with "dood" when referring to a third-party casually.

However it was probably a poor word choice to comment on an article that many seem to interpret as a gender discussion piece.

[weareconvo]

...any comments about the actual content of my post, or are we just going to talk about my odd use of SoCal surfer idioms for a while?

[jamesaguilar]

If you didn't mix your acidity into the content, this issue would never have come up. Hopefully this can be some kind of teachable moment for you and others who feel that extreme bluntness or rudeness have no effect on the bandwidth of a conversation. In fact, they are noise, and if you've read anything about signals processing, you know what effect this has.