A first I was like âoh god, touchy-feely engineeringâ but then I actually read Bryan Cantrillâs text and yeah, I think heâs right.
You donât have to be an engineer to recognize that gender as a construct is not structurally sound. 
But just so you heard it from us: if this were the act of a Joyent employee, we wouldâto deliberately use a gender-neutral pronounâfire them.
Are shitty labour practices also a core engineering value?
Good engineers have always had empathy, it goes with the job. Learning how a diesel engine 3 stories high feels in rough weather or the struggles of a cars gearbox that say go easy on me.
Being sacked for calling a boat her or she sounds like blatant capitulation to some notion of what fanatical feminists want. Empathy is about a feeling which does not necessarily need words to communicate. Sacking someone for poor choice of words is an unepathetic over reaction and definitely from the rulebook of totalitarianism. I wouldnât want to work for you.
An engineer
Werner Von Braun used slave labor and got the US to the moon. So no, empathy is not a core value of engineering.
It is a core value of not being a dick, that itself should be sufficient.
These flimsy âsee, we are rational about itâ excuses annoy me, as they try to fit anything in the context of making money.
Poor choice of words? Skipping reading the article to save time, are we?
itâs not the use of the gendered pronoun thatâs at issue (thatâs just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered.
Werner Von Braun used slave labor and got the US to the moon. So no, empathy is not a core value of engineering.
I believe that is a poorly designed and executed argument. So just maybe empathy actually is a core value of engineering. Godwin is a thing because it was long ago proven that bringing up Naziâs can pretty much only polarize and weaken conversation. Itâs bad engineering relative to the open exchange of ideas.
Engineering is not just about getting a thing done, itâs about serving people. If you treat people like interchangeable sacks of meat, then itâs pretty likely youâre not giving much thought to their other actual needs, and your design will be flawed relative to what people actually need. Things like respect, dignity, and kindness. We have all been in badly designed spaces, used poorly conceived machines, and been amazed at the lack of foresight evident in some projects.
The only thing i ever liked about Ayn Rand was that I read most of her work as various examples of engineering gone awry, gone away from what people actually need. The fountainhead, Anthem, etcâŚ
I donât agree with her solutions, but I like the way she posed the problem in such stark and believable terms.
It was not about a poor choice of words, but about not accepting an appropriate change to gender neutral. And Iâm not sure Iâd want to work for you.
A robopsychologist
Nobody gets sacked for a poor choice of words once in a while.
They get sacked for being sanctimonious dicks when theyâre asked to keep such preferences to themselves while at work, by their employer.
As it should be.
Yup, thatâs some serious empathy right there.
It does make sense though, in that empathy is largely the ability and inclination to put yourself in someone elseâs shoes. A lot of engineering at a high level is figuring out how other people are going to use your product, which means seeing things from other peopleâs perspectives. At a low level, itâs about figuring our whatâs going to go wrong, which is easier to do if you can get your mind out of your own headspace to think of things that arenât immediately and naturally obvious to you.
As far as I can make out, nowhere does Ben âreject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be genderedâ that seems to be something invented in the Joyent blog post so they can get angry at it and talk about firing people.
The change was actually rejected for being trivial, which I can understand, it was one word in a comment that didnât affect the execution of the code or enhance the understanding of the function.
That Ben did not appreciate that some people attach greater importance (more it seems that making the code more readable) to the role of gender language could be seen as a lack of empathy, however to label him some kind of sexist douche, and suggest that he should be fired, based on no evidence at all is certainly worse.
Ironically, given what this is all about, the comments would be better to be rewritten without âheâ or âtheyâ as there is no human involved.
âI personally dislike randomly substituting âsheâ for âheâ; my preference is to use the singular they/them âŚâ
The problem with this is that âtheyâ and âthemâ are not singular pronouns. English doesnât really HAVE a gender-neutral singular pronoun. (At least we donât randomly - or not so randomly - assign gender to nouns. In French voiture (car) is feminine and autobus (bus) is masculine. Go figure.)
I guess you could argue that usage is making âtheyâ and âthemâ both singular and plural (context-dependent), but I think what we really need is a newly-invented gender- (or sex-, if you prefer) neutral singular pronoun.
But then I guess we already have one: s/he. Meh. Kinda ugly. Maybe we could promote âit.â
Empathy is a core engineering â or human â value: Agreed.
Not using gendered pronouns: Lazy, lousy solution. The optimum answer is to shift the conversation from the abstract to the concrete. âIn this example [pick a name randomly] needs to do thus-and-such.â Follow thru using the name and appropriate pronoun for that individual. Almost as good is to switch to first and second person â you and/or I â which are neuter in English; unfortunately many companies consider this undesirable for various reasons (mostly bad ones)
The usual comany-endorsed bad answer is to go into passive voice and avoid mentioning individuals at all. Which all too often produces hard-to-read textâŚ
Or a name that doesnât indicate gender.
Huh. Worrying about this kind of thing is probably why the Western World canât do engineering for toffee these daysâŚ
See, thereâs this nut, and this bolt, and youâve got to connect one to the other. But you canât do this until youâve been to a seminar to explain to you why your documentation of this process has to be gender-neutral. Or gender-random. Or whatever this weekâs fad isâŚ
(Note the cunning use of second-person aboveâŚ)
From TFA:
my preference is to use the singular they/them
Fuck you, Bryan Cantrill; there IS NO singular they/them in English. As much as you might wish thatâs not the case, it is.
Either accept that writing the bulky âhe or sheâ is the ONLY correct way to use singular pronouns from a gender-neutral position, or decide that a smoother flow is more important than gender politics, and just go with one gender or another. You canât have it both ways.
ETA: Look at the edit in question: Revert "doc: Removed use of gendered pronouns" ¡ joyent/libuv@804d40e ¡ GitHub
While âheâ may just as wrong as using âshe,â the uses of âthemâ and âtheyâ that were rejected were 100% grammatically incorrect.
ETA2: Oh, rich irony, Joylent of all companies lecturing the masses on ethics:
Granted. âStandard metasyntactic variablesâ.
