- the employee pulled off the impossible

- may be already burnt out or on the brink of emotional collapse

- the "jump out of window" would have been as much of a joke as it was a coping response

- the righteous language policewoman does not feel empathy to personally ask him, how he is doing

- instead, she goes to HR to report him

- this unexpected hostility breaks the camel's back and what might have been interpreted as a joke actually wasn't. Still emotionally drained and now backstabbed, the person commits.

In short: policing voice was more important than taking a potential signal seriously. How is it not a despicable behavior in this situation?

PS: I hereby permit the commenters to reprimand me for the stereotype-based guess.

It doesn't, this kind of language policing is all about control and power.

A friend of mine worked as consultant with a big bank in London. They would get weekly emails about what kind of "newspeak" is allowed or not.

They seriously banned terms such as an "all hands meeting".

Woke 1 was absolutely crazy.

I feel like the affluent just love to invent new words to show the “others” that aren’t using it how backwards they are, and how the affluent are truly enlightened.

LatinX is awful. An AIM screen name from 1998.

It is interesting how different locations find different things offensive. Only when I was living in Europe for a while (doing Blizzard Customer Service) did I became aware of how big a deal the usage of N word was, as over here the K-word (look up "South Africa k-word" if you don't know it) is the word of choice for the, unevolved, die hard racists.

Was similarly unaware, (but not really surprised in hindsight) how World War II references were much better left avoided and Nazi references an enormous no-no. Over here references to Nazism are very rare and while South Africans did fight and die for the Allies in Europe, the impact of WW2 over here was no where near what it was like for most of the rest of the world.

Classifying a Latina as a Latino or vice-versa will get you in a pretty serious fight in a lot of places.

And no it's not just privileged white people. My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.

I'd recommend getting out a bit more or reading a bit more:

> According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,[7][21][22] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language."[20][23] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.[24][25] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.[21] A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.[10]

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

9/10 Latinos would roll their eyes and get back to doing actual work, they don't have time to be offended.

It's all a performance to them anyway, and I'm not playing the game.

People get lumped into "guys" and feel excluded. That's such a different bar than feeling offended.

It's ok for you to say, "I'm sorry my language makes you feel excluded, but I'm not going to change" and it's ok for someone to think less of you as a result.

Why does everyone jump to the idea that people who want more inclusive language are offended? Or that the critique being offered here is that the language is offensive?

(Granted, sometimes that is the critique. Plenty of casual racism or ableism is offensive. But that's not the case with "guys".)

anyway I have always considered Hey guys as gender neutral.

Merriam Webster seems to agree by listing this as a secondary meaning.

used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex saw her and the rest of the guys.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/guy

The normal way for languages to evolve is for words to spread into different (adjacent) forms in order to express more nuances of their original meaning(s). The collapse of words' meanings, and for basic things as (nominative case) pronouns no less, like it happened in English for "thou" and "you", is not fitting the definition of "normal" in the larger context of linguistics domain.

Also, is it just me or does that Wikipedia entry have zero citations? I thought Wikipedia was allergic to citation-free claims..

Again, because you don’t have to deal with it constantly. Women are constantly being undermined.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91630773/theres-a-career-tax-on-...

> there's a difference between empathy and just policing language for no discernable reason.

And what I said in my comment is that I don’t know which happened to you, but that it’s important to understand that because you’re not suffering the everyday repercussions which are treated as “normal”, maybe you don’t really know which one it was either. That’s where the empathy comes in, it’s you reaching out to the person and talking about it, rather than just complaining about it on the internet.

> I think the reason you were downvoted wasn't the call to empathy

I was not referring to an isolated incident. In fact, I can fairly often predict when the worst people will come out to downvote and run (they never have the courage to comment). At this point I can assert with a good amount of confidence that HN has a severe dipshit problem.

> the insinuation that I somehow was not being empathetic in my comment

There was no such insinuation, but it is increasingly common on HN that people just read anything and foam at the mouth thinking they are being attacked. For a community which prides themselves on objectivity and correctness, there sure are a lot of assumptions and wrong interpretations.

> which perhaps I was not being empathetic but it seems irrelevant to the topic at hand.

As long as you believe being empathetic to a person who was affected by your words is irrelevant, you will be incapable of understanding the situation, seeing it for what it really is, and navigate it appropriately.

I don't think this is hard or complex. It's an easy question with a simple answer: do you like working with user foo? Whether you answer yes or no, why?

If virtually all your coworkers answer no, and the org feels it's in their interest to kick you out, then what lesson do you take from that?

And let's not forget that someone going around inventing fires to put out that he alone can put out is also something that fits the description of an agenda.

So no, sometimes the world is not our to get you. Sometimes you cause grief to everyone around you, to the point that it's a net benefit to get rid of you.

People need to stop confusing geeks and nerds with being socially awkward and outright sociopaths. Enjoying tinkering with things doesn't require you to be abhorrent or lack any social skills. You're not smart or intelligent if you believe it's a good idea to go around telling others to fix problems they don't have and being obnoxious about it. Being able to fix a bug does not change that.

You might 'care' to add features nobody asked for? Or 'care' to spend longer than necessary to refactor something that doesn't need it.

What does this even mean? This sounds like an euphemism for someone being a jerk just because they wanted to unilaterally push changes to the code.

> It saddens me when management supports egos more than the product. It shows up years later to the customers.

Management are hired to support the people that maintain the product, and help them work together. If a developer fails to work together with coworkers, it's the manager's job to either help that developer right their wrongs, or support other developers by getting rid of the problematic one.

Good point. What I described is not some law of nature, but a function of the current long-term fad of American ultracapitalism.

Happily, the signs are that this is all falling apart in an irreversible way. Whatever rises from the ashes might resemble a civilization again, if we're lucky.

Personally I was not aware of that and I feel like something like that should have come up during the entire time he was being deplatformed.

But, was he referencing actual testicles or did he just use the term "balls" in a tongue in cheek manner (to mean like, chutzpah or something?)