As someone who successfully raised one puppy (disgustingly shameless clickbait: [1]) I can recommend a critical principle that applies to software developers as well:
Only positive reinforcement: for the dog, you don't even express disapproval when they mess in the house. You just carry them outside, plus express wild approval when they do it outside.
I don't recommend picking up your developers and carrying them around, but you get the idea.
"But they have to learn what's bad, too!" you're saying. Yes, but they'll notice that you're not doing that "wild approval" thing for certain behaviors, and instead showing them the correct one. They're a lot smarter than laboratory rats. Most developers are as well.
But the overriding reason is: you want the dog to be happy. Because then he'll make you happy.
I think the idea is to correct incorrect actions, not to emotionally penalise them - this is basically the same as no-blame culture where you change the processes that enabled the mistake to be made rather than punishing the person who happened to make it.
Note I don't say "intentionally hide it." I suggest leaving it to the dog (person) to notice the absence of approval, and also that he showed a better action.
While I don't think this has any wildly profound revelations, I would highly recommend reading it because it contains reasonable advice punctuated by really, really adorable pictures of the author's puppy.
Unfortunately even in some open source projects you can't be a pseudonymous dog anymore, you have to declare your pronouns, sometimes even ethnicity etc all in the name of equity. I don't like these kind of development and urge more more people to abandon such projects.
It's sort of strange that this selective pronoun approach only really works in an online context and doesn't scale appropriately to real life interactions, to the point where pronouns become useless as an information compression and so we would be better off not using them at all and just use proper nouns. But this is where it gets funny because that's easiest in most online comms with the use of @.
It's quite clear no one has any idea what they are doing.
I see it the same as telling colleagues they are fat etc. It is rude. If you keep it up when they ask you to stop likely you get fired, even if you are right.
Anyway, in my opinion if they make a bigger deal out of it than if when you call people fat then it is just politics. But I still wouldn't do it myself, just like I don't call people fat even if I think they are. If they push me then I will tell the truth, but if they push me to hear my opinion about their pronouns or gender then it is hard to say that it is me bullying them rather than the other way around.
Edit: But I think this was originally about being forced to show your pronouns online. Not sure I'd like that, seems pushy and bullying to me. I'd rather people not have that information, even saying they/them is information that I am not comfortable showing my gender, why would I want to give people that information?
The way I see this, my sexual preferences has nothing to do with software development. I know a bunch of people disagree, sometimes even claim you can't develop software without sexuality but that's actually discriminating against asexual individuals and often against people on the spectrum that are not in able to express their feelings. It's all deeply troubling.
In my language (non-indoeropean ) there is no difference between he and she, that regularly puts me into trouble for somehow "intentionally" mis-gendering others and there's never any lenience expressed towards me for that.
Even if you're against trans people, in an online forum, normalizing calling out pronouns allows cisgendered women to say "I'm a woman and would like to be called as such" without it being disruptive or cause men to view her as pushy.
All the more reason to explicitly call it out ahead of time, so they can be certain to use the right ones. Why would it be pushy, -especially- if there's reason to believe someone will use the wrong ones?
Really, I don't understand the objection; we pre-emptively give our names to people, for all the same reasons we might give people our pronouns.
Yes, the identity politics seeping into what was previously an anonymous, decentralised, and democratic process of software development has been both sickening and infuriating.
I echo the call to abandon such politicised projects, and also to immediately cut out those for who identity is more important than meritocracy of work.
yeah seeing this transpire serves to confirm the decision to move to another line of work. i have only enough energy to solve real problems, cant be wasting energy on made up ones.
My bigger concern is having some other dog commit a change to my Terms of Conduct without prior experience in the org, and then witch-hunting me when I mark their PR as wontfix.
That, and to prevent it from being presumed all male. That is, without calling out pronouns, people will either default to "he/him" (which presumes everyone is male), or "they/them".
If you don't want to identify a gender, "they/them" doesn't.
But it normalizes calling out pronouns such that someone can say "I am a woman and would like to be called as such" without sticking out.
That's really the intention; by making it so everyone, even those who legitimately don't care how they're identified (which is a smaller number than those who are fine being 'defaulted' to 'he/him' or 'they/them'; most who don't want to call out a pronoun will object to being referred to as 'she/her') define a pronoun, it normalizes it for those to whom it is important. And it doesn't de-anonymize anything; "they/them" is an option, as is asking "please don't use pronouns when referring solely to me; use my username").
Sure, but it still would need to be provided pre-emptively; it doesn't really avoid the issue that some people have of having to upfront declare preferred mode of address. Even though that's perfectly normal even in day to day conversation, i.e., "Hi, I'm (name)".
> Isn’t the whole point of declaring pronouns that it gives you the option not to be gendered, if you prefer?
No, the point of declaring pronouns is to bring meatspace identity into cyberspace.
Sometimes that's the point of the space, as in social networks, but other times counter to the point. e.g. does anyone care what a typical HN user's gender is? Should they? I'd argue no, because we're here to focus on topics of common interest and our respective genders usually aren't relevant to that discussion.
An exception there might be users who we already know are dogs (those who have chosen to make their meatspace identities transparently recognizable from their HN identities).
Enforcing arbitrary pronouns aims to achieve the exact opposite: enforce the use of gender-specific pronouns to third-parties based on someone's preferences.
> Just default everyone’s pronouns to “they/them” unless they explicitly change the setting. Doesn’t seem like a big deal.
I fail to see the rational basis of complaining that "default pronouns" are pushed onto a small subset of users, but then suggesting that this problem goes away by pushing "default pronouns" onto everyone.
Who gives a shit about “rational basis”? It’s just basic courtesy to address people according to their preference.
Complaining about this increasingly makes you look like one of those assholes who refuse to remember someone’s name because “nobody in my family and friends has a weird name like that.”
Well, for starters those who show respect towards others and don't feel entitled to force their own arbitrary whims onto everyone around them and act as some kind of etiquette police .
If you have the gall to try to frame this issue as one of respect, the very least that's expected of you is that you show it towards others.
As a pseudonymous cat, the issues I've seen aren't being required (not just normalized) to supply a pronoun, but rather being expected to supply a human name to the KDE project for copyright tracking purposes.
In the name of equity I would suggest not promoting cats on the Internet and software projects since your species already over-represented in picture on the web, we all know we should reverse the bias in favor of dogs. /s
> but rather being expected to supply a human name
For the record my cat is called Cat (that's short Catherine) and agrees with me.
Sadly, human memory is just so damn strong. It’s stored with emotional context, and I really wish I could turn it off without becoming completely sociopathic.
For me, getting better at this came out of introspecting on a song lyric... "I crucified my hate and held the world within my hand." My introspection started with committing to not using the word "hate" for a year, but instead find ways to express what was bothering me rather than jumping to judgement (that was hard work). Through the introspection that resulted from that exercise, I came to understand that a lot of it is framing.
When someone cuts me off on the road, it's easy to judge them because they think they are the only one in a hurry and they are willing to risk harm to others. But it's possible that their child is dying in the hospital and they are trying to get there so the child won't spend their last moments alone. I can't know which it is. Would I rather give the inconsiderate driver a break they might not deserve or the grief stricken parent judgement they don't deserve? Since I can't know which it is, I have to choose which side I'd prefer to err on.
That's an extreme example, but once I figured this out, I found that it gave me more peace to not judge in such situations. It's much better for my own mental health to hope their loved ones are okay than to be angry. And my choice doesn't affect the other driver at all. Without judgement, there isn't anything to hold a grudge about. Once I had practice with highly provocative situations like that, work was easy by comparison.
OTOH, you do have a lot of control in many cases. I realized that I was way too emotionally invested in a lot of work interactions because I just hadn't thought through what I actually wanted. Once I realized that, I was able to dial down my emotional investment and I stopped forming grudges at least in those cases.
I’ve tried this successfully over vast stretches of time at work. However, the human element always gives way for me and I do eventually crack. Sometimes I do think it’s ok to feel the emotion because it’s not just business when humans are involved.
One difference between puppies and junior developers is that you can discuss career aspirations with the latter. If you have juniors AND you can influence resourcing decisions in your company, then you can try to align the work given to the juniors with available projects that could best support their skillset / career development.
Not a dig to the parent post but in general, plenty of companies have "career development". What's lacking is the appropriate salary increases, which is why changing jobs is common.
Only positive reinforcement: for the dog, you don't even express disapproval when they mess in the house. You just carry them outside, plus express wild approval when they do it outside.
I don't recommend picking up your developers and carrying them around, but you get the idea.
"But they have to learn what's bad, too!" you're saying. Yes, but they'll notice that you're not doing that "wild approval" thing for certain behaviors, and instead showing them the correct one. They're a lot smarter than laboratory rats. Most developers are as well.
But the overriding reason is: you want the dog to be happy. Because then he'll make you happy.
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GhuA-XPj932SRtnVLReOBYXt0wb...