This entire comment is a lie. Terms like "motherboard" are readily findable on Google's internal search. I could not find anything referencing a banned non-inclusive words policy in the employee policy guide. I have never heard of anything remotely resembling someone catching heat for saying "motherboard" or whatever.
You're welcome to ping me internally. It's in the banned words list (happy to share a link internally) and I double checked policy before posting this comment to make sure I was accurately representing the rules that are applied to me as an employee.
based on dannybee's comments elsewhere, the list you're referring to is actually for external product comms, not internal googler comms.... could you elaborate on your position further?
That's not true, there are a few internal-only lists that have different contents (lots of overlap but not 100%). Different PAs have adopted different lists.
I don't want to share the name of the internal one publicly, but anyone at Google can ping me if they want help finding it, or they can search "respectful words"
> Terms like "motherboard" are readily findable on Google's internal search.
This is meaningless. I work at a large organization that has banned terms like "master/slave" and "whitelist/blacklist", and I can also readily find these terms through internal search, simply because it's taking a while for the requirements to be implemented and enforced.
> I could not find anything referencing a banned non-inclusive words policy in the employee policy guide.
This also doesn't mean a lot, unless you've comprehensively searched through every possible location for the relevant policy, as almost every organization in existence has terrible knowledge management.
Go talk directly to someone in HR and tell me if they tell you that those words aren't restricted.
Since you work at Google, maybe you can answer this: does internal tooling exist to flag occurrences of "bad" words in say, code reviews or shared documents?
Former Googler (until a couple of months ago). I've never seen anything like it, but maybe I just didn't use "bad" words in code? There were presubmit checks for typos and such. Also, IIRC I asked people in code/design reviews to rename white/black lists to allow/deny lists, but it might have just been in docs.
I did get an angry code review response from a fellow engineer once, after writing in a commit description (not the actual code) something like "this is a stupid fix but it stops the linter from bitching about so and so" - for using both the words "stupid" and "bitch". I guess the second one was on point but referring to my own work as "stupid" is pretty okay in my book. I would never ever describe anyone else's work as such.
> I would never ever describe anyone else's work as such.
But someone reading your commit message doesn't know that. Someone new to the company might see your change and think "That looks reasonable to me", but see that you called it "stupid", and start to doubt themselves.
Although it makes technology more boring, I think there is some value in using precise words over emotive words. Perhaps using the word "pedantic" instead, or "no-op", would have conveyed more information, without disparaging the amount of intelligence that went into making it (or into the design/configuration of the linter).
> "I asked people in code/design reviews to rename white/black lists to allow/deny lists"
Odd thing to do. "Black" is synonymous with darkness, hidden, off, empty space, and things of that nature. For this reason "blacklist" works. There is no clash with people, or any disrespect.
Politically correct OCD invents problems. Then dictate to others how they should solve those problems. Add penalties for those who don't follow the prescribed solutions to invented problems, and we find ourselves in 2022 looking at Google's efforts to solve the invented problems.
The author of the Vice article states that by removing master/slave and black/whitelist, it "addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology".
Accusations of bias are just accusations. We can't "find" bias on the grounds of matching words in technical contexts to the same words in other contexts.
In the S&M world, the context is not actual master and slave, it's a new context that encompasses consent and good times. Likewise, the technical context is not one that involves people, but machines communicating under specific rules which "master/slave" adequately describes.
Source: I also work at Google.