There is plenty of evidence that people other than those on corporate diversity teams have said this is a problem, going back to at least 2003 with
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/masterslave/ (emphasis mine):
> To verify that this [request 'that equipment vendors avoid using the industry term “Master/Slave” in product descriptions and labeling'] wasn’t a hoax or an internal joke which mistakenly escaped to the wider world of the Internet, we called the Purchasing and Contract Services division for the County of Los Angeles, and they informed us that yes, they did issue this message, and yes, it was meant seriously. In May 2003, a black employee of the county’s Probation Department filed a discrimination complaint with the Office of Affirmative Action Compliance after spotting “master” and “slave” labels on a videotape machine, whereupon the Internal Services Department was obligated to issue notification requesting that vendors refrain from using the master/slave terminology.
So yes, at least one. (FWIW, I think claims of "white guilt" give off a pretty heavy attempt at encouraging white silence.)
Just looking at HN you'll see other evidence, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7806066 :
> Have you ever taught African-American kids about database replication? I'm guessing "no", because the master/slave terminology actively interferes with the learning environment — more so than adopting this less common terminology would.
Or in this HN comment from two years ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17930085 :
> A few years ago I was in a meeting talking about database options, hitherto I had used "master/slave" to describe this database topology. In that meeting was an African American co-worker ("Frank") and as the words left my mouth I realized that completely irrespective of my intent I brought into the room the spectre of times past. I've no idea how Frank felt about it - but all of a sudden I had lost all ability to continue my point. I paused and said something that amounted to: "you know,... that phrase is fucked up - let's not use it - what words should we use?" and Frank suggested we look at what terms Amazon uses; they used "source and read replica" and that's what we went with. I've never regretted recoding my use of words on that one.
Or another from 8 years ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4617174 :
> A coworker and I were de-duping records in a database. One of us said while pairing on the script "well, every slave needs a master."
> An african american woman in the office turned to us and said "maybe it's the master who needs the slave?"
> She wasn't really offend or anything and she said it with a sincere smile. She was just calling out our idiotic computer lingo for what it was.
> After apologizing feeling like complete idiots we quickly changed our terminology both in words and in the script to parent/child.
Or from 7 years ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5423626 referenced Matthew Haughey/mathowie's comment at https://www.metafilter.com/126184/Furore-over-sexism-being-c... :
> All this talk about forking being offensive-or-no reminds me of a few years ago when someone pointed out to me that the whole hard drive relationship talk in IT circles of "Master" and "Slave" drives was offensive to them, being that they were black.
If you can't get the small problems fixed, can you really fix the large ones? What are the relevant core problems in your company which this distracts from, who is arguing that this change is something other than a no-brainer change, and what is their reason?