Lawyer lawyer lawyer LAWYER lawyer LAWYER

> While I think it is very true the question I asked myself is, should my company be the training ground for people to learn to get along ?

> The answer I came up with is a resounding no. I think that knowing how to interact with the opposite sex is something the individual is responsible for before even entering the work place. If they want to pay me to teach them manners then so be it, but I am not going to pay them to teach them manners.

60 years ago, that would be spot on. Back then there was a very clear distinction between work life and social life. Furthermore, there was much more separation of job by sex so that even if you were engaging in a social relationship with an opposite sex coworker you would probably not have much interaction with them while at work.

The workplace nowadays, especially in many tech companies, is quite a bit different than the '50s tech workplace. Companies now often deliberately try to mix work life and social life, often aiming for an environment that is more like college than like a workplace. Startups often keep employees so busy that they must spend long hours at work, leaving little time to maintain an outside social life.

How this strange mix of work and social is handled is often quite different from company to company.

The bizarre thing about this post is that it attacks Patio11's post which emphasized consulting with a lawyer (and predicted that the result of that consultation would be firing the biz dev guy for cause, but emphasized that the consultation was important), rather than any of the many comments that recommended the action that Patio11 predicted that a lawyer would recommend, without advising consulting with an expert in the applicable area first.

This is bizarre, because her objection does not seem to be with the idea of consulting with a relevant expert and being guided by their opinion, but with firing without doing so, which isn't what Patio11 recommended. From other things in the post, its clear that the real issue is that the poster has a personal animus for Patio11 because of some ancient personal drama the two apparently had on HN in the past, and her perception that that interaction resulted in the eruption of negative treatment of her by others in the HN community. And, it really seems like she is mistargeting Patio11's response as a pretext to resurrect drama over that and, simultaneously, make some vague implications about gender dynamics at HN based on Patio11 being a high-karma-rank male poster and her being a high-karma-rank female poster and the relation that has with the old drama.

No, intent is what matters, not your feelings about certain words. I can't control whether you get upset or not but I can control whether I intended to offend.

Note this is not the same as ignoring someone's expressed choice (when being directly addressed) if they have an issue with certain words.

You have lots of control over whether someone gets upset. Don't call someone a racial or sexual slur and don't misgender them, for example. If you know some use of language is or could be problematic, don't use it. If you're not aware what language that may be and accidentally offend someone, obviously you shouldn't be held at fault, but you should then take it upon yourself to learn what the problem was so you don't repeat it.

Because I personally know people who see 'guy' as a gender-specific word - and because the dictionary says "guy" means "a man" - I know i'm not going to ever call a woman "guy", because it may offend them. I think this is a pretty simple concept...

I think you're overreacting here. Yes, the impetus of the original article was a weird "he said, she said" soap opera. And some comments are feeding on that aspect.

However, it looks like majority of comments are focusing on the "right" way to deal with a MILF comment. Some members express that it is a zero tolerance offense. Some other members express that something like that should only be a warning and the person given a 2nd chance.

I think it's a productive conversation because even if neither side changed the others' opinions, at least we learned what others' thresholds were. I was surprised to learn that MILF is not disrespectful enough for some folks to terminate the employee. Now I question what others think is within the boundaries of not firing. What about a quick butt grab in the hallway? How about sending a nude to a coworker's phone/email? In any case, the only thing that taints the discussion of this important topic is that it was begun by the soap opera article submission. Some of us ignored that part.