Hacker News Reader

Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

This is the first time I've heard the term "micro-promotion," and I would very much like to never hear it again.

I think it is in terms of promoting in terms of publicity rather than advancement. I'd like a better word, but it seems to be in contrast to micro-aggressions.

I like the concept but the homophone makes it confusing. (Giving positive feedback in public regularly and in front of peers and management seems to be a good thing.)

Given that micro-aggression are arguably mostly created by the mentality of the receiver, and not the acts of the sender, I don’t think the comparison is entirely right.

How about just calling it casual encouragement?

We can pretty easily call micro aggressions casual [race/sex/class/etc]ism.

Sound good?

No, because those are real things, based on actual classifiable actions and behaviour.

Micro-aggressions are just made up offenses in the mind of the receiver.

The person above you was correct and they are real things that are called microaggressions. A micro aggression is defined as "A statement, action, or incident regarded as an instance of indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group such as a racial or ethnic minority."

> micro-aggressions

Not GP, but I agree, and would further like to stop hearing this one too...

I think an older term is “an attaboy”:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=attaboy#2432...

https://dilbert.com/search_results?sort=date_asc&terms=attab...

"Attaboy" is obsolete for obvious reasons.

"Guy" is frequently used in gender-neutral contexts. "You guys" can include females in the group.

Not sure why your voted down its common usage now - being older it struck me as odd 20 years ago first hearing a female colleague use it in this way.

I think because it's unrelated to the original comment. "Guys" was not in question, "attaboy" was. Using "guys" as an argument would be a strawman regardless if the rationale is correct.

WRT "guys"; I know of at least two companies (and I work at one) which try to encourage the use of other pronouns in place to "guys" in order to be more inclusive.

The point was, attaboy could be used in the same way that "guys" is. I don't see how that's a straw man fallacy.

Also, companies promoting switching pro-nouns is an ineffective way to get people to be more inclusive. It's a band-aid. You be inclusive by actually being inclusive.

Seems to me that respecting someone’s feelings of “exclusion” by using pronouns that make them feel included is “being inclusive”

Not every company need change, but if a pretty minor change can have a big impact on someone’s happiness and feeling of belonging, I’m willing to change.

That term could be used or taken pejoratively, as if people are being stiffed and only given "micro-promotions" when they're worth more than that.

This article has nothing to do with "promotions" from an HR perspective (although arguably being promoted to "Team Lead" ought to have resulted in a pay rise - whether it did or not isn't mentioned in the article). It's about a healthy team and its leaders treating someone fairly, honestly, and respectfully.

I agree. It just brings up so many messy associations (because "micro-aggressions") that I would stick to a term like "applause" or "appreciation."

Or “encouragement”.

But yeah, I agree, avoid the toxic baggage.

My take is that it's many small, public acts of appreciation. That would go a long way for me, at least!

The 'micro-promotions' link in the article leads here: [1], to an arguably fairly ideological intersectional view of how people ought to behave in a company, and it mostly has nothing to do with 'nice little high fives' or 'micro praise' or anything like that.

It's a though the author is conflation two issues (that are of course related). One, a more generic 'nice nudges' culture, and another oriented specifically towards 'minorities in tech'.

[1] https://maleallies.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Male-Allie...

It's a dorky word, but it corresponds to an actual thing that is appreciated and noticed by technical employees. If used correctly, it has value.

You may not like the term, but it's valuable to have a word that describes something like a micro-promotion.

In another word, say nice appreciative things to people.

Here's your title bump to "Technical Lead" with your 2% raise, have fun taking way more responsibility with pretty much the same pay...

Getting micro-promoted is a micro-aggression.

Comment needs more intersectionality :)

It's the new "-1 not enough jQuery".

I would think that it's micro-aggression not to micro-promote, when there's a reason for.

McDonalds micro-promoting their employees with 10 cent raises is absolutely a micro-aggression.

Why frame it that way? How would something like "Employee of the Week" be aggressive?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com