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Comment by james_pm | Hacker News Reader

Referring to people as "Plaids" is dehumanizing. 260 talented people were let go.

It’s the silly cutsey name they give to themselves, like metamates or googlers. So it makes sense to consider them “part of the family” until the end

Yes.. "themselves". Ugh...

Maybe they should have been called stripes because many stripes together compose aid. But that would be a bit weird naming themselves after one of their competitors.

> It’s the silly cutsey name they give to themselves, like metamates or googlers.

No on in their right minds are giving these names to themselves. It's the HR "we are all a big family" playbook since forever.

Yes and no, I know “googler” and “noogler” appeared organically

I honestly don't know why there's so much resentment over this point in-thread here. I do understand that in the context of a layoff announcement, it's a little cold.

I worked for a company called Weblinc, we called each other Weblincers - not because it was some cult, and there wasn't company "we're a big family" messaging, although there were many tightly knit social groups among colleagues that formed over the years and continue to exist outside of work. That said, when we productized the platform we'd built and rebranded as Workarea, no one made some tribalized adoption of that name. I hadn't thought of it much, but Workarean doesn't roll off the tongue, and becomes an unfortunate homonym, particularly in southeast Pennsylvania.

I'm sometimes called a number of things that I also call myself: a Philadelphian, a Pennsylvanian, a musician, and currently, a commercetooler. It's not my entire personality, but I think it's a little sociopathic to think the company of people that you work with does not contribute in some way to your identity.

As someone who actually works at Plaid I agree. I'm surprised to see these reactions to these company demonyms that feel really extreme and at times sound like a conspiracy theory. I understand the apprehension about cult-like company cultures but I'm just not feeling it at Plaid at all. It's no more cringy than people referring to their entire employer as "we", which I see constantly and never see derided at all.

People actually do call each other Plaids in certain contexts because it's shorter than saying something like "colleagues" (which sounds overly formal), and it's clear that it encompasses the whole company. I've never heard a colleague say that we're a family or anything similar. Google had a bit of self-mythology about "Googlers" but Plaid doesn't really even have that.

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