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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

It may be meaningless to you. But it's not meaningless to other people.

Now you can choose not to care about their opinion and be dismissive of their integrity by claiming it's only for social status. But you're never going to hire the best engineers if that's the approach you take.

I've worked with some of the very best in the industry and never seen anyone do great things by being intolerant of people.

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If you try to bend over backwards to appease the whims of every group of people you'll never accomplish anything. A good engineer realizes this, and prioritizes accordingly. It's a core competency of the job.

Not pushing back on master -> main is a sign that an engineer will not make good decisions on the job.

Also this has nothing to do with "intolerance" and your framing of it this way is a classic manipulation tactic: "You wouldn't want to be intolerant would you?"

I think you're saying it would appease someone, so I think the logical next question for you is why it'd be so hard for you?

Adopting Christianity as the official company religion would also "appease someone". Why would that be so hard for you? It's just words after all.

> I've worked with some of the very best in the industry and never seen anyone do great things by being intolerant of people

Same here. It's my 23rd year as a software engineer and I'm lucky to be a part of this crowd. Tonnes of tolerant, talented, brilliant people.

Being tolerant doesn't however doesn't mean we like being subjected to bullshit like the master -> main change.

It's just writing a shorter word. Why does it bug you so much. Unless you want to make bigger changes to society to counter the effects of racism instead? Cause we'd like that.

It bugs me because no one asked about this and it's purely virtue signalling.

Not only that, it implies that black people are unable to contextualise vocabulary.

What would you have people do instead that is actually helping and not virtue signaling?

There's already plenty of affirmative action being taken. We have black history month everywhere now, minorities are getting much better representation in the media. Please don't pretend nothing positive is happening and we have to change master to main at all cost or all hope is lost. Also, this is predominantly American problem but it's shoved down our throats here in Europe like our "wealth" was built on the back of slaves.

I'm Polish, can you imagine how ridiculous this is becoming from our perspective?

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