Great article. I think part of the difficultly with the word "guys" in particular is that it depends on the usage. Saying "hey guys" or "you guys" when referring to mixed company is generally interpreted as gender neutral. But talking about "ops guys" or "a guy" is definitely not gender neutral.
"Guy" and "dude" are definitely gender-nonspecific these days, and I don't mean just in tech. When those tapes of Tiger Woods were leaked, he called his mistresses "dude". Language has evolved.
While it's certainly possible (and I'd argue true) that they're less gender-specific than they were previously, I think the fact that we're discussing a blog post from a woman saying she felt excluded by "guys" is a pretty clear sign that it's not a gender-neutral term.
Well, I think in many cases the intent by the speaker is to be gender-neutral, including in the cases OP shows. It can be ambiguous and off-putting to others though, and in other areas people usually accommodate (e.g. female chair members are "chairwoman", not "chairman").
It does bring up an interesting subject: what is a good colloquial or informal way of specifying a plural of an individual unit for these sorts of things without resulting to annoying chaining of multiple words like "guys/girls" or "men/women"? DevOps "guys" is out. DevOps "people" doesn't use individual units. DevOps "monkeys" or "ninjas" are kind of gender neutral but sound very...stupid. DevOps-ers sounds awkward. I guess you could go with something like "gurus" but not every hire is going to be a guru.
I suppose the safest option is "DevOps engineers", but that adds some additional formality and isn't so colloquial or simple.
"Folks" doesn't abide by the unit requirement. And the others you offered sound a bit awkward and formal (and also don't really meet the requirement either).
"Folks" is probably the closest thing you'll get though.
Just the other day I overheard a group of teenage girls playing soccer, with one of them periodically referring to her teammates as "hey guys." It was odd enough to me that I took note of it.
I disagree. Many people attempt to use it as a non-gendered pronoun, but I don't think that makes it inherently "gender-nonspecific".
Think of it this way. When you call a male-identifying person "guy" it affirms their gender. When you call a non-male-identifying person "guy" it passively denies theirs. "Guy" is not gender nonspecific, and when you use it that way, it has the potential to make a non-male person feel like their gender identity is being assimilated into your idea of a "guy", whatever that is.
Another thought to leave you with. "Guy" == male when the gender of the person it refers to has not been established. Suppose someone tells you "I saw this guy biking down the street the other day..." Do you ever imagine that they're talking about a woman?
If you believe this is an issue of people simply "taking offense", then I don't think you fully understand this issue. This is a matter of people feeling unwelcome and outcast. Try and place yourself in the author's shoes.
If someone is genuinely friendly and welcoming, and you reject their company because you look for and find offence where none was intended, then that's kinda your problem, not theirs.
Regardless of what you think about it, plenty of people disagree. As a plural, sure "guys" can generally mean a mixed group, but as a singular noun used in a generic sense (eg, "we need a devops guy"), I challenge you to find any native English speaker to whom "guy" primarily denotes a woman.
In a professional setting, it's important to use language carefully. And in a situation like this where you have evidence that at least some people feel using "guy" and "guys" is a poor choice, and where there are plenty of equivalent alternatives ("folks" is my go-to), the only reason to use "guy" is to be a jerk.
GP: > "Guy" and "dude" are definitely gender-nonspecific
You: > find any native English speaker to whom "guy" primarily denotes a woman.
It's not supposed to primarily denote a woman, GP specifically said it's non-specific.
That said, I disagree. I think guy is gender specific, typically. I also have very, very seldom heard a woman called "dude." Certainly the non-specificity isn't universal.
I think the example in TFA is great: I'm not likely to pick up a cute devops guy at a conference (seing as how I'm a straight male). Like it or not, language matters and it is deeply tied to the culture in which it has evolved. If we want to change our culture (to be less misogynistic), we'll have to change the language we use, to facilitate the thoughts we would like to think. It will involve trying out new terms, seeing which ones fit our meaning without being too corny.
As an aside: what is a devops guy/girl/individual anyway? Isn't the core of devops (as opposed to system administration/system development) a holistic approach where everyone has a responsibility for implementing the system as a whole, including both development and day-to-day operations? Hence:DevOps?
You don't even need to make it sexual to highlight the difference. If you say "Can someone help the guy at reception?", most people would head to reception expecting a male.
I was considering an edit to the effect that misogynistic might be too strong a word -- but on reflection I realized that many (most?) cultures have quite recently (from the perspective of evolving language) either burned women alive as witches, or stoned them to death. So I don't think such a qualification would be warranted. Even if what I might have had in mind might more aptly be described as being "merely" oppressive towards women, rather than woman-hating.
I'm not for calling people jerks in online forums either, but I think that in this case the point is valid. Someone is behaving like a jerk if they deny the experience of others through lack of empathy. If you (the general you, not you) respond to someone who tells you "this language makes me feel unwelcome" by arguing that their experience of the language is wrong, you are in fact being (quite literally) a jerk.
Brilliant article; I've caught myself making the same mistake many times even though I try hard to avoid it. I do think that saying "hey guys" (or similar) is the gateway drug - I find myself making the mistake much less often when I consciously attempt to erase all gender-associated terms. You can say "Hey people" or "Hey team", and get the same effect.
> As for those conversations I had at devopsdays with the folks who thought they were “just” not devops enough?
As a junior, my vision of devops is someone who is guarding staging and production, and release management, assuming you have a mature self-service platform for developers. As for why people feel they are not devops enough I think it is important to realize that devops is mainly a culture change (quoting from a coworker). Your devops can be your system admin. Your developers should know how to handle some operations, because they will have to work with the SRE/devops. There should be a structure, a list of runbooks and procedures in place. Automation is only a syntactic sugar of blueprints, documentations, plans (recovery, backup, SLA, etc). DevOps should be the people that say NO to developer and NO to business and NO to upper management when you know something won't go well (e.g. there is a strict release/deployment requirements). So a mature DevOps team is essentially jack-of-all-trade go-to team. You write a lot, you talk a lot, you plan a lot, you maintain a lot, and you innovate a lot (looking at the big picture). Whether you are running a startup or an enterprise, automation is the last thing on your to-do list. To claify my last point: sure you should build your VPC and security groups using cloudformation if you are on AWS. But before doing that, you obviously need to start off with a discussion.
In my extensive non-coastal observation of ops centers, mostly at very large companies, the male-female ratio in ops is much more "normal" than the dev group ratio (which is often all male). Then again I've never worked with anyone who would go to a ops-conference (what do you guys talk about?). This may result in some audience bias, if the audience at a con is entirely mid/upper mgmt (probably all male), or marketing people and startup founders trying to sell stuff to ops mgmt. She might be seeing a mgmt glass ceiling and thinking it has something to do with ops at the bottom of the pyramid.
I have observed that the more competently run the ops dept (procedures, decent mgmt, staffing by butts on seats 24x7 instead of on call) the more likely you'll see women working there. I worked at a huge telco that had an all female fiber ops center during 3rd shift some part of the week, for example. Its not too far fetched that a good indication you have professional adults running a place instead of kids, is having female ops team members. Counting them is probably not the dumbest possible metric for a quick eval of a company.
The important thing we as a community need to understand is that there are terms that can be very gender specific and at the same time being gender neutral depending on the context.
I do try to avoid 'guys' and 'dudes' in professional contexts, for the reasons mentioned in the OP, but it can be difficult to remember. Most of my closest friends are women, and 'hey guys' and 'hey dudes' are common greetings even when the group is all women (other than me). I don't usually address individuals by anything other than their name, but 'dude' is occasionally used for either a man or a woman, while 'guy' in the singular is clearly only for men.
I mean, 'guy' is male-identified to the point that it's used as an indicator -- "guy stuff" versus "girl stuff", etc. It's not a huge stretch to perceive the plural as only quasi-neutral, addressing women by assumption rather than by explicit inclusion.
I've always been bothered by the fact that so few roles on the infrastructure/operations support side of things have an actual coherent job title. My team has developers, testers, and a business analyst. Their jobs have names. But my friends on the other side of the cube-farm in the rooms full of half-assembled PCs? They're all just "IT guys". They might have a proper title for their role, but nobody knows it.
Oh I know their roles - there's the guy who owns all the images, the guy who handles file-system permissions, the guy who handles firewalls and virus scanners, etc. They have roles and specializations and whatnot, what they lack is a nice verb-oriented job title. Managers manage, developers develop, testers test, analysts analyze... they support and maintain and operate, but we don't call them a nice verby name like "operators", we just associate them with the noun Information Technology and so they get the abbreviation and suffix "I.T. Guys".
They are used a bit. "IT people just don't get the problem" sounds fine to my ear and I see that kind of construction. (Which has a slightly different nuance from IT doesn't get it.) It's a bit clinical and impersonal but something like that is what I'd probably use in an official marketing doc. Peeps, on the other hand, is very slangy and at least today carries the implications of acquaintances, as least as I've seen it used. As someone else mentioned, folks isn't a bad clearly general-neutral, casual term. And I use it from time to time in more casual writing.
this is only going to go away if people use gender neutral terms naturally... its sad but true.
i've always used guys to mean 'people' because there is no natural slang alternative. i'm now rethinking this, but its hard to retrain years of doing what i thought was correct in this manner.
although in hindsight its so obvious i should have seen it :/
but at the same time nothing jumps to mind as an alternative. this is definitely problem, but i'm not sure how to actually fix it.
"Y'all" and "folks" carry a bit of a cultural connotation. "Y'all" is identified with the South, and "folks" has a somewhat rural (folksy!) sound to it. I grew up without "y'all" and with "folks" almost exclusively referring to parents and grandparents, so I don't feel very natural using them.
In chat, I'll use "folx". It's a private, unexplainable joke that also helps me feel a little less silly (by being a lot sillier).
Anything it takes to get more women in these type of fields is a good idea, imo. There's a slight perspective difference that I find really beneficial when working with women in tech. Besides the other obvious benefits.
The first rule of devops club is welcome to devops club.
The second rule of devops club is welcome to devops club!
The third rule of devops club: someone yells stop, goes limp, tests don't pass: the deployment is over. Roll back to your last known good Docker environment.
Fourth rule: only two gu^H^H devops professionals to a deployment.
Fifth rule: one deployment at a time.
Sixth rule: no bespoke one-off installations of "just this one library" in production.
Seventh rule: deployments will go on as long as they have to.
And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first night at devops club, you have to push something into production.
(Some of these are more practical than others, I'll admit. Please don't practice rule 8, and I'm not sure what rule 7 even means.)
Rule 5 is something that should be mentioned more often as a best practise when dealing with production: do one thing at a time. If you're doing several things at once, it's easy to miss an important step. Not so much a problem outside of production, but in production it can be quite harmful.
Elaboration of rule 7: you keep working until it either passes sanity testing or it's fully rolled back. I think anybody who has deployed to production has faced a rocky rollout where prod's behavior does not match staging and nobody knows why and everybody scrambles until it does.
Sixth rule: suggesting bespoke one-off installations of "just this one library" in production results in the "burning lye" scene.
And the on topic first rule, if you've ever read the book, is the first rule of devops guys is don't talk about devops "guys" in the presence of someone of the female persuasion.
