I've never worked for a true unicorn but I've been in companies that got a sudden success and grew way too big way too fast. I think you can tell from the inside when a company loses its way. As you mention, suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product. You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development. You start having a massively more complicated hierarchy of bosses and managers and project leaders and it seems like everybody is chief of something and everybody loses sight of the big picture as they just become focused on a single aspect of a given product. What was once a lean startup with a vision is now struggling to get new products out of the pipeline even though they have ten times (or more) the manpower.
Growing is hard and unicorns are expected to grow really, really fast. In the end many companies with a completely viable product end up going under just because investors thought that a million dollar company should be a billion dollar company.
>suddenly you have tons of teams working on what seems to be fairly niche aspects of the company's product
At scale it tends to be worthwhile, even necessary, to engage fully with the complexity of all those "niche" aspects.
When you don't understand how something could possibly take so much effort, it's possible all the people working on it are idiots and you could do it better in a weekend. (When you spot situations like that, think of them as startup opportunities...)
It's also possible they're doing a good job hiding the complexity from you.
I think there is a lot of truth to both your comment and the parent comment.
Everyone underestimates the complexity of systems they aren't personally familiar with. Ask the average person how many parts are in a modern automobile and they'd probably guess too low by an order of magnitude.
But it is also true that large organizations get weird when money is easily available. You get a Cambrian explosion where without selection pressure to ensure people and teams do real, useful work, everything starts to seem like a good idea.
Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business.
This is a very nice description of what I've noticed moving to a large organisation. There is also a lot of busy work. As the organisation grows, communicating and negotiating between groups requires extra effort that often ends up being the role of a new management level, and groups have self-preserving incentives to stay relevant leading to lots of entropy (busy work, repeated work, hero projects that are just there for internal branding). As someone who has recently been put in this level of management I spend a lot of time having to negotiate out of new project initiatives invented more to attract exec attention or satisfy a rogue execs dream project. Makes me really look forward to moving back to working in a smaller company.
> Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business.
Three questions.
(1) "What would the impact on our business be if we built the best possible, state of the art feature here?"
(2) "What would the impact on our business be if we half-assed a solution in a quarter of the time?"
(3) "What would the impact on our business be if we utterly failed?"
(Usually, the different between 1 & 2 is negligible. Sometimes, between 1 & 3. Don't ask people to justify success. Ask them to justify why we should spend any more time than slightly-above-failure.)
Those questions assume an existing framework where "the feature", "state of the art", "half-assed", and "failed" are all well-defined. But my experience is that the framing itself is most of where the challenge lies.
You end up with team A who wants to add the feature, team B who thinks it's an anti-feature, team C who thinks the entire application where feature lives should be scrapped, PM D who says users can already accomplish what the feature does using existing features, UX design E who says the fact that users are still asking for the feature means all those other features must be poorly designed and we should fix those...
That’s a false dichotomy. It’s likely that that are both not idiots and what they are doing isn’t necessary.
When large companies have such excess engineering power to blow, they tend to say yes to all requirements and scope creep takes over everything. So no, the engineers building the abstract framework factory are not stupid, but they should have just built the report dashboard instead of the tool to generate tool generators.
As soon as an organisation gets above a size limit, organisational politics becomes the most important factor in any decision.
The decision to agree to a feature request starts to consider Who the feature request came from before any of the practicalities of the feature itself.
They're not idiots, and they are doing what is necessary, but the goals have moved from outward-facing market and customer concerns to inward-facing organisational-political concerns.
Every coder in a large organisation, sooner or later, gets given a task that makes no engineering sense but achieves some internal political goal.
I can't find you a source right now but back in '94 when I was learning IBM mainframe Assembler the history was mentioned and they claimed thousands of engineers, mathematicians and physicist worked for 3.5 years on the first mainframe (or was that the 360?).
The IBM of that era was literally inventing the modern computing systems. The complexity of the tasks at hand were essential, not incidental. I think the general trend of thought here is a critique of the latter day NIH syndrome and the consequent inflation of the technical teams.
It’s a different type of systems engineering, that’s more akin to sorcery, than to actual physics.
The hardware is, of course, limited by physics, like the speed of electrons and heat dissipation. But once you get past that, your computer system is a collection of bytes that you reassemble to form whatever it is your imagination desires.
And while the 747 is a magnificent plane, it did have the benefit of over 50 years of aviation and aeronautical science behind it, all figured out.
Whereas software is still somewhat in its infancy right now. And every few decades, it seems to revolutionize itself, as newer and faster hardware become available.
The functionality may be similar, but the scale is completely different and shouldn’t be ignored. Building a machine that cooks 1 pancake every 5 minutes is a fun project for precocious college students; designing a system capable of cooking 10,000 uniform pancakes per minute is a feat of incredible industrial engineering.
I'm talking about R&D specifically, not infra folks.
But let's say designing for scale is 100 times harder than a taxi app for just one national taxi service. Based on my 23 year career in trenches I seriously doubt that's the case, but let's be generous.
That would net us into ballpark of €60M expense. Non-negligible, but it translates into a hundred developers pulling €100k a year for 6 years, still at least an order of magnitude below Uber.
Very obviously it does not scale anywhere near linear. There has to be a severe case of diminishing returns in technical hiring.
So did early Uber. Famously, the contractors were Spanish-speaking, so FTE engineers #1-5 had Spanish-English dictionaries on their desks to understand the code.
It means that the functionality of the app that immediately comes to mind is only one of the many ways in which they lose an extraordinary amount of money.
>> You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development.
That's better than seeing man-years go into features that get deployed. I witnessed one successful control system company spin up a team of new hotshot UI engineers, all right out of the best schools. After months of work the team "updated" the product. Withing hours the call center was hit with hundreds of "You changed the g-dam menus!! Put them back NOW!!".
The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
> The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
Is this sarcasm? Seems like a really user-hostile attitude if not. Admittedly, my personal point-of-view is that the majority of UI updates are make-work for engineers and PMs with at best no value added, and at worst negative value created (as you experienced).
That's more of a failure for the ux and product vision than it is a failure of project management. The trick isn't to just roll out new changes slowly, but to involve the users and figure out what needs to change and how.
That really depends on your customers and the product. In this case, control systems, incremental changes are definitely not the way to go. Imagine if your car made an incremental change to the position of the brake pedal every time you turned it on. In such situations you don't babystep. You announce the change ahead of time, provide your customers with transition training, and make the change as scheduled.
In the case of "adaptive" menus in control systems, imagine if the elevator in your building rearranged its floor buttons so that the most requested floors were always at the top. Total chaos. People learn where their button is on day one. After that ANY change is going to go badly no matter what the UI engineers say. That UI should be carved in stone for the life of the building.
Were there any dedicated UX people involved? To me, a UI engineer is someone who works exclusively on the front end, and would implement the work of the UX designer. They wouldn't actually do the designing and research themselves.
This is one of those cases where that Ford quote about a faster horse is relevant. Many people will be happy to just have what they have now without thinking how it could be better.
> The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
Fuck people doing this. Especially extremely radical design changes such as Twitter's and Facebook's "redesigns" that they force down the throats of their users. Or Microsoft.
> The trick is to squeeze your long-term UI project in the same update as some routine security fixes. Then the clients are forced to learn the new system.
No, the trick is to iteratively change the UI in a way that's easy for the user to get used to.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. It's off-topic and tedious, and leads to nasty flamewars that are also off-topic and tedious. It's also against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), as other users have pointed out.
> I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent, but replacing "man-year" with "person-year" is a painless, traditional-grammar-friendly way to go gender-neutral.
It is not painless: it is dissonant and takes another syllable.
One might argue that is worth the pain and stylistic cost of infelicitous phrasing in order to be sex-neutral or welcoming or whatever, and that might indeed be the case.
I think that language is far less important here than culture. Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country.
Speaking of dissonant, as a woman it's always a bit difficult to figure out when "man" means "human" and when "man" means "not you, lady". "Men's room" = "not you, lady"; "man-years" = "of course I'm talking about you because I'm certainly not sexist; man means human, of course, except when it explicitly doesn't, like when you didn't have the right to vote because the right to vote was for all men who are created equal, haha".
As with many things that don't make much sense, it started from something more reasonable. Long, long ago the word 'man' unambiguously referred to all human beings, while 'woman' was used for females and 'werman' was used for males.
The forgotten sexism is that we began using 'men' to refer specifically to males, almost like they were the only people that mattered. It happened so long ago that it's been mostly forgotten that there even was another name.
Though, you still see vestiges of it in the language. That's the same wer- as in werewolf.
This is a good point, excuse a quibble: 'werman' did not seem to actually see usage in Old English, although 'wepman', meaning male human, did in Middle English.
I'm basing this on a discussion at Wiktionary:
> Their point, that Old English mann was not specifically male, is correct; but their example of the specifically male word is apparently mistaken.
Thanks for pointing that out. I think Wiktionary is where I first heard the word, and I hadn't seen it was removed.
So, wer did mean male/husband and man did mean everyone. It's just that they weren't used together. I should probably also have noted that woman was 'wifman' back then. That one has more obvious descendants than the male version.
But this is something you do constantly as an English speaker. "Drinking" can mean any liquid, or just alcohol. Wood can be a material, or a forest. A bank can be a financial institution or the side of a river. A mouse can be a rodent or a computer peripheral. Does it really take conscious difficulty to figure out the intended meaning?
> Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country.
I don't want to be that person but Zoroastranism is the religion you should be comparing against -- it predates Islam by a good deal and developed alongside Farsi. And Zoroastranism does hold men and women to be equal. [1] Iran was actually a pretty liberal country prior to the Islamic Revolution (which was really more of a rebellion against American control).
Iran has been Muslim for over 1300 years. Zoroastrians today are a tiny minority. It's a bit disingenuous to refer to the (brief, mainly urban) liberalism of the Pahlavi years in place of everything that came before or after.
The dissonance should be cause for reflection and growth. Why does the gendered version sound harmonious? What does that answer say about the society that evolved our language?
> and takes another syllable.
That's just silly. If typing three additional characters causes you pain, you shouldn't be writing comments on the internet in the first place.
Dev-hours, suggested below, also sounds harmonious. Employee hours sounds okay; it's cumbersome but it seems to project the concept of hourly pay directly into my mind. Hu-years and hu-hours are physically uncomfortable. Is there anything to learn about our society from that?
I think language is something we don't really understand. Maybe you have a more refined model, but any reflection upon this for me will be complete conjecture. Language is this ancient thing that evolved in concert with our minds, optimizing for some vast array of factors. Human intervention into that process seems to always go wrong, down to US attempts to fix the spelling.
It bothers me that speaking my dialect with common definitions is not good enough. Can we not just be charitable in our interpretations of others' speech? Why do I have to dedicate cognitive load to verifying that every possible interpretation of every word is acceptable with no expectation of others meeting me in the middle, even just as far as the dictionary definition? If people's feelings matter, why don't mine?
Of course your feelings matter. I'm sure there are plenty of situations where your feelings are the most important factor to consider. But this is not one of those situations. Your feelings of minor inconvenience from being asked to use different words are less relevant than others' feelings of oppression from decades/centuries of societal biases.
This is long, and I apologize for that. I think I've said some important things though, and I'll ask you to do me the kindness of reading it. Thanks.
There's a notion in improv that when you respond only to the last thing that someone said, it's because you are in your own head and you're not listening. Additionally, it feels like you're talking down to me and others in this thread. Are those feelings invalid? It just seems like showing some respect to others should be a precursor to caring about whether a word could be misinterpreted as exclusionary, if the goal really is to make people feel less bad.
I personally devote a huge amount of time and energy to the feelings of others. I need to be doing it less, it degrades me. If I were to start caring about this on top of everything else, I would be completely dysfunctional. You call it a minor inconvenience, but if I were to accept that this is worth doing, I'd implicitly be agreeing to a thousand minor inconveniences, overthinking everything I say even more than I already do (this is a fifth draft, and look how long it has been made so I can feel I'm communicating effectively), and inevitably retreating altogether from social interactions that already give me anxiety.
Back to the subject at hand. What the word 'man' as in 'mankind', 'manpower', or 'man-hours' means to me is a dehumanized, de-individualised, notion of genetic humans working towards some end. This is a _very_ useful construct for me. A person is something else, a human individual. It is impossible for me to consider a single person, let alone thousands. People have 86 billion neurons of uncompressable complexity, and I've only got 86 billion of my own to try and grok that. This is also an incredibly useful construct for me. I can't just swap one for the other, it would be a significant long term effort to rewire all of the associations.
A better solution would be a new word to take the place of 'man' there. 'Man' already does the job, but I'm sure there are other prefixes in english that also mean human. I don't think it's a material issue, so I'm not going to devote energy to solving it. But if someone is going to tell me how to talk, they can afford to make the damn effort to find a suitable alternative instead of forcing me to adapt to the first thing that comes to mind. And when it is pointed out that it doesn't work, and it doesn't sound right, they could maybe try to figure out what is wrong with their solution, rather than assuming I'm a closed-minded closeted sexist. I don't know.
Seriously, the amount of time people who pretend to be hard and rational loose their minds over things like "one syllable."
> Persian, for example, is a genderless language: it has no 'he' or 'her,' no 'waiter' or 'waitress,' no 'actor' or 'actress.' And yet I think most folks would say that Iran is far less gender-neutral than any English-speaking country.
That's a straw man. Asking for gender-neutral terms when referring to groups of people does not equate to asking for gender-neutral culture. Take it from a trans person, that is _not_ what most of us are asking for.
>Take it from a trans person, that is _not_ what most of us are asking for.
statements like this are not useful for building understanding.
rather than speaking in negatives and stating what it is that you're not looking to achieve, tell us what is being sought.
Being disconnected from the struggle/lifestyle/issue, I do not know what to take from your statement.
What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?
For what it's worth, I already use 'dev-hours', but not from any gender/rights perspective, it just sounds better and correlates the specific industry to the metric. It's also about the same amount of verbal effort as 'man-hours', so the change was easy.
> What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?
We're asking to simply feel included (this includes women as well as trans people; I'm both). When so much of your life is being told you don't belong or that people like you don't / shouldn't exist, it's a big deal. It's 1) more accurate and 2) more reflective of the wide variety of experiences a person can have. I'm not being glib here, but of course the need for gender neutral language seems irrelevant: it is to you because you were already included. It's doubly important in heavily male-dominated industries.
I, too, prefer using "dev" or "employee" in place of "man" in these cases simply because it's more accurate. But it's really not a lot of effort and it actually means something when someone corrects themselves because it's basically "wow I feel seen and like I have a place here". When you've never seen someone like you in a position of success above you because you're one of the first, it really, really matters to feel accepted in any way you can.
Like, you don't have to do it. But these days it really does sound a bit anachronistic to use "man-hours" -- language changes along with the culture and it always has.
I'm totally with you on the inclusion part, everyone in a diverse team needs to feel included.
However, on the solution part, if you say dev-hours, I as a designer would have a huge problem :-), or even as a PM I would have same problem. 'Employee' comes close, but then it precludes estimating for consultants, freelancers etc. 'Person Hours' does not seem to have any of above problems, but then as mentioned it is awkward to use.
Well, maybe perfect solution does not exist, or maybe the perfect solution is being more accepting - accepting gender diversity AND also accepting that many times things that we do is out of laziness or choosing easier path or just out of habit - people in professional work environment do not do things with ill intention.
There is no ill intention behind using certain phrase and doing so does not spread any harmful stuff around.
> There is no ill intention behind using certain phrase and doing so does not spread any harmful stuff around.
I agree; very few people use male-centered language with ill intentions. But it's still a choice people can make if they choose to, and it means a lot to those of us who often feel marginalized. You're not a jerk if you don't, but it's pretty much all upside if you do.
Anecdotally, I would say I hear gender-neutral language used about 2/3 of the time in the Fortune 500 world. While I don't hide the fact that I'm trans, I'm fortunate to pass for cisgender so most people I work with outside my immediate team don't know -- I'm pretty sure they're not altering their language for me. Maybe it's because I'm a woman, but it was a trend I noticed before I transitioned as well.
> statements like this are not useful for building understanding.
I don't ask you to "understand," honestly I'm not sure if I even particularly want you to. I want you to _respect_ us, and others. And no, understanding is not a precondition to respect. By insisting on using exclusive language, or even by framing otherwise inclusive language as exclusive, you are showing lack of such respect.
And true understanding is a huge amount of work. If you need understanding for respect, there ain't going to be many people you'll respect.
> Being disconnected from the struggle/lifestyle/issue, I do not know what to take from your statement.
> What, in your opinion, are most trans people asking for, and what makes you sure that the majority seek that?
We ask you to say "humankind" and "employee-hours." Among other mostly practical, material things: don't exclude us and don't get in our way.
I do hope you know that it’s never intentional. I’m definitely not excluding any gender when I think of the concept of “man hours”—it’s just an abbreviation for “human” to me. I try to use gender neutral language where ever I can, whenever I think of it... I end my meetings with “thanks everyone” rather than “thanks guys”, even though “guys” just means people to me. But it can be stressful to always have to worry about the different intentions people can put behind words, even if none are meant. Basically I think trying to use more gender neutral language is a great thing, but we also shouldn’t criticize it every time it’s seen. I think it’s fair to assume we all have good intentions and that we’re not secretly sexist.
I don't alter quotes, even for PC reasons. And If I am going to reuse language for effect I am not going to make changes unless they add to the point I am making. The first comment said man-years and I stuck with that as I wasn't trying to correct their gender grammar.
Also, "person-year" is vague as "persons" includes non-humans entities such as corporations and partnerships. "Man-year" refers only to work by biological humans. "People-years" might be better but that is plural. Had I been the first I might have used person-years, but when someone else sets a precedent that avoids confusion I'm happy to stick with it despite potential microaggressions.
While those variants solve some complaints, they're a lot more specific and may change the meaning of some statements. For example, many of those terms exclude work that isn't done by "engineers". Using a term like "employee-hours" might make contractors on your team feel less valued.
I'm not saying anything about anyone's intent either, but it's also painless and traditional just to refrain from unsolicited corrections of people's word choice when there isn't any ill intent to be talked about.
I find it very enlightening when people who find issue with my expression let me know about it in a friendly way. I think the commenter took a lot of care to phrase their concern in a very nice way; when people do this to me I thank them. It’s the only way that I can keep learning how the language changes with time.
If matt_morgan has concern, matt_morgan can personalize his concern, not preach about what's "painless, traditional-grammar-friendly" generally to all. I don't find that friendly, I find it intrusive.
I always find it so interesting that a full-out flamewar is just fun, while a side comment about improving communication is "intrusive". This is the internet, my friend...
The OP's intent was not to single out a gender. He/she was using a very common catchphrase. Your call-out was really passive-aggressive and uncalled for.
Do you get pressed everytime someone talks about history, and suggest they use the word "herstory" or "perstory" instead?
Seems to imply a different amount of time. Work year would be the amount of time worked in a year (usually ~2000 hours give or take). Sort of like how a work-day is 8 hours rather than 24.
Man/woman/person/dev/etc-year seem to imply an amount of work that is equivalent to a year (~8760 hours).
Or at least that's how I would use those terms. It's entirely possible that these definitions are regional in nature.
We were once negotiating an SLA and my colleague happily agreed to a 24 hour turnaround time. I asked him if he thought that was perhaps a bit optimistic and he replied, “24 business hours, that’s a three day turnaround time!”
I actually considered that when writing my original comment but "the mythical man-month" is such an obvious reference that it felt weird to change it. I suppose you can also think of it like "horsepower", it's an equivalency but doesn't actually mean that the power literally comes from a horse.
Still, point taken, I'll consider using person-year next time.
I suspect they got the point, and rather you are missing their point, which is taking the (trivially easy) opportunity to be more gender-neutral with our language..
And yet you are treating their comment like a "real problem"... you're the one crusading, they just gently and non-confrontationally made a suggestion. You could have just passed on by if you didn't agree with their suggestion, but you turned it into a crusade against them. To the observer, you are in fact the one acting like a "snowflake" fired up (dare I say "triggered") by their actually quite gentle suggestion, in which they make it clear that they weren't accusing anyone of ill-intent.
Do you think your annoyance and anger at their suggestion is a "real problem" or a "snowflake problem"? If you don't think it matters that much if someone says "man year" or "person year" (you said it wasn't a "real problem"), why is the suggestion to do either way so triggering to you? Do you think it might be more in line with how worthy of your annoyance it is to see someone suggest "person year" (maybe not worth that much annoyance in the grand scheme of thing when we have 'real problems'?) to reflect on your own about why their suggestion to say "person year" made you so angry and upset, without needing to reply on HN and turn it into a crusade?
My annoyance is that it has absolutely no relevance and adds nothing to the discussion regarding the story/post. It's just noise, which begets noise (my response) and so on. Let's talk about tech.
If left alone, there would have been nothing distracting about that short and explicitly non-accusatory comment, but you were triggered and chose to build a crusade around how you don't want to see certain kinds of comments on HN. You seem to have trouble handling the fact that some people have different opinions than you, about what comments are worth making. Very snowflake problem.
Sounds like you have a problem handling the fact that some people are tired of the bellyaching every time someone uses a common term in which it is not meant in a derogatory way.
You understand that there are millions of women who are victims of abuse, sidelined or disregarded by society, and constantly repressed because of sexism, right?
Losing your job is a temporary problem for most people. Sexism, like the kind that is baked right into our language, is an inescapable daily struggle for many women.
We have the capacity to think about both women's rights and the recently unemployed at the same time. It's frankly sad that you can't look deeply enough at this issue to see it as more than a problem of "grammar preferences".
Once again, none of this is relevant to the post regarding Uber's layoffs unless they're somehow disproportionately laying off more women than men can it be even considered remotely relevant.
I disagree with such a compartmentalized way of thinking about these issues, where it's inappropriate to discuss gendered language when it comes up in some other context. That's often the only effective opportunity to address this kind of problem. A comment about the use of gendered language is relevant in response to a comment that uses arguably gendered language.
This is not a common way of speaking anymore, IMO. When I read "all the developers are men", I didn't understand what you meant at all. I thought maybe you were making some kind of ironic joke about sexism. I did get what you meant after re-reading of course, but "All people are men" sounds very archaic to me, like something out of Tolkien.
Usually when we want to talk about humans as a species or whatever, we now use the word "human."
Language is fluid. The thing that was "right" to say 500 years ago wasn't right 100 years ago, and what was "right" 100 years ago wouldn't be right now. There are clear arguments for why encouraging people to think about the gendered language that they use and how it perpetuates gender roles would be beneficial in combating sexism. The arguments for maintaining existing language because it is currently the most popular tend to be pretty thin.
When you move into how people feel are we introducing inequality? People feel at different rates. Some can go into a rage in an instant while others can be a rock. Are we rewarding the primate brain over scientific obvervations when we choose to accept personal feeling as the gold standard? Should we be encouraging one over the other?
Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male.
Training yourself to default to non-gendered language like person-kind and to think about whether a term originates from problematic aspects of gender dynamics is a relatively easy first step towards breaking down some of the insidious aspects of sexism that are imbedded in language.
> Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male.
That is not actually true. The Old English word for a male human being is wer, as in werewolf; it is cognate to the Latin vir (also meaning a male human being, and the source of modern English words like virile & virtue). That word is no longer in common use in modern English, although I think maybe it survives in some dialects.
The word man(n), OTOH is the gender-neutral Old English word for a human being, as found in such words as woman (from wifman, a wife-man) or leman (a mistress, or love-man), both notably referring to female human beings. It is cognate to modern German mann, again referring to any human being.
The word mankind thus refers to … any kind of man.
Modern German "Mann" is an adult, human male. Ehemann (husband), Fachmann (expert), Kaufmann (salesman). The parallel, of course, is Frau (adult, human woman), which also does double-duty on its own as a word for "wife": Ehefrau (wife), Fachfrau (expert), Putzfrau (cleaning lady). That "Putzfrau" is a long-standing word but "Putzmann" doesn't exist, and that "fachmännisch" and not "fachfrauisch" (fachfräulisch?) is a word are examples of the sexism deeply embedded in languages a lot of us are going on about. Thoughtful Germans are finding their way towards more gender-neutral terms, especially in job postings, which used to be horribly gendered - think "Reinigungskraft" (cleaning power) instead of "Putzfrau", or "Entwickler*in" instead of "Entwickler" (developer, grammatically male).
Modern German "man" (single 'n') is an indirect pronoun that is usually best translated as "one" or "someone", but even then, you fall into the sexism of male as default. "Man ist was man isst" (one is what one eats)
> Out of curiosity - do you have a background in this kind of thing (linguistics), or its just an interest topic for you?
I love languages. Each one is beautiful and endearing and ugly and infuriating in its own way. I really love English, because it’s my native tongue and I know the most about it, but I love studying languages in general. One thing I have found is that the more one knows about many languages the less likely one is to go off half-cocked about perceived problems in one’s own.
I did study a little bit formally, but I also love computers and there’re a lot more career opportunities in software development than in philology or etymology, so that’s where I focused.
Can we be species neutral. Person refers to humans and leaves out animals and other substances like carbon which would experience a year in the same manner as a human.
For what it's worth, this isn't unique to unicorns. Almost company successful enough to get to the scale of tens of thousands of employees likely has huge amounts of waste within it. The situation you describe of niche projects being scrapped after several person-years of effort had been invested, incomprehensible management hierarchy, and no coherent strategy perfectly matches my first job out of college, a year at Sprint in 1999. Me and two other new hires spent a year doing next to nothing on a team of 20+ building a complicated Java service with a purpose I never understood, but which had been going on for about a year, with half the team made up of contractors. Pretty sure I never wrote any actual code, though I did have to fill out time sheets every week. I had two managers, neither of whom I ever talked to. After a year, I got a 15% raise and a promotion. Then soon after I found another job and quit, our project got cancelled, but everyone on the team just got moved to other teams doing similar "work".
Do you think the degree to which a company succumbs to one of these "pathologies" matters? Is it a matter of timing (i.e. becoming successful faster than they become moribund)?
What do you think differentiates a company that becomes "mature" vs one that flames out?
Mature companies, notably, make a profit. Not a future profit, not an expected profit, not profit-discounting-advertising, a right-now end-of-year no-accounting-tricks more revenue from sale of goods than expenditures from all sources. I'm going to take a page out of the IRS handbook, and say that they have made a profit for the last three out of five years, in fact. Let's take that a step further and say that they've existed for five years. Their primary method of financing operations is not private equity, but public equity or loans. Once a company looks like this, it's pretty well set.
Growing is hard and unicorns are expected to grow really, really fast. In the end many companies with a completely viable product end up going under just because investors thought that a million dollar company should be a billion dollar company.