This reminds me a lot of Mattt's other post about empathy[1]. What stuck with me most were two tweets at the end of it: one person said "Why do open-source programmers take things so personally?" to which another replied "because we're all persons".
At the time, I was ruining some of my professional relationships over arguments about their open source projects, because I only looked at these from a technical stand-point. Once I started putting myself in their shoes, I stopped criticizing. Instead I tried to be that person who always makes you feel like you can do anything, who always praises and never criticizes, who believes in you and your ideas, because that's the kind of person I look up to.
True, I had to ignore some technical deficiencies a few times, but life's too short. Plus, who am I to think I have all the answers? Maybe those technical deficiencies are really innovations in disguise, which I just lack the proper imagination to see properly at this early of a stage? Even more reason to overlook it and be supportive rather than critical.
So far it's working out well. My professional relationships are improving, and I feel like much less of a sour-puss than before. But YMMV.
EDIT: This is possibly related to my recent burnout which made it a whole lot easier to not really care about technical details and focus a lot more on the relationships and the positives. These two things happened at the same time.
I can't upvote this enough. At the very least, developing cognitive empathy can help you communicate better with people by understanding their emotional state and responding appropriately. But more than that, there's all the positive benefits of applying emotional intelligence to your work and personal life that come from empathizing with people.
NS is a common prefix for Apple-derived ObjectiveC classes. In that context it stands for NextStep, which Apple acquired many years ago. The NSHipster blog is a reference to this usage of NS. I understand that it has extremely negative connotations in Germany, but unfortunately you're going to have to take that up with Apple, not with the blog's author.
Yes, I know that. Just recently I talked with a friend about just that unfortunate naming decision by NextStep. I also didn't want to directly critique the site owner.
I just thought it might make sense to draw some awareness to the issue because non-German speakers have practically no chance of knowing about this pitfall. It's kind of similar to the Chevy Nova situation.
Funny how they repeated that mistake with the next generation. Called the MR-S in Japan, you could see how it could be shortened to "Mrs." in English, comparing the car to something a mother or wife might drive. So they named it MR2 Spyder in US and MR2 Roadster in EU.
I thought you were going to talk about the insensitivity of using the word hipster, which seems to have been turned into a derogatory term about people who dress too well I guess...
NS is actually part of the Objective C naming history:
I don't think most people consider a fedora and skinny jeans dressing 'too well', and those are the fashion items that come to mind when I hear the word 'hipster'. Then again, the word hipster seems to be context-sensitive... YMMV.
Haha the term seems to describe everything from Mad Men era suits to fedoras and skinny jeans, even to bringing back the Canadian tuxedo shudder (http://thecanadiantuxedo.com/blog/)
German people writing iOS software must be having a hard time then.
Seriously, even in the context of cultural sensitivity, this seems pretty silly to me. Really? National Socialism gets to own the letters NS for the rest of time? I mean, if it's an objective fact that Germans get upset by those letters, then I guess that just is. I still can't remember ever hearing of anyone being upset about letters that could stand for something else before. There aren't really that many letters, so I'm not sure how feasible it is to restrict two-letter combinations.
I've taken my time to ponder this because there really is a problem with getting this point across. I do not know of any other language where two letter combinations are connotated this heavily. Sure, there are some that are mildly weird/inappropriate, such as for instance FU in English, but nothing compared to these three in German (I stupidly forgot one in the previous post).
I think I've come up with a way of explaining how heavy the connotation is. So again, these are the abbreviations:
NS is bad, quite worse than any comparable thing in English (but not bad enough for Apple to drown in boycott mails, as you noted).
SS is significantly worse than that. Have those two uppercase letters together (better yet, standing freely together) and there is nobody raised in Germany who will not immediately think of the SS and/or death camps.
KZ is the worst. This one is an immediate, unconditional full stop. Now here comes the comparison: Putting that in your product name is _exactly_ the same level of horrible as using the word pedophile in your product name.
That is the level of connotation we are talking about here.
At the time, I was ruining some of my professional relationships over arguments about their open source projects, because I only looked at these from a technical stand-point. Once I started putting myself in their shoes, I stopped criticizing. Instead I tried to be that person who always makes you feel like you can do anything, who always praises and never criticizes, who believes in you and your ideas, because that's the kind of person I look up to.
True, I had to ignore some technical deficiencies a few times, but life's too short. Plus, who am I to think I have all the answers? Maybe those technical deficiencies are really innovations in disguise, which I just lack the proper imagination to see properly at this early of a stage? Even more reason to overlook it and be supportive rather than critical.
So far it's working out well. My professional relationships are improving, and I feel like much less of a sour-puss than before. But YMMV.
[1]: http://mattt.me/2011/empathy-and-open-source/
EDIT: This is possibly related to my recent burnout which made it a whole lot easier to not really care about technical details and focus a lot more on the relationships and the positives. These two things happened at the same time.