Re: "Man-months" offend some of your audience.

["<Arthur Dilancea>" <adilance -at- TRANSPORT -dot- BOMBARDIER -dot- COM>]

Ok, I wasn't going to get involved, but...

All this talk about gender and political correctness has become, for lack
of a better qualifier, disfunctional.
The political correctness movement is like unions: they may have been a
good thing when they first started, but now, they're nothing but a pain...

If there is a time for political correcteness (maybe for marketing or
election periods), it's not here, not in technical manuals, not in
scientific material of any kind. However, it seems that too many brainless
bureaucrats with too much time on their hands and in need of a new pet
project have decided to revamp the industry accepted terms. They say that
this is done to not offend anybody based on gender or race. What about
offending the (apparently very few) people that have at least one active
brain cell and can think for themselves.

What about looking at things another way. If in reading the word
"policeman", you think of a man, then maybe it's your perception of
comprehension that is faulty!  What about the word "worker"? Do picture a
man, woman, troll, robot, drone, ...
Actually, I like drone, since a lot of people today are just  that:
mindless drones.

On another note, the term "man-month" is the figment of someone's
imagination. There are two ways people are paid today. Either by the hour,
or a specific amount for a project. So it only makes SENSE that "man-hours"
or "hours billable" be used as the accepted term.

A man-month is the is defined (by someone who doesn't know how to estimate
the work) as the time it will take a man (man, woman or beast) to do a
"job" (let's leave this vague) until someone competent comes into the
picture and tells them what to do.



Just my humble opinion (not trying to establish an industry standard here).
Arthur Dilancea.


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