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hyporational comments on question: the 40 hour work week vs Silicon Valley? - Less Wrong
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Comments (107)
Serious (and not particularly considering myself part of any oppressed minority).
My experience is that addressing any group as "you people" is a near-infallible sign of hostility and contempt, with (not always but often) a side order of prejudice against whatever (political, religious, philosophical, social-class, ...) group "you people" might be part of.
Maybe my experience is atypical, or maybe yours is. You might want to do a bit of googling and see how the phrase is used and how it's perceived; if your impression on doing so accords with mine, you'll probably want to avoid using it when you don't want to signal hostility and contempt.
My mental autocompleter matches "you people" to things like "you people are all the same", "what the ---- is wrong with you people", etc.
(I note that urbandictionary.com's second definition for "you people" is "Blacks". For what it's worth, that isn't something I read into it -- though I see there's a similar suggestion on wiktionary, so maybe it isn't just urbandictionary.com being flaky.)
If your reaction to the phrase is even slightly frequent then I might want to address people in a more neutral way. Is "you guys" better or am I being sexist now? Is just "people" better? Suggestions? Maybe I should go all medical and drop pronouns altogether just to be sure :)
Since I'm not a native speaker my connotation-o-meter isn't always amazingly tuned. The issue is amplified when I think and type quickly. Since you're a native speaker I suppose your experience is more typical than mine, so I'll avoid "you peopleing" in the future unless I want to be extra cheeky.
You might want to better take into account the amount of non-native speakers here next time you're instinctively reading between the lines. Anyways I'm glad I learned something new about connotations again.
"You guys" has absolutely none of the hostile/contemptuous feeling that "you people" has (at least for me). It's distinctly informal and (as you surmise) some people may interpret it as sexist.
I think I'd generally just say "you" and, if necessary, make it explicit what particular group I had in mind.
It hadn't occurred to me that you might not be a native English speaker; sorry about that. I guess it's one of the perils of speaking the language very well :-).
As another non-native speaker, I frequently find myself looking for a "plural you" in English, which was what I read hyporational's phrase as trying to convey. Useful feedback not to use 'you people'.