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Ask HN: How to deal with my team speaking a different language?

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Re: Ask HN: How to deal with my team speaking a different language?

#51
Different organizations will have different conventions about this. Your org and office might have to figure out what conventions it wants.

And, as an individual (especially if your office is in China?) you might want to consider how much Mandarin you're able to learn, even if only for goodwill but years from being able to follow engineering conversations.

Related thoughts...

A friend mentioned getting into an elevator in the US, where two people were speaking German, and they switched to English as soon as they noticed him, even though they were strangers and not talking with him.

As someone who's worked at multinational companies (one Chinese, one Japanese) while based in the US, I've felt humbled by colleagues' impressive efforts with English.

One place, there were times I was in a meeting of team leads and the director, and I was the only person who was a native English speaker, and everyone else shared a different native language, yet everyone was speaking English, though some not fluent. (Defaulting to English was by convention, not only because I was there.)

Although admiring colleagues' language abilities (and the progress of some over time prompted the thought that one day that engineering lead might be running an international company), I sometimes felt a little bad that some of them had additional language burden atop technical engineering work. A consolation I imagined was that maybe some of them wanted to practice English.

At one multinational, I encouraged specific uses of written English engineering and product management communication. Which, in addition to the usual benefits, helped by it being easier to read&write across language frictions, than to hear&speak. And some meetings were converted to be country-specific, in whatever language people communicated most efficiently and comfortably, so long as we could stay in sync (asynchronously) via effective documentation.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with my team speaking a different language?

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even in the case where a junior wouldn't be able to contribute to the discussion meaningfully ... they can learn from it. Do you mean to say junior devs should be a part every single meeting held by senior engineers? This is utter nonsense, sorry.

Definitely all design reviews. And I think they should be given the option to attend all other meetings too, maybe with the exclusion of those that are more business oriented like discussing the vision for the team with management, etc. It has to stay efficient. Otherwise, how do you want your junior developers to not be junior at some point? I wouldn't want to work for your company.

It's good that you've mentioned efficiency. How do you think, if junior devs would have to take part in every tech conversation, scheduled or not, when would they do their job?

> And I think they should be given the option to attend all other meetings too,

Surely we had numerous meetings altogether, she wasn't excluded. But if every engineer would be given the right to attend every meeting, this would pretty much degrade to everyone just holding meetings all day long.

> I wouldn't want to work for your company. Thanks for sharing! There are quite a few companies that follow your vision, I wish you good luck in your career.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with my team speaking a different language?

#54
post #14

Just talk to them. In English. I've worked in a multi-language business for many years where I did not speak all the languages, and there are two points I think you need to take to heart 1. No one can guess what you're feeling/thinking, you need to tell them 2. Don't take it personally if people are doing what comes naturally to them Your comment on benefit of the office is understood, but misguided; your colleagues…

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Re: Ask HN: How to deal with my team speaking a different language?

#55

That's hilarious. I used to work as a senior backend developer in one of Berlin's startups. Another senior BE dev was a native Russian speaker, so despite our fluency in English we started chatting in Russian now and then. Our conversations were meaningful and respectful (unlike those held by our predominantly Italian sales team who would shout out words like "cazzo"). We didn't mean to exclude anyone either, we only…

Seems like you might hold some resentment towards her, and that you're not so self aware about alienating colleagues. If she felt like the right choice was to bring it up with management, it would seem fairly clear that she felt you were speaking Russian often enough that it would be an imposition to communicate with you, in a way that's quite common in Berlin and in Berlin startups. Though obviously not as much as G…

You are making too many assumptions about the nature of our conversations just in a single comment. Imagine a situation: a newly joined junior dev is given a task to implement a web scraper. Meanwhile, senior devs sitting beside her start discussing AWS bills for the previous month, pretty much in a casual way. Do you think she should a) be given a chance to participate in this discussion b) carry on with her task, asking senior devs of what's unclear when needed?

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with my team speaking a different language?

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely all design reviews. And I think they should be given the option to attend all other meetings too, maybe with the exclusion of those that are more business oriented like discussing the vision for the team with management, etc. It has to stay efficient. Otherwise, how do you want your junior developers to not be junior at some point? I wouldn't want to work for your company.

It's good that you've mentioned efficiency. How do you think, if junior devs would have to take part in every tech conversation, scheduled or not, when would they do their job? > And I think they should be given the option to attend all other meetings too, Surely we had numerous meetings altogether, she wasn't excluded. But if every engineer would be given the right to attend every meeting, this would pretty much deg…

> How do you think, if junior devs would have to take part in every tech conversation, scheduled or not, when would they do their job?

How? Better. Because they understand more about the reasons why a system is a particular way.

When? The other 30 hours of the work week? My team is meetings heavy yet we all have time to do actual work.

A big part of being a senior software engineer is growing others. I'm not sure you're a senior engineer yourself, despite your belief in it.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with my team speaking a different language?

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you might hold some resentment towards her, and that you're not so self aware about alienating colleagues. If she felt like the right choice was to bring it up with management, it would seem fairly clear that she felt you were speaking Russian often enough that it would be an imposition to communicate with you, in a way that's quite common in Berlin and in Berlin startups. Though obviously not as much as G…

You are making too many assumptions about the nature of our conversations just in a single comment. Imagine a situation: a newly joined junior dev is given a task to implement a web scraper. Meanwhile, senior devs sitting beside her start discussing AWS bills for the previous month, pretty much in a casual way. Do you think she should a) be given a chance to participate in this discussion b) carry on with her task, a…

And she has no way to know you are talking about AWS bills as she doesn't understand the language. Its intimidating, think from someone else's point of view.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with my team speaking a different language?

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making too many assumptions about the nature of our conversations just in a single comment. Imagine a situation: a newly joined junior dev is given a task to implement a web scraper. Meanwhile, senior devs sitting beside her start discussing AWS bills for the previous month, pretty much in a casual way. Do you think she should a) be given a chance to participate in this discussion b) carry on with her task, a…

And she has no way to know you are talking about AWS bills as she doesn't understand the language. Its intimidating, think from someone else's point of view.

No it's not. If my current boss is talking German fast enough, I can barely understand. Whenever he's talking with the legal team he's using German. This is a clear indication to me that my participation is unneeded (altough I do communicate with our lawyers on variety of subjects). Moreover, I think overhearing other people's conversations is impolite.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with my team speaking a different language?

#59
post #44
post #14

Just talk to them. In English. I've worked in a multi-language business for many years where I did not speak all the languages, and there are two points I think you need to take to heart 1. No one can guess what you're feeling/thinking, you need to tell them 2. Don't take it personally if people are doing what comes naturally to them Your comment on benefit of the office is understood, but misguided; your colleagues…

>your colleagues don't have an obligation to you or the company to hold every conversation in English. English isn’t my first language (I struggled to learn English as a kid) and I rather heavily disagree with this statement. There’s nothing about the situation that’s acceptable. Communicating well is arguably the most important thing in any knowledge workers job and this is already a difficult task for some people e…

Additionally, the speaker who has a hard time with English, I assume they understand it but might not know the "perfect" words to say, isn't going to get better without practice. While one could argue the OP should learn Mandarin, I'll hard disagree.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with my team speaking a different language?

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And she has no way to know you are talking about AWS bills as she doesn't understand the language. Its intimidating, think from someone else's point of view.

No it's not. If my current boss is talking German fast enough, I can barely understand. Whenever he's talking with the legal team he's using German. This is a clear indication to me that my participation is unneeded (altough I do communicate with our lawyers on variety of subjects). Moreover, I think overhearing other people's conversations is impolite.

> No it’s not.

Maybe to _you_, don’t assume other people are the same way.

Along my whole career path (I’m a senior now) I’ve always been curious about the high-level technical stuff and took every opportunity to listen to knowledgeable people.

I think there’s a term for it: incidental knowledge transfer.

You might be stripping that person of the opportunity to grow, or maybe just to hear about something interesting for them to follow up on later.

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