8 points by william-cooke 2 days ago
I'm currently interviewing for roles in another language and it's so difficult. I'm wondering if this is universal? I'm struggling to even imagine the daily work in a company. Handling meetings, understanding requirements, standing up for my solutions... I sound like a child. Anyone lived through this? How?
I think that is part of the whole feeling. It's difficult to know those expectations too, especially when interviewing.
Though in this case, I'm certain the nap was the better choice
Funny enough, back when I worked with a Southeast Asian team, we all spoke English. Native languages were Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Mandarin, Ukrainian and so on. But most people wouldn't be able to speak these languages, so we mostly used English.
The customer was often Indonesian and would write bug reports in the language. The non-Indo speakers would just run them through Google translate and comment what they understood and those who were native speakers would correct them if they were mistaken. Especially when there's sarcasm or some cultural context.
There were a few who only spoke the Chinese dialects, and we'd use an intermediary in meetings, and AI/Google translate on text and code. This was also a good use of AI - it was fluent in whatever language, Java or Mandarin and could piece them together well.
Anyway, yeah, it's workable. Nobody knows all the languages. In engineering, there's more empathy for this, especially from the multilinguals.
I speak 4 languages fluently. Here is what helped:
1- Speak slowly. Don't rush it
2- Its fine to formulate what you want to say in your mind before saying it. take your time.
3- Use a phone and record yourself speaking about different subject. Practice, practice and practice.
4- Some audiences are harder than others. French people for example tend to nitpick and want you to be really fluent. While most english speakers are fine with your speaking, but it depends on the audience and who you are speaking to.
5- You obviously need to immerse yourself in the language you want to speak. Tv-shows, Movies, News and even tabloid. The latter is actuallt good to understand jokes, innuendos and other subtle conversations.
One thing I also noted, is that if you follow/watch people who are not native speakers, they actually tend to explain things/concepts better. Because they are limited in words and have limited scope compared to native speaker. Anyone remarked this?
"French people for example tend to nitpick and want you to be really fluent." I humbly disagree.Moved to France only recently and started a company. Whenever I try and talk to locals in French they politely interrupt and ask if it was easier for me in English.
I always heard they would switch to English for people, but they wanted people to make an attempt and not just start with English like it was assumed people understood it in France. It sounds like you made the attempt.
It's a cultural difference – french culture prefers correctness over politeness, whereas in the US people prefer to "keep the peace" by not emphasizing mistakes.
It shows up a lot in engineering discussions if you have french colleagues too.
That's all really great advice, thanks!
I suppose a lot of that time taking is what feels awkward but you're right it's better to be understood and clear.
Love the idea of non-natives explaining better in some ways but that doesn't feel like me right now.
On the other side, one thing I have tried to be more mindful of, as a native English speaker often working with nearshore contractors, is speaking and writing more simply. Enunciating more, slowing down a bit, and using fewer idioms can go a long way towards making ESL coworkers more comfortable.
My one embarrassing moment was that when I was working with a team in India that spoke perfectly clear English was that they asked me was I native English speaker (I am). They had never heard anyone with a southern accent.
I’ve learned to modulate my southern accent and speak slower over the years as I’ve worked in more customer facing roles and even more now that a large part of our company is Latin America and Brazil.
As far as idioms, I did introduce my former CTO who was Indian to the term “sausage making”. Any time he would get into his “geek mode” and want to know the technical details I told him he really didn’t want to know how the sausage was made.
Honestly, I feel this on a spiritual level — or, well, an infernal one.
My native language is PHP, which, as everyone knows, is the demonically fluent tongue of the Ninth Circle. Down there, variables appear from the void, arrays shift shape without warning, and error messages read like ancient curses. Beautiful stuff.
Recently I tried picking up Rust, which people kept hyping as some kind of angelic, higher-order language… but after using it, I’m convinced it’s just the void teaching itself self-esteem. Every compiler message sounds like: “I’m perfect. You’re the problem.”
So yeah — working in a non-native language is tough. But if I can survive switching between demon-speak and cosmic-void-whispering, you’ll be fine too.
Haha I should have been clearer that I meant human rather than programming (or demonic) language. But by the sounds of it, I should be down there in the infernal PHP realms! The boringest part of type safety is surely the safety...
My Bad, I keep think hacker news refers to mostly programming..
I'm pretty sure the parent post is referring to spoken language, not programming.
My personal experience is that a different culture/work ethic probably is even more than a hassle than language.
For example, at one of the orgs I worked my team lead was based in (and native to) a country in the south of Africa. While hammering out a big feature req he told us, based in Europe, through Teams text chat he wouldn't be around for a few hours because he wanted to take a afternoon nap.
We thought he was just joking around, and we needed his opinions a little while later because of something we ran into so we tried to dial him in: no response. Chat: no response. Turns out the guy was really off taking an afternoon nap.
Luckily we could solve things without his help, but to us in Europe that was really weird. Later we did some research and discovered that people in that part of the world really like to take afternoon naps, even though they should be at work...