Every time I get into the skills tree thing to help people chart their path into the tech industry I’m reminded of the fundamental requirements that no one mentions even though they are far more important than learning to code. One of them is full English proficiency, not just enough to get by.
Today, this has nothing to do with American/British imperialism (although it once was). It’s just a fact, a fact that gets overlooked in every meeting I’ve had over my career.
I’ve always had people on my team who have no fucking idea what we are talking about in pretty much every meeting. Then, they run off thinking they’ve understood and inevitably there is a misunderstanding and conflict later because of it.
This problem is exponentially exacerbated when other members of the team are fast-talking, technical types who could give a shit about ensuring others actually understand what they are saying. Or worse, technocrats who purposefully fast-talk as a political move to subtly leave out those who don’t understand. I cannot overstate how frequently this problem crops up on technical teams I have worked with in the past, and even currently.
The only way around this is to require that all English speakers on the team use a certain level of English, no more, no less. I’ve seen this work while working with a team of Europeans. In fact, I get the sense that Europeans are used to doing it. They default to English in a group since sometimes there are a half-dozen native languages spoken in the group. I’ve even heard of companies holding job interviews and team meetings entirely in English even though everyone on the team speaks the same non-English language. They are so comfortable doing this that they just intuit the need for ensuring that everyone is understanding each other. Americans do not do this.
Honestly, I think given the rise of ex-pats and multi-national teams where English is the second language of most of the team that fast-talking native English speakers are ultimately fast-talking themselves subtly out of a job — especially if their manager is a non-native English speaker.
It’s not overt. It’s subconscious. The annoyance of not understanding a person for so long grows into something more, into a “team fit” situation. It’s not prejudice, at least no more than firing someone for being unable to speak English at all.
This seems to affect Americans particularly strongly because we really don’t give a shit about being understood. It’s one thing to behave like that on a personal live stream or YouTube video. It’s quite another in a professional capacity where the entire team suffers. Besides, videos can be slowed down and repeated, conf calls cannot.
It gets even worse because people tend to lump non-native English speakers into the “children” category subconsciously. They sound like a child, so they must be as smart and experienced as a child (which is obviously bullshit).
I know we do this. I became so totally aware of it after I learned my first second language. When I was able to understand native French speakers their intelligence and fluency and everything were obvious to me. Before that, listening to them attempt broken English was, um, cute.
I had one particularly strong experience of this with America false impressions based on language ability with a Russian bus driver friend who was a college professor who took the job because it paid more (at the time) since he knew a bit of English. All the Americans coming onto the bus thought he was a nice old man, a kind bus driver making ends meet, but this dude was a multi-degreed Moscow University professor with more intellectual capacity that that entire bus of people combined. Ironically, it worked in his favor. The Americans gave the kind old bus driver a lot more tips in American dollars out of pity. They had no idea.
So English does matter. Without it you really can’t even enter the tech world unless you plan on working in an isolated, nationalist capacity, and there are plenty of countries where that is true, some of which are kicking America’s ass and laughing at this writing right now. The Slavic and Asian countries come to mind. China, Japan, and Korea are so dominant on the tech scene that they (rightfully) look down on Western technology companies. If one of “those English-speaking imperialist corporations” has a good idea they just steal it and recreate it without any English involved. But someone still has to be very fluent in English to do the stealing. (That’s one of my favorite scenes in Mr. Robot, btw).
Tags:
#english #career #culture #education