[eukgoekoko]

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 used Russian talking about stuff we wouldn't immediately share with everone in the first place - just because junior devs do not have to participate in the discussions about architecture design. Still, a junior dev from the US felt intimidated hearing our mother tongue so she asked our manager to introduce "English only" policy in this German company. She could not pass the probation period (was too busy doing gymnastics directly in the middle of the office space) and left the company, but the policy remained. Sure I don't have an answer to your question, but may I ask you: what's wrong with you? How do you think, does your attitude have something to do with xenophobia?

[brailsafe]

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 German, it would be the common crossover language.

If you're senior and they're junior, part of your job is mentorship, and you should be making it as easy as possible to consult with more experienced people if necessary.

Those are the general principles I've always followed, and would do so regardless of whether they seemed incompetent or not. You need to be able to set your ego aside.

[eukgoekoko]

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?

[justincormack]

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.

[eukgoekoko]

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.

[arubania2]

> 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.

[eukgoekoko]

I was sharing my personal experience with my boss because of > think from someone else's point of view.

As for "incidental knowledge transfer" as you call it, there's another side of it: it's called distraction.

[brailsafe]

I find reducing distraction is best served by providing sufficient means for a person to isolate oneself physically. If you feel like the conversation is a private one between yourself and another, the correct approach is not to speak in a different language. Not only does that not scale, it only solves your problem, you don't get to decide how the junior feels about it, and neither do they.

If you're a senior, you should have been a junior at some point, so I'd put the question back to you. Do you feel like sitting next to two people speaking in a completely different language would eliminate distraction? For me, I'd still be getting the noise of you speaking, but then I'd also be wondering why two members of my team have openly excluded me from a conversation happening in my presence. It doesn't encourage me to try and do better, and it makes your duties opaque. The way you describe it also sounds rather imbued with infantilism; "don't worry what we're chatting about, just type your little code while we do important grown up stuff".

Would you have been open to her asking you to stop if she felt that was ruining her productivity? It really just seems like a barrier that isn't necessary and shouldn't be there, waving it away as though they should have different feelings about it.

[eukgoekoko]

> Would you have been open to her asking you to stop if she felt that was ruining her productivity

Most definitely yes. But she never really shared with us what she felt. So when I heard from my boss she wasn't OK with us talking Russian I was like: WTF, how doesn't she understand she has a privilege to speak her native language at the office while most of the employees have to resort to the silly form of English they learnt at school?

[langsoul-com]

Bro wtf is with that end?

> but may I ask you: what's wrong with you? How do you think, does your attitude have something to do with xenophobia?

Completely outa the blue based on what came before.

[eukgoekoko]

Xenophobia is literally a "fear of unkown". What I meant to say is that one could rationalize irrational fear of unknown speech with this feeling of exclusion, but could it be it's just uncommon sounds and intonations that make you feel uncomfortable? I've mentioned Italian sales for this very reason: facing a different culture would naturally raise questions within you: - are they talking shit behind my back? - do they have something against me? this all depends on your levels of paranoia and xenophobia. As a person coming from a vastly monocultural society I used to feel this, too. I believe the solution to this is being open for everyone and overcoming xenophobic sentiments and by no means complaining to the boss.

[thaumasiotes]

> Xenophobia is literally a "fear of unkown"

It's literally a "fear of foreigners". It was possible to use the adjective ξένος to call something strange, but that's not the sense used in the word, or the most common meaning of ξένος.

Based on the dictionary entries (see https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=cenos&la=greek#... ), it does not appear to have been possible to use ξένος to describe something as unknown. There is a related sense, "ignorant [of ...]", but that would describe the person who isn't familiar with something, not the thing that is unfamiliar to a person.

For "fear of the unknown", you'd presumably want something like "agnostophobia".

[thaumasiotes]

> Completely outa the blue based on what came before.

Not really; what came before is a story about how he'd talk with his friend in the office they shared, and then he condemns the OP for sharing the apparent American opinion that that kind of thing needs to be banned. The line from one to the other isn't exactly obscure.

[iLoveOncall]

> just because junior devs do not have to participate in the discussions about architecture design

This is incredibly wrong.

Even in the case where a junior wouldn't be able to contribute to the discussion meaningfully (and that would be wrong too), they can learn from it.

[eukgoekoko]

> 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.

[beaker52]

I personally think they should be invited so they can learn and participate. If you want to reserve decision making responsibility for the seniors, that’s fine.

Regardless of whether juniors attend “senior” meetings or not, seniors should be transparent with juniors by showing them exactly how they should be operating —especially around operational subjects. Using language which isn’t common to all team members (whether Russian, English or any other language) is not the way to build a healthy team of people, in my experience.

[iLoveOncall]

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.

[eukgoekoko]

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.

[iLoveOncall]

> 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.

[aastronaut]

GP isn't talking about meetings, where some dedicated time and space is spent to discuss a certain topic.

I have two policies for casual work-related discussions:

- discussions should have outcomes

- it shouldn't exclude anyone (not the same as: it should include anyone!)

...and a simple policy for non-work related discussions:

- feel free to chat about private topics however and to whomever you prefer

So:

- try to schedule meetings for important things and make anyone that could/wants to learn from it feel included

- if it's just casually pondering about architectural things and there is an outcome, you are obliged to provide a non-exlusive summary to the other team members (and should be able to give a reason on why this discussion was taking place exclusive to others like it did)

- and, if there isn't an outcome, the discussion wasn't worth its time and there shouldn't be a need to involve anybody else

[luckylion]

Once we find a way to generate energy from the work people do moving goal posts, we'll be all set.

[jamil7]

I've also seen this a ton in Berlin startups, although mostly French or Spanish.

You can't realistically ban people from speaking their native language to each other (nor should you try), however I can understand the feeling of exclusion it creates, not sure what the solution is.

[thaumasiotes]

> You can't realistically ban people from speaking their native language to each other (nor should you try)

It can be done. Irish Gaelic is not what it was.