[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?