[Solvency]

I always hear conflicting stories like this. On one hand, people claim Americans are often too artificially faux positive, too effusive, too <insert anything but the cold hard authentic truth>. And that you'll have no problem hearing from Scandinavians / Eastern Europeans / <insert here> exactly how they feel. Often to the surprise of many Americans, who are not used to such candid direct communication.

Obviously life isn't so black and white but I am wondering where these generalizations come from.

[watwut]

This is not about people in Europe not speaking their mind. It is about them not speaking their mind during organized scheduled meeting that has multiple people in it. These people will tell you what they think in one on one or a smaller group. They will tell you what they think spontaneously in discussion. But when you put 8 people of them and formalized it all, they go into formal mode and talk much less.

The two are two different issues, basically. Also, the directness of a discussion kind of depends on a topic. Americans tend to be hierarchical and tend not to want to hear negative things. Eastern Europeans are more likely criticize, express doubts or pessimism. These are seemingly taboos for Americans. But that is kind of orthogonal to the meetings topic.

[scyzoryk_xyz]

Being blunt is different from being truthful. We Eastern Europeans are so truthful that we end up not saying anything at all for fear of being too blunt. So what you get is all these 1:1’s where everyone has to make sure that everyone else is on exactly the same page before being open about it in a larger meeting. No space for disagreement or discussion in a larger forum!

I can’t speak about other Europeans or their culture, but here in Eastern Europe we historically had very little education in presentation, debate skills and critical thinking. So people have strong opinions, but little skill in presenting or confronting them with other perspectives and ideas. Of course, it never is all black and white. But this is my own experience with tech millennials at least.

Americans (at their best) are in some ways the opposite - they’re good at diplomatically navigating a variety of imperfect voices to arrive at a mutual agreed upon point of view. Coming with that (idealized) American mindset into Eastern Europe isn’t easy.

[JohnFen]

> they’re good at diplomatically navigating a variety of imperfect voices to arrive at a mutual agreed upon point of view.

I think this is reasonably accurate. It's rather necessary in order to be able to function in a nation where you are interacting with a huge variety of people with a huge variety of sensibilities, from all over the world.

[JohnFen]

> people claim Americans are often too artificially faux positive, too effusive, too <insert anything but the cold hard authentic truth>.

I am a genuinely positive person and my interactions reflect that. But I have learned to to be more dour when interacting with people from other countries (mostly from European nations) because they think I'm being phony.

The thing is... I'm not. Being dour to put them at ease is me being phony, but they'll accept that as being "authentic".

So much bizarreness all around.

[deepsun]

I immigrated to US, and I'd say Americans are direct. They just try hard to make the words very polite. So polite, that Europeans take that for positiveness or indirectness. But it's just politeness.

[andrekandre]

  > They just try hard to make the words very polite. So polite, that Europeans take that for positiveness or indirectness.

interesting, any good examples?

[kayodelycaon]

“I would recommend/suggest/consider changing this code to this.”

Read: Fix your shit. Or give me a good reason to not block your PR until hell freezes over and we all need ice skates.

Phrasing things like this works well with junior developers. They feel safer having an opinion or asking questions.

[JohnFen]

Thank you for this moment of enlightenment. As an American, I totally hear "I would recommend/suggest/consider changing this code to this" as a particular flavor of "fix your shit". That flavor being that the person saying it isn't mad about it, but you really do need to fix your shit. If they're mad, they'll say "fix your shit".

My enlightenment was that this meaning is so instinctive to me that I doubt that it would occur to me that it could be misinterpreted.

[watwut]

That is the thing. I would take this suggestion as optional. For me, it means that you have some preference, but are not strong about it nor care much. I would not interpret it as "fix your shit".

Polite and direct to me would be something like "I think you should change this code".