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by kerakaali 220 days ago
> the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails

I don't disagree with your statement, but I read the sentence: "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?" with a similar gross reaction as the OP comment did.

Reading that in response to Marsf's original message of airing grievances and feelings of disrespect towards his work felt entirely tone-deaf and corporate in nature. Especially in context of this being in response to the Japanese team, where Japanese business communication norms are often at odds with the American standard.

You might think that this method of communication is inefficient, but the heart of the matter seems that the Japanese team finds the very emphasis on efficiency as disrespectful when it comes at the cost of the human element of respect.

1 comments

> felt entirely tone-deaf and corporate in nature. Especially in context of this being in response to the Japanese team

The person is a "Support Community Manager" in Indonesia if you click on their link. They're not the CEO of Mozilla who is supposed to be an expert in intercultural communication. I think you're being kind of harsh on someone who is presumably not high-level and just trying to do their job and get more information to be helpful.

> The person is a "Support Community Manager" in Indonesia if you click on their link. They're not the CEO of Mozilla who is supposed to be an expert in intercultural communication.

This is completely backwards. The CEO is not expected to manage intercultural communication. You know whose job that is? The community manager.

The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan, but managing local contributors is absolutely a job for the community manager and not the CEO.

> This is completely backwards. The CEO is not expected to manage intercultural communication. You know whose job that is? The community manager.

Sorry, you're wrong. Intercultural communication is very much a core skill for the CEO of a global organization. They're expected to know how to communicate appropriately so some international deal doesn't get torpedoed due to a faux pas.

> The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan

Right. So on that, we agree.

Even if not a high level, then s/he had to learn that style of communication from peers in the corp, and the tone is set by managers. It's entirely OK to blame someone who has title “Manager”.
The style of communication seems perfectly fine to me. It's acknowledging there's a problem, apologizing as much as they can before they have the real facts, and offering to communicate over the phone to figure out what's really going on. I honestly don't know what more you want from someone who is a customer service manager. Not the leader of the team who built the translation product.
The problem is, its false to insist that the manager does not have real facts. The facts have been stated by OP in the first post in the thread, and while the statement can be true or false, it's not like it's not there. The responder should have listened and evaluated this, possibly with consultation with PM of the feature, and just by this response we can assume s/he just didn't listen.

Moreover, OP chose the very thread as the venue, and attempting to switch it to a different, intransparent one is a disservice to the community. Community is very important context of this message, and the response seems to validate the proposition that it's really the end of it, per the subject of the thread.