Employees feel isolated when a team speaks only their native language
13 posts across 9 communities in the last 60 days; 15% from r/Accounting.
“If you wouldn't say it to someone on your project team, it doesn't belong on this sub. This includes being nice, not discussing politics, and encouraging healthy conversations or debate. Bigots & hate speech have a zero tolerance policy. A good rule of thumb is to follow…”
“You seem to be looking at that as a problem instead of an opportunity.”
“It's only an issue when someone who is indian does this is what the op is pointing out because everyone seems to be defending hiring based on language except when it's indians”
Several users expressed discomfort and feelings of exclusion stemming from teams primarily communicating in languages other than English. Some felt it was unprofessional, while others interpreted the behavior as a sign of respect or politeness towards those who don't speak the shared language. The posts highlight concerns about belonging and inclusion within diverse work environments.
SOURCES (24)
“If you wouldn't say it to someone on your project team, it doesn't belong on this sub. This includes being nice, not discussing politics, and encouraging healthy conversations or debate. Bigots & hate speech have a zero tolerance policy. A good rule of thumb is…”
“Most people have a decent understanding of that. He could be way off, but it's not incredibly likely IMO.”
“Ahh, that's a soft skill I'm def not going to tackle. I think maybe it is, I know the head tilting is a cultural thing, I wish I knew it better to better communicate intent and meaning. Reminds me of the head nod we do, up is attention seeking, down is a polite gesture. I'm interested to find out now, it's a great question.”
“Oh yeah no, I’m AuDHD, neurodivergent, etc, all day long. Took a looooooong time for me to learn soft skills. Definitely didn’t bother me, honestly didn’t know if it was a culture thing.”
“you want to use your privilege start by checking racism when you see and hear it. a lot of this mess goes unchecked because "good yt people" never speak up.”
“It's only an issue when someone who is indian does this is what the op is pointing out because everyone seems to be defending hiring based on language except when it's indians”
“I'm thinking Philippines. I tutored a lot of ESL students, and OP's English is closest to US English.”
“It’s inconsistent. There’s Japanese, Korean, Chinese (not East Asian) but then there’s South Asian (instead of Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan etc)”
“Having worked for decades in this EU / USA thing there may be a cultural thinking issue too. My German or Scandinavian colleagues tended to absolutely think about everything, no trust me bro, no nothing, and be extremely well organized. And way overstaffed vs us. Lower cost European sites like Poland or Spain, epic overstaffing. So they could afford to do super elegant designs, produce dissertation level documentation, and have more tests done than NASA. Meanwhile we were severely understaffed,”
“Oh, you're an angry one, aren't ya?! 😂 I think you might want to look up what code-switching is. Maybe it'll help you get less upset about language when you see that people can use everyday casual speech in some contexts, while they might switch to a completely different way of speaking when among other people. Language is about people understanding each other in context, along with understanding what that context is, not about the strictest and most out-of-context logician in the r”
“Oh at my work all managers are developers as well so I didnt clarify that”
“lol i thought we were the only ones with this problem. our team has like 85% english users but the german and french speakers complain way more and for months we couldnt figure out why cause our eval numbers looked great we ended up translating the same benchmark set instead of writing native ones, mostly cause nobody on the team speaks japanese and we didnt trust google translate to get the nuance right. but honestly that might be the wrong call, the translated prompts sometimes read weird and”
“Hello, my fellow lone white female engineer! The only other white women I ever meet is when we collaborate with sales and marketing.”
“I’m usually the only gay guy and also have autism so am always different /don’t fit in and it means my boss doesn’t value or develop me no matter how hard I work. So I do good work, build relationships with other departments and then if it’s noticeable I leave. It sucks being different but there isn’t much you can do if they dislike you.”
“I went to a computer science class in California once. I calculated it and noticed that over 89% of the class was from India.”
“No one's championing discrimination. My point is that "the right" group is now facing the same discrimination as they have been dishing out since the dawn of time, and now they're complaining because it's happening to them. If they want change, then they should start with themselves.”