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Horrible idea, but I am not surprised someone decided to do this. In Germany employees have guarantee that they can speak German at work, does not matter the co

Horrible idea, but I am not surprised someone decided to do this. In Germany employees have guarantee that they can speak German at work, does not matter the company is international, on the meetings, emails are people from USA, India, Ukraine, Poland. German has to be used if a single German employee wants that. I have a friend who works in such place. DeepL is a most important piece of software he uses, the problem starts if DeepL messes up some details. Meetings are a nightmare, communication is a nightmare. Managers try to mitigate all that, by avoiding employees from Germany in the projects, what is pretty funny, as company is multinational, but of German origin, and most of the managers are Germans... This attitude is just one of the many factors that led to https://www.amazon.pl/Kaput-German-Miracle-Wolfgang-Munchau/dp/1800753438 https://www.amazon.pl/Kaput-German-Miracle-Wolfgang-Munchau/...

miroljub 2y ago
Why would it be wrong that an employee working in his country prefer to use his native language for communication? If the team is mixed, that means someone would need to learn and use a foreign language. Why does it have to be always only English? That being said, I still prefer a programming language in English, but it's not like there are no precedents here. Many Germans are used to writing Excel formulas in German. Why not code? Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly to and from a universal internal format?
- hulitu 2y ago
  > Many Germans are used to writing Excel formulas in German. And many Japanese are used to writing Excel formulas in Japanese. Excel is such a crap program. Good luck with spreadsheets which have formulas in anothe language. > Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly Because some words' meaning is context dependent. "We don't need no education"
  - miroljub 2y ago
    > Because some words' meaning is context dependent. And English is the only language where that is true? > "We don't need no education" Then educate yourself and learn another language. Something tells me you are fluent only in English.
  - t_mann 2y ago
    > Good luck with spreadsheets which have formulas in anothe language. Excel always shows the formula names in your system language. If happen to be on a computer set to Japanese and prefer English, just set it to that. Why does the whole world need to assimilate to English to save you the - rare - inconvenience of two clicks?
- Pavilion2095 2y ago
  > Why does it have to be always only English? Because a lot of people already know English. You can find good candidates anywhere, bring them together, and they will be able to work together. That's the advantage of English today. There are no reasons to build artificial barriers that hurt cooperation in your company and your country's economy in general, other than nationalistic ones. It is especially silly in countries like Germany, which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers and an aging population. I'm not saying that immigrants shouldn't learn the local language, but there should be other mechanisms and incentives outside of one's workplace.
  - FirmwareBurner 2y ago
    >other than nationalistic ones Welcome to Europe where every country has a different language that's not English. You call this nationalistic, but how many people in the Anglo-sphere would be comfortable working in foreign languages? A lot of workers, especially older ones, still aren't fully comfortable in English beyond ordering a pizza on vacation abroad, and the older ones also have a longer tenure and a bigger voice in the company. And European companies are a lot older than US companies due to a lot of factors. Plus, most often, European companies build products for local markets rather than the international markets, which means local language knowledge is mandatory besides English, so then when a lot of the product management, sales, marketing, customer support is all done in the local language, how can you expect to have the SW dev team to be the only insular one without speaking the local language? >which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers There's no skill shortage in IT work. Every open position gets enough applications form local candidates in this economy. The skill shortage is in poorly paid hard labor jobs that nobody likes to do like elderly care or construction or that requires doing night shifts.
- bakuninsbart 2y ago
  One of the unexpected tough parts during my CS studies was keeping track of the german translations of terms. I would sit in an exam and wonder what Halde (Heap) was again. 98% of interesting literature is in English, and even if the lecture was in German, the recommended literature would usually be in English. In my job, I'm thinking and writing in English, then sometimes translate back to German if need be. Switching to an English keyboard was a major improvement, as many really important strokes are less intuitive in the german layout ( {} for example). I would be really peeved if a random guy on my team could force all of us to program in German. It creates a lot of unnecessary friction.
  - majewsky 2y ago
    My favorite hate term from that category is my Operating Systems professor saying "I-Knoten" for inode. Not "Indexknoten" oder anything, just the letter I + "Knoten".
  - yellowmoneybank 2y ago
    Erlangen?
kuschkufan 2y ago
only narrow-minded people see an idea which was intended as a joke as validation for their opinion and then go on and drone on about their stubborn ideas to lecture the world with their agenda other people however are busy implementing something in rost to further anger the former
OrangeTux 2y ago
> German has to be used if a single German employee wants that. I'm not sure about this statement. See [1]: "The Regional Labor Court (Landesarbeitsgericht - LAG) of Nuremberg had to rule on a motion by a works council, in which the latter demanded that the discussions held with it be conducted only in German. At the same time, it demanded that all communication between the branch management and the employees be conducted in German. The Regional Court rejected both motions of the works council." [1]: https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/detail/no-obligation-for-the-employer-to-use-the-german-language.html https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/de...
- sinuhe69 2y ago
  Yes, but translation must be provided when requested. "Contrary to the view of the works council, communication in English is also not an obstruction of the works council. The court explained that it is crucial how the works council receives the communication. In the disputed case, texts were previously translated into the German language. Face-to-face conversations were translated by those present into German or into English for the branch manager. This was not objectionable, since the risk of a wrong translation was at the expense of the employer."
phartenfeller 2y ago
That is certainly one way to look at a fun project...
aredox 2y ago
It is absolutely mad that today, in 2025, with all the computing power available, the mass of extremely well educated programmers, the number of geniuses, and the advances in computer science... ... merely suggesting the possibility that the keywords of a programming language could be freely translated back and forth between two human languages (in a totally compatible way!) immediately generates comments such as "horrible", "a nightmare", "this is why that country is a failure"... I mean, this is a 1-to-1 transcription of very specific, identifiable, unique, protected words in a text file. And this is the top-rated comment when I write this. Who are you, people who wrote or upvoted this? Why are you so scared by any deviation from what you are used to?
- tialaramex 2y ago
  You're imagining something which can't exist. Maybe because you don't know any other human languages, or maybe despite that (which is worse) "freely translated back and forth between two human languages" isn't a thing. You might as well insist that Pi is rational. So what you get instead is awkwardly translated back and forth in a way that increases confusion. Nobody actually wants that. You're arguing for much worse outcomes, as a result of an at best naive understanding of what language is.
  - t_mann 2y ago
    It is a 1-to-1 mapping of keywords. It's not the only choice of German words one could have used for those concepts, but neither are the English ones. For some people the particular choices made in German here will make more sense, for others the English ones. What's so bad about being more inclusive?
  - aredox 2y ago
    >You're imagining something which can't exist. Excuse me, what is hard in taking this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/appendix-01-keywords.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/appendix-01-keywords.html And translating those back and forth? In fact, if it "can't exist", how can Rost be "fully compatible with English-Rust, so you can mix both at your convenience"? And Rouille? https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille And Unirust? https://github.com/charyan/unirust https://github.com/charyan/unirust
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mzhaase 2y ago
I've never worked at a German tech company where people actually talked German..
- tiffanyh 2y ago
  Are you based in Germany? SAP is also a “German tech company”, and I bet most of their non-Germany based employees don’t speak German either.
  - mk67 2y ago
    Working at SAP and working language is English, also in Germany.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    I work at Qt in Germany and literally everything is English, official language is English
bryanlarsen 2y ago
You have been successfully trolled.
huijzer 2y ago
> This attitude is just one of the many factors that led to ... Thanks! Sounds like an interesting read. German manufacturing is in a really tough spot indeed. But, just to have a bit more nuance in the discussion. It's not all hopeless. Munro loves the new electric motor from VW [1]. And I'm personally also very impressed by multiple high quality open source projects that are made in Germany such as Typst and Forgejo. [1]: https://youtu.be/qTilowhsX_w https://youtu.be/qTilowhsX_w
isaakengineer 2y ago
If I am not wrong German was supposed to be a dual language in the United Stated but the German migrants there who contributed to founding the country lost their cultural access; and as someonein love with works by Goethe and inspired by other European authors, I believe the loss of European languages is a humanitarian cultural heritage loss; and a German comapny should endeavour to hire individuals who are interested in German language and culture. Sacrificing a temporary short-term ease of in finding employees at the cost of cultural loss is not wise, imao.
solarkraft 2y ago
> German has to be used if a single German employee wants that Many large german companies use english as their primary language, so I doubt this claim.
notTooFarGone 2y ago
Why is this up upvoted? This is flat out wrong and you link to a very poorly researched book with a lot of blatantly false populism in relation to energy politics.

miroljub 2y ago

Why would it be wrong that an employee working in his country prefer to use his native language for communication? If the team is mixed, that means someone would need to learn and use a foreign language. Why does it have to be always only English? That being said, I still prefer a programming language in English, but it's not like there are no precedents here. Many Germans are used to writing Excel formulas in German. Why not code? Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly to and from a universal internal format?

hulitu 2y ago
> Many Germans are used to writing Excel formulas in German. And many Japanese are used to writing Excel formulas in Japanese. Excel is such a crap program. Good luck with spreadsheets which have formulas in anothe language. > Or, better yet, why not a built-in translation layer in a programming language, that would allow writing code in any language, and translate that on the fly Because some words' meaning is context dependent. "We don't need no education"
- miroljub 2y ago
  > Because some words' meaning is context dependent. And English is the only language where that is true? > "We don't need no education" Then educate yourself and learn another language. Something tells me you are fluent only in English.
- t_mann 2y ago
  > Good luck with spreadsheets which have formulas in anothe language. Excel always shows the formula names in your system language. If happen to be on a computer set to Japanese and prefer English, just set it to that. Why does the whole world need to assimilate to English to save you the - rare - inconvenience of two clicks?
Pavilion2095 2y ago
> Why does it have to be always only English? Because a lot of people already know English. You can find good candidates anywhere, bring them together, and they will be able to work together. That's the advantage of English today. There are no reasons to build artificial barriers that hurt cooperation in your company and your country's economy in general, other than nationalistic ones. It is especially silly in countries like Germany, which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers and an aging population. I'm not saying that immigrants shouldn't learn the local language, but there should be other mechanisms and incentives outside of one's workplace.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  >other than nationalistic ones Welcome to Europe where every country has a different language that's not English. You call this nationalistic, but how many people in the Anglo-sphere would be comfortable working in foreign languages? A lot of workers, especially older ones, still aren't fully comfortable in English beyond ordering a pizza on vacation abroad, and the older ones also have a longer tenure and a bigger voice in the company. And European companies are a lot older than US companies due to a lot of factors. Plus, most often, European companies build products for local markets rather than the international markets, which means local language knowledge is mandatory besides English, so then when a lot of the product management, sales, marketing, customer support is all done in the local language, how can you expect to have the SW dev team to be the only insular one without speaking the local language? >which suffer due to a lack of qualified workers There's no skill shortage in IT work. Every open position gets enough applications form local candidates in this economy. The skill shortage is in poorly paid hard labor jobs that nobody likes to do like elderly care or construction or that requires doing night shifts.
bakuninsbart 2y ago
One of the unexpected tough parts during my CS studies was keeping track of the german translations of terms. I would sit in an exam and wonder what Halde (Heap) was again. 98% of interesting literature is in English, and even if the lecture was in German, the recommended literature would usually be in English. In my job, I'm thinking and writing in English, then sometimes translate back to German if need be. Switching to an English keyboard was a major improvement, as many really important strokes are less intuitive in the german layout ( {} for example). I would be really peeved if a random guy on my team could force all of us to program in German. It creates a lot of unnecessary friction.
- majewsky 2y ago
  My favorite hate term from that category is my Operating Systems professor saying "I-Knoten" for inode. Not "Indexknoten" oder anything, just the letter I + "Knoten".
- yellowmoneybank 2y ago
  Erlangen?

kuschkufan 2y ago

only narrow-minded people see an idea which was intended as a joke as validation for their opinion and then go on and drone on about their stubborn ideas to lecture the world with their agenda other people however are busy implementing something in rost to further anger the former

OrangeTux 2y ago

> German has to be used if a single German employee wants that. I'm not sure about this statement. See [1]: "The Regional Labor Court (Landesarbeitsgericht - LAG) of Nuremberg had to rule on a motion by a works council, in which the latter demanded that the discussions held with it be conducted only in German. At the same time, it demanded that all communication between the branch management and the employees be conducted in German. The Regional Court rejected both motions of the works council." [1]: https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/detail/no-obligation-for-the-employer-to-use-the-german-language.html https://www.heuking.de/en/news-events/newsletter-articles/de...

sinuhe69 2y ago
Yes, but translation must be provided when requested. "Contrary to the view of the works council, communication in English is also not an obstruction of the works council. The court explained that it is crucial how the works council receives the communication. In the disputed case, texts were previously translated into the German language. Face-to-face conversations were translated by those present into German or into English for the branch manager. This was not objectionable, since the risk of a wrong translation was at the expense of the employer."

phartenfeller 2y ago

That is certainly one way to look at a fun project...

aredox 2y ago

It is absolutely mad that today, in 2025, with all the computing power available, the mass of extremely well educated programmers, the number of geniuses, and the advances in computer science... ... merely suggesting the possibility that the keywords of a programming language could be freely translated back and forth between two human languages (in a totally compatible way!) immediately generates comments such as "horrible", "a nightmare", "this is why that country is a failure"... I mean, this is a 1-to-1 transcription of very specific, identifiable, unique, protected words in a text file. And this is the top-rated comment when I write this. Who are you, people who wrote or upvoted this? Why are you so scared by any deviation from what you are used to?

tialaramex 2y ago
You're imagining something which can't exist. Maybe because you don't know any other human languages, or maybe despite that (which is worse) "freely translated back and forth between two human languages" isn't a thing. You might as well insist that Pi is rational. So what you get instead is awkwardly translated back and forth in a way that increases confusion. Nobody actually wants that. You're arguing for much worse outcomes, as a result of an at best naive understanding of what language is.
- t_mann 2y ago
  It is a 1-to-1 mapping of keywords. It's not the only choice of German words one could have used for those concepts, but neither are the English ones. For some people the particular choices made in German here will make more sense, for others the English ones. What's so bad about being more inclusive?
- aredox 2y ago
  >You're imagining something which can't exist. Excuse me, what is hard in taking this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/appendix-01-keywords.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/appendix-01-keywords.html And translating those back and forth? In fact, if it "can't exist", how can Rost be "fully compatible with English-Rust, so you can mix both at your convenience"? And Rouille? https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille https://github.com/bnjbvr/rouille And Unirust? https://github.com/charyan/unirust https://github.com/charyan/unirust

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mzhaase 2y ago

I've never worked at a German tech company where people actually talked German..

tiffanyh 2y ago
Are you based in Germany? SAP is also a “German tech company”, and I bet most of their non-Germany based employees don’t speak German either.
- mk67 2y ago
  Working at SAP and working language is English, also in Germany.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  I work at Qt in Germany and literally everything is English, official language is English

bryanlarsen 2y ago

You have been successfully trolled.

huijzer 2y ago

> This attitude is just one of the many factors that led to ... Thanks! Sounds like an interesting read. German manufacturing is in a really tough spot indeed. But, just to have a bit more nuance in the discussion. It's not all hopeless. Munro loves the new electric motor from VW [1]. And I'm personally also very impressed by multiple high quality open source projects that are made in Germany such as Typst and Forgejo. [1]: https://youtu.be/qTilowhsX_w https://youtu.be/qTilowhsX_w

isaakengineer 2y ago

If I am not wrong German was supposed to be a dual language in the United Stated but the German migrants there who contributed to founding the country lost their cultural access; and as someonein love with works by Goethe and inspired by other European authors, I believe the loss of European languages is a humanitarian cultural heritage loss; and a German comapny should endeavour to hire individuals who are interested in German language and culture. Sacrificing a temporary short-term ease of in finding employees at the cost of cultural loss is not wise, imao.

solarkraft 2y ago

> German has to be used if a single German employee wants that Many large german companies use english as their primary language, so I doubt this claim.

notTooFarGone 2y ago

Why is this up upvoted? This is flat out wrong and you link to a very poorly researched book with a lot of blatantly false populism in relation to energy politics.