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The Sales office is located in Prague, with a small Dev department. Most R&D is in St. Petersburg and in Munich.
by hhariri 13y ago
The Sales office is located in Prague, with a small Dev department. Most R&D is in St. Petersburg and in Munich.
- nraynaud 13y agoIt must be quite funny to be in a company where almost nobody communicate in his native language. I've seen some russian language messages in youtrack followed by a stern response to write in english in public places. The trick is always the same, when you use english as the common language in your company, you immediately give a strong communication power to native english speakers, they always look so confident when they speak. They look more professional by not doing mistakes, by using a wide vocabulary and by mastering the corporate lingo. That's a place where Europe could innovate: finding a third way between using English that completely obliterate non-native speakers in arguments and using hundred of translators, one for each couple of languages.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoUgh. I work in china where English is the working language. Many of my Chinese colleagues are very confident in speaking English, to the point that my advantage is limited to helping with paper editing when submission deadlines approach.
- nraynaud 13y agoI have seen from experience that the command of english is a discriminator in the workplace and in negotiations. You seem to say something in the same direction by saying that it's because you have some good english speaking people around you. Imagine they would be a vast minority, that most of them would be struggling to make a sentence, and that sentence would be hard to understand (this problem sometimes arise inside a language with local accents and dialects), how would meetings turn?
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoI quite expect they wouldn't meet the bar for working at an American company in Beijing. It's already worked into the hiring process.
- nraynaud 13y agoIf the company is american, then what I emphasized doesn't apply at all, it's absolutely normal that most things must be done the american way, and selecting people for their ability to speak with the headquarter makes sense.
- mark_l_watson 13y agoWhen my wife and I were traveling in China a few years ago, young people were very friendly, speaking to us in English. Perhaps they were both being friendly and practicing speaking English.
- nraynaud 13y agoIt's the same in France, my GF is from the US and everybody including me speaks to her in english also she want to improve her french. Which of course completely reinforces the cliché of the American who doesn't have a strong command of a foreign language (the best way to make a prejudice true is to act on it).
- olegstepanov 13y agoWell, at JetBrains almost all oral communication takes place in Russian, while written is expected to be in English. And we have pretty stark engineering influence on culture, so corporate language is most of the time received with raised eyebrows.