eukgoekoko

Seriously, the fuck has happened to nerds? I expected to see some name-dropping in the post, probably some mentions of GNU / Richard Stallman. What have I found? Jobs and Woz, you're sure nerdy as hell, Mr. Apple-Fanboy.

> It is not that different from German in this matter.

I've met several Germans who spoke Russian fluently, none of them has really mastered the instrumental case, not even a friend of mine who worked at the German embassy in Moscow. Although you might say it's a minor grammar difference, this particular grammar case seems hard to grasp for people who are not accustomed to it through their native language.

Also, from my personal experience, quite a few Germans who learnt Russian had a real struggle understanding the concept of perfective/imperfective aspect.

+1 Baumwolle is my fav.

> Would you have been open to her asking you to stop if she felt that was ruining her productivity

Most definitely yes. But she never really shared with us what she felt. So when I heard from my boss she wasn't OK with us talking Russian I was like: WTF, how doesn't she understand she has a privilege to speak her native language at the office while most of the employees have to resort to the silly form of English they learnt at school?

I was sharing my personal experience with my boss because of > think from someone else's point of view.

As for "incidental knowledge transfer" as you call it, there's another side of it: it's called distraction.

No it's not. If my current boss is talking German fast enough, I can barely understand. Whenever he's talking with the legal team he's using German. This is a clear indication to me that my participation is unneeded (altough I do communicate with our lawyers on variety of subjects). Moreover, I think overhearing other people's conversations is impolite.

You are making too many assumptions about the nature of our conversations just in a single comment. Imagine a situation: a newly joined junior dev is given a task to implement a web scraper. Meanwhile, senior devs sitting beside her start discussing AWS bills for the previous month, pretty much in a casual way. Do you think she should a) be given a chance to participate in this discussion b) carry on with her task, asking senior devs of what's unclear when needed?

It's good that you've mentioned efficiency. How do you think, if junior devs would have to take part in every tech conversation, scheduled or not, when would they do their job?

> And I think they should be given the option to attend all other meetings too,

Surely we had numerous meetings altogether, she wasn't excluded. But if every engineer would be given the right to attend every meeting, this would pretty much degrade to everyone just holding meetings all day long.

> I wouldn't want to work for your company. Thanks for sharing! There are quite a few companies that follow your vision, I wish you good luck in your career.

Xenophobia is literally a "fear of unkown". What I meant to say is that one could rationalize irrational fear of unknown speech with this feeling of exclusion, but could it be it's just uncommon sounds and intonations that make you feel uncomfortable? I've mentioned Italian sales for this very reason: facing a different culture would naturally raise questions within you: - are they talking shit behind my back? - do they have something against me? this all depends on your levels of paranoia and xenophobia. As a person coming from a vastly monocultural society I used to feel this, too. I believe the solution to this is being open for everyone and overcoming xenophobic sentiments and by no means complaining to the boss.

> Even in the case where a junior wouldn't be able to contribute to the discussion meaningfully ... they can learn from it.

Do you mean to say junior devs should be a part every single meeting held by senior engineers? This is utter nonsense, sorry.

That's hilarious. I used to work as a senior backend developer in one of Berlin's startups. Another senior BE dev was a native Russian speaker, so despite our fluency in English we started chatting in Russian now and then. Our conversations were meaningful and respectful (unlike those held by our predominantly Italian sales team who would shout out words like "cazzo"). We didn't mean to exclude anyone either, we only used Russian talking about stuff we wouldn't immediately share with everone in the first place - just because junior devs do not have to participate in the discussions about architecture design. Still, a junior dev from the US felt intimidated hearing our mother tongue so she asked our manager to introduce "English only" policy in this German company. She could not pass the probation period (was too busy doing gymnastics directly in the middle of the office space) and left the company, but the policy remained. Sure I don't have an answer to your question, but may I ask you: what's wrong with you? How do you think, does your attitude have something to do with xenophobia?

You're still missing my point: your claim about Gorbachov having no memories of NATO borders negotioations is false, the sole purpose of my comment was to debunk it. There's one thing I can agree with you though: this argument had really taken imbecilic position.

You have claimed that "Gorbachev has publicly admitted he has no memory of it". This record of preliminary talks with Baker published by Gorbachev Foundation proves the opposite. There's no question this document has no legal bearing, but it's definitely more than just an allegation to say the US have fooled poor Gorbi.