Timeline for How to politely ask "pretentious" engineers to simplify language
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
16 events
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| Oct 16, 2018 at 19:13 | comment | added | Upper_Case | @DaveG gnasher is saying that if I and J make this complaint to HR, with the suggestion that A-H are suddenly using more difficult language, and HR investigates, the stance of A-H will as indicated, whether that's the exact phrasing or not. "We can't take the time to make our English simpler anymore, because a result of recent actions taken by I and J has forced us to allocate our resources to other tasks" can get the same point across and also throws the ball back (they did X, so now we can't Y) | |
| Oct 16, 2018 at 18:35 | comment | added | DaveG | @gnasher729 the last thing teams A-H is going mention to HR is their annoyance with I & J. If they explicitly say "we are retaliating" they are admitting to slowing things down deliberately. Instead all A-H has to do is play dumb: "no we're just using normal English... hey, team B, what do you think? How about you team C?". What is teams I & J going to do when HR asks why A - H would do such a thing? Look bad by admitting what they did? | |
| Oct 16, 2018 at 18:09 | history | edited | gnasher729 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 16, 2018 at 16:55 | comment | added | DaveG | @Darkwing To HR, engineering emails are going to look like complete gibberish anyway, filled with engineering jargon that HR doesn't understand. Complaining to HR is just going to make teams I & J look incompetent, particularly if the vast majority of the teams assert that the communications are "normal". | |
| Oct 15, 2018 at 19:14 | comment | added | cdkMoose | @Summer, "Wasting time googling stuff" is how we learn. If OP has time to search for the perfect word(he actually did well based on his premise), then he has time to learn the words from the other team. If the rest of his team can't afford some time to learn, then that is a totally different problem. Any time you work in a mixed language environment like this, you're going to run into words you don't know. Consider it an opportunity instead of a burden. | |
| Oct 15, 2018 at 18:45 | comment | added | Summer | @cdkMoose OP is talking about a whole team, plus maybe he has googled pretentious, which brings me back to wasting time googling stuff. | |
| Oct 15, 2018 at 17:13 | comment | added | cdkMoose | @Summer, as a native english speaker, I would put specious, supercilious and esoteric at roughly the same "fancy" level as pretentious. If OP knows how to use pretentious, then I don't see why the other words are so hard to understand. | |
| Oct 15, 2018 at 12:51 | comment | added | Kevin | @Chan-HoSuh Whether or not OP's team is an innocent bystander or not is kind of unclear. They may have assumed that since they were given notice, the other teams were given notice as well. | |
| Oct 15, 2018 at 11:39 | comment | added | Frank Hopkins | @gnasher729 That being said, you're right that trying to target the other teams through HR, without revealing the bigger picture, will likely lead to a trench war / negative comeback and the other teams eventually bringing up the issue - or retaliating in other forms if HR simply tells them to use simpler language. | |
| Oct 15, 2018 at 11:38 | comment | added | Frank Hopkins | @gnasher729 I think the last part confuses the reaction of HR with that of the other teams. Sure, the other teams will blame team I (and J) for the incident, but in the eyes of a reasonable HR department that's no ground to start to fuck up their team work even more and thus sabotage future projects as well. A sane HR would have them use adequate language and/or make sure the Asian teams increase their language level. A sane HR would also try to have a meeting where the underlying causes could be brought forward and resolved. | |
| Oct 15, 2018 at 11:26 | comment | added | Summer | Seems pretty unnecessary to use all these fancy words, grabbing a dictionary every time a task needs to be done is slowing everyone down. Using simpler language is slowing nobody down. I also wonder if you're perhaps a native English speaker as I'm still looking for these two words 'that are quite common' you mention. | |
| Oct 14, 2018 at 21:04 | history | edited | gnasher729 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 14, 2018 at 21:03 | comment | added | gnasher729 | @Chan-HoSuh True. | |
| Oct 14, 2018 at 20:55 | comment | added | Chan-Ho Suh | I disagree OP's team is an "innocent bystander". From the wording, it sounds like they got advance notice of the solution. They didn't bother mentioning it to the other teams, nor did they mention to management the problems that would arise. Even though they got no benefit from the solution they cast their vote for the solution. It's not surprising they are getting tarred-and-feathered together with the troublemaker team. | |
| Oct 14, 2018 at 20:28 | history | edited | gnasher729 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 14, 2018 at 20:23 | history | answered | gnasher729 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |