My company/team relies on a language I clearly specified I can't speak

Question

I was hired as a software engineer last summer at a small sized company (around 50 employees), the company is based in Germany as I am. I had a second interview with the lead of developers across all projects (let's call him John), and the CEO/co-founder. The interview went well. At some point in the interview process, where I spoke about my motivation behind the job change etc, I mentioned that I do not speak German yet, as I am still at a beginner level. They replied that I should not worry about that, that this matter "is on them" as they will provide the necessary accommodation for me.

I am three months through the job now, started working within a small team (led by Paul) and there are no major issues for now. We hold two daily meetings, one with all developers and one with the developers of our project. The first one has always been conducted in German, but on my first day, John suggested having an English-meeting daily one day and a German-meeting daily the following day, and so on. At first it was a bit weird because the purpose of daily meetings is to let people know about each others' work/progress/contributions.. but then I made peace with it since our project-specific daily is always in English (unless one other developer has specific questions to the team lead, then they switch to German). This week, we had an annual meeting where news was shared about the company's vision/goals for the year. The meeting had all employees, and it was in German. The following day on our daily meeting, the team leader (John) does not attend, and our project lead (Paul) starts the meeting with a lengthy speech, then a colleague asks to switch to English "so that I would understand what's being said". Then before he'd explain he said "Oh yes, we should work on your German..". It appears that there is a major hierarchy change in the company, which was spoken about in the annual meeting, Paul will become our team lead and John will have other responsibilities. Then he switched to German again, and for the remaining time I did not understand a thing. Then our project-specific daily started, led by Paul again, and I realized that prior to that, Paul called a non-German freelancer (who doesn't attend the first daily) and told him about the change. I feel like Paul knew that some people do not have that piece of information, but only cared to share it with one person and not the other(myself).

I am feeling/being excluded by the day due to language barrier. What I do not like is that the people who interviewed me were not honest about this, they hid the fact that most communication will be in German. I also do not like Paul's attitude about me not speaking German, making it sound in front of everybody as a lack from my side rather than an issue that the interviewers lied about having a solution for. I plan to have a performance feedback call with both Paul and John, I want to address this matter because it affects me everyday and it makes me feel like an outsider, although I attend meetings, I feel like I know very little about my workplace.

I need suggestions on how to phrase this in the meeting I plan to have. My purpose of the meeting is to communicate this issue to my managers and let them know that this issue has consequences on my involvement in the workplace (as stated above) and hopefully push them further to provide accommodation as they promised in the beginning. At the end of the meeting I ll get to know if they were aware all along and just not doing anything as long as my code is being pushed, probably they don't care about my long-term stay at the company, or if they are aware but not really realizing the side effects of this. Note: I do take German classes, but my beginner level is far away from understanding/speaking the language for business purposes.

Thanks

Answer 1

I read this part:

They replied that I should not worry about that, that this matter "is on them" as they will provide the necessary accommodation for me.

And parsed it as: We know it doesn't work as is, but we will change things so it does work. In other words: Unfounded optimism.

You are a software developer, and software developers are high in demand. If a small company has trouble finding enough people (as most companies do), they become more accomodating and looser in who they hire. So why not hire somebody who doesn't speak German and force everybody else to speak English? Yeah, you will find out soon that you overestimated the English fluency of your workforce.

People not involved in the hiring are now prone to blame you for not speaking German, when it's on the company, not you.

Now, what you can do: Adress that you were told during the interview that you not speaking German is on them. State you are learning German, but since German is so hard it will take quite a while to get business fluent. Ask what they are doing in the meantime. Illustrate the points you told us here: It affects your feeling of belonging, because you miss strategic information. It lowers your work performance, because special questions are in a language you don't understand and so your knowledge grows slower than it could. etc...

As soon as you sense they understood it's a problem, stop adding more examples and focus on solving it with them.

Answer 2

Millions of people go through this successfully.

I am feeling/being excluded by the day due to language barrier.

You are.

My advice is to just brush it off until you're fluent enough. I've worked in a couple of languages I wasn't fluent in. You need to be more self reliant and build your own picture of your work. We had team meetings I couldn't understand but I didn't care, I focused on my issues rather than the big picture and clarified those whenever necessary.

What I do not like is that the people who interviewed me were not honest about this, they hid the fact that most communication will be in German.

That's a given, it's Germany.

Expecting everyone to conform to you doesn't always work out well. You're expecting them to have fluent English while some may struggle with it. And you're allowing it to impact on your morale which can only lead to frustration. You need to relax, focus on your tasks and everything gets easier.

Answer 3

First of all, since some people are insisting otherwise: This is not your fault. When you were hired the CEO knew that you didn't speak German but was still willing to hire you, because they needed your skill. German companies in IT will sometimes have to compromise on language skills, since there is a shortage of tech people willing to work for German tech salaries.

Unfortunately just because you theoretically in the right, it doesn't necessarily help you with the situation when circumstances (or strategies) change. Maybe they decided to stop hiring non-German speakers, or maybe Paul's English just isn't as good as John's and these are decisions that are made despite of you, since the overall impact on the company is more important than the impact it has on you.

I don't think you have a good chance of fighting the change, but you can be proactive to improve your situation. Schedule a meeting with either Paul or if he is not sympathetic with your situation, talk to the people who have originally hired you. Be clear about how you are impacted, and what you suggest can be done about it. Ask for company resources to help you learn German, for most parts you don't need to be a fluent speaker, being able to understand the gist of a German announcement or conversation around you will already allow you to insert yourself back into the discussion.

In the end, unless they are going to fire you (which is going to be hard if you have a permanent contract), then it is in their interest to make you a more effective worker, though it might not be on the top of their minds, so you have to bring the solutions to them that allow you to stay afloat in the changed circumstances.

Answer 4

So, the tl;dr I'm taking away from this is that you relocated your life to a country where you don't speak the language at a functional level, you got a job in that country with a local company where everyone (or at least almost everyone) at that company is a local, and then *surprised pikachu face* when everyone is speaking the local language and you can't.

As they say, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in Germany, do as the Germans do. Which includes speaking German. If you can't do as the Germans do, then perhaps you shouldn't have moved to Germany. I've had a similar experience in Japan, where I moved to Japan and worked for a Japanese company, and the first team I was on spoke in Japanese when I wasn't around and (sometimes) in English when I was around (and even then sometimes Japanese). Fortunately for me I speak enough Japanese that I was more or less able to get the gist of a lot of things (not that they knew that; for various reasons I only responded to them when they spoke in English). Needless to say, that job did not go well, and I can't imagine it was not at least partially to do with my lack of speaking Japanese (around my coworkers; I do speak Japanese at a functional level but I did my best to not speak it at work, again, for various reasons).

Here's what you can do: Have a meeting with your boss and let them know that it's negatively impacting you that everyone is speaking German all the time. Try to come up with concrete examples. It's entirely likely he'll come back to you and say "we only speak German when it's not important for you to know", in which case you'll have to come back with specific counterexamples of when that didn't happen, or you'll have to take that and live with it. Then you can see what happens, if the situation changes. Probably it won't; remember, their native language is German, yours is English. Asking them to speak English all the time is actually a chore, it's not like everyone just automatically speaks English all the time everywhere in the world (which is an opinion frighteningly large numbers of Anglophones believe) and they're just speaking German to screw with you. Furthermore, your boss, as a German himself, likely shares this bias against your position and is likely to be sympathetic to your other teammates (and not to you) when and if this problem continues occurring in the future.

The next step after this would be to find another job, and/or to quit the workforce entirely (and find some way to financially support yourself without working) while you continue to improve your German skills to the point at which you can rejoin the workforce in Germany. You may be able to find another job at a different company that is more amicable to not using German, however, this being Germany, I find it unlikely; my company in Japan gave me the same promise of using English primarily, except when they didn't, and I expect Germany is no different.

Of course, the third option, which is what I ended up doing myself in my experience in Japan, was to simply leave Germany entirely and move back to your home country where (I presume) they speak English. Finding a job where English is spoken in a primarily English-speaking country is going to be far easier than finding a primarily English-speaking job in a German-speaking country, simply by the numbers. If this is possible for you, it might be the route to take.

Lesson to be learned: If you want to move to another country for a long period of time, you need to learn the language to an appropriate level before you move there, not after you arrive while also trying to navigate a workplace environment in a language you don't understand. The fact that you didn't do your due diligence ahead of time is the root of your problem, and that's on you.

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Aside: The reason why, when I worked in Japan, that I chose to speak exclusively English at work, is because my Japanese, while proficient at a conversational level (I can make small talk with just about anyone on just about any topic), is not perfect. As a result, I was afraid that, if I was to be given instruction in Japanese, my Japanese coworkers would use words and terms I didn't understand in Japanese, and either I would have to ask them to translate to English anyway (which would just be easier if they explained in English from the start), or, worse, I might think they said one thing and they actually said another and I ended up making mistakes in my work due to miscommunication. The official workplace policy at this company was that everyone should speak English (this was top-down decided by the CEO and was not a wishy-washy "company culture" issue), so I had that to fall back on if I ran into trouble, which is why I felt I had enough leverage to insist on this. And despite all of that, it didn't work.