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0 pointssmt885y ago0 comments

> everyone understands each other just fine mainly because the English used is simple, without fancy words and direct to the point

Fine. So what? Just because it works doesn't mean it's perfect or frictionless.

Lots of software and business concepts are not simple. They take a long time to explain, and they're hard to express with a language (English) that was not designed to express them.

Like I said, it's a problem between two native English speakers, too. It's just more of a problem when one of those people is missing chunks of vocabulary or doesn't understand some of the small, impactful differences in wording in English.

My business partner is Israeli and speaks excellent English, and we still run into these problems sometimes.

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blaser-waffle5y ago

"Nitty-gritty"

Damn near caused an outage because the offshore team didn't know that idiom, and I didn't think about how they might not understand that. Told the not to get into the nitty-gritty of the upgrade until we knew more about how the customer was going to build -- but they didn't know what that meant and kept trying to finalize router configs.

Even with fluency little stuff like this can kill. There is a reason NATO makes everyone learn the same phonetic alphabet and radio transmission patters.

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