alt Hacker NewsJust typical? There are places where writing down passwords to post-it notes is typical too, doesn't make it very professional, not without a great deal of sarcasm at the very least, or some good old bikeshedding about semantics.
> you cultural colonialist
Well at least you got that part of your insult quota completed for the day. People throw around terms like "colonialist" way too easy these days. One would think if colonialism of any kind, geopolitical or cultural, was so important to you, you wouldn't so casually dispense it. Or is this part of your professionalism too and I'm just being given a taste?
Gotta say, pretty weird though, the Spaniards I work with are normal people who can distinguish just fine when it is appropriate to use foul language (like in informal discussions between colleagues or even to clients) and when it is not appropriate (like in codebases or in formal business communications). Maybe you just work somewhere where the standards are low? I know that a lot of our own small / medium sized companies usually have such poor standards too, frequently accompanied by e.g. using native language identifiers instead of English ones. Product quality usually correlates, though not always and not consistently. Doesn't make me want to call the practice any more professional here, everyone understands that this is subpar lowbrow behavior.
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> Just typical? There are places where writing down passwords to post-it notes is typical too, doesn't make it very professional...
Nice, now with extra patronizing, just the flavor we inferior cultures apparently crave.
> Gotta say, pretty weird though, the Spaniards I work with are normal people who can distinguish just fine...
Ah yes, the Spaniards you work with. Let me guess, you can count them on one hand, right?
> Maybe you just work somewhere where the standards are low?
And there's the second scoop of condescension. Maybe I just work in real places with real Spaniards, not in whatever sanitized fantasy you’ve constructed.
Let’s be clear: I've been working in Spain for nearly 25 years. Cursing is common here. It’s a cultural norm, not some "unprofessional lapse" waiting to be corrected by the wisdom of outside standards. If you'd ever had an honest, open conversation with one of your Spanish coworkers (the kind where people don't filter themselves for fear of offending delicate American sensibilities) you might have figured that out.
I'm assuming you're not Spanish, and work with some Spaniards in the context of a company that's not Spanish, or is multi-national, or something like that.
Perhaps the difference you see is that the Spaniards you work with censor themselves because they believe you or others will be offended. But perhaps when it's just those Spaniards together, or when, say, they are working for a Spanish company where everyone else is Spanish, they let loose and are quite vulgar, because that's socially and professional acceptable in those contexts.
I'm not Spanish either. I'm American and am very aware of the polite sensibilities you're talking about in professional settings. But even that can differ. I joined a previous company when it was around 50 people in total, and stayed with that company as it grew to around 10,000. When we were 50 people there was lots of in-person swearing and poor-taste jokes, because we were small enough to know what most/all people would be comfortable with. But as the company grew, that happened less and less, because people could never be sure of the audience for what they were saying. (I had a similar, if less drastic, experience at another company that grew even just from 15 people to 200.)
This phenomenon seems entirely normal, in pretty much any place, though the details of what is and isn't offensive can be different depending on region or culture.