Thread: Many Indian immigrants to Silicon Valley struggle with the language of Big Tech. The language in question is not English, or for that matter, Python.
The dialect of corporate America can seem vaguely indecipherable, where the words spoken aren’t necessarily the words meant and sentences must be decoded for hidden subtext.
Successive HR training programmes and employee manuals have led to a sort of erasure of personality at work, where employees find themselves speaking in templated formats.
Political correctness is taken to an extreme, where even in casual conversations, you need to be as careful as a lawyer filing a legal notice.
A work culture that demands performative inclusivity and marketable authenticity has made Silicon Valley’s technology giants a huge challenge to navigate.
While respect for different cultures, communities and genders is valuable in any workplace, the narrow, tight boundaries within which people are allowed to express themselves results in the “shredding of any form of humanity and authenticity”, as one employee put it.
The concern feels less about inclusion and more about ensuring the company doesn’t get sued.
As people are discouraged from bringing their full range of emotions to work, passive aggression replaces plainspeak. This is particularly true of big tech companies with bloated bureaucracies. Startups & smaller companies don’t have the money to lose on indirect communication.