Comment by pimeys

1 day ago

YMMV. I worked in three different German startups in Berlin and I almost never heard anybody speaking German in the company, even though more than half of the people were from Germany. Maybe it's different in bigger companies, or outside Berlin?

5 comments

pimeys

Reply
ruszki  13 hours ago

I would rather say older companies, and Berlin is definitely a different beast. That’s the only place where I had similarly good experience in Germany/Austria, and heard consistently good hearsay regarding this. It’s still way worse averagely than Nordic countries, Netherlands, or even some Eastern European countries. And here, I specifically mean when they can speak English, they just choose not to.

  • pimeys  12 hours ago

    Yeah. I know, I'm from Finland originally. People in Berlin are quite often just rude, but it's just something you have to deal with when living in this city.

    I've been living in Berlin for 15 years now, and every time I visit Finland I'm shocked when for example the cashier in the supermarket smiles to me and is friendly. Are they mocking me, is this a joke? It takes a few days to adapt.

    Naturally living in Berlin means you learn to hate and love your city at the same time. You hate so many things in here, and when you travel, you're happy to come back because the place you were in of course misses all the unique aspects of Berlin.

weslleyskah  19 hours ago

You are comparing different environments. Inside a startup or a multinational it will obviously be quite common.

But you can't expect low level bureaucrats from a transportation company to start speaking english when it is not required to perform the job.

  • pimeys  14 hours ago

    I was answering to this part:

    > The German site at my multinational company at the time was the only site on Earth which had to introduce an internal regulation about mandatory English, because they just switched to German all the time even when there were people on the call from different countries.