[flagged]

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

▲

arjie 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> > > The reason is sadly, the culture is very reserved and cautious, so as an "outsider" it's going to take A LONG time before you can be trusted in a senior/leadership position (no matter how good your German language skills are).

Can someone explain what the "strongest plausible interpretation of this" is in this context? It sounds like straightforward xenophobia from the Germans but the other guy who said so got flagged by the moderator. That implies that the strong interpretation is entirely obvious but I don't know what it is, and I can't get it out of an LLM. If it were that anyone takes a long time before they're trusted, that's institutional slowness. If the slowness is reserved for an "outsider" and not for a "native" then that feels like the natural interpretation is xenophobia.

I can understand why a foreigner in Germany (the outsider here) would be hesitant to say anything so I understand that part.

▲

dang 6 hours ago | parent [-]

You're adding a lot of assumptions in order to reach that conclusion.

Generally it's not a good idea to reduce someone else's comment to a blunt denunciation, and especially not when you're adding a putdown of your own ("that is a LOT of words"). The commenter was obviously offering a complex expression of their experience and not just circomlocuting a crudity.

	▲	arjie 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I assume you mean "you" here in the sense of "one" because I didn't say those other things. And certainly the "that is a lot of words" framing is something I personally dislike as well, but the conclusion seems accurate, doesn't it? If German companies routinely have a glass ceiling for foreigners that they don't have for natives then surely in the American context we'd consider that bigotry of some sort and certainly if it were in the US we'd consider it a Title VII violation of the CRA on the basis of national origin. I think it would help to provide an example by construction: relax one or more of the assumptions you think are being smuggled in and describe how it is not xenophobia to do what the German organizations OP was at were doing. I'm struggling to come up with something here - some kind of cultural mismatch not related to language fluency? What it seems to me is that the OP, immigrant that he is, is describing a fairly xenophobic society that he nonetheless has to live in and is therefore not using explicit labels for.