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Holden Rohrer
Ms Rosner
Hire Me
2 Apr 2021}

% The top three descriptors site supervisors use to describe good
% interns include: enthusiastic, confident, and respectful. Describe how
% you are embodying these descriptors presently at your internship site
% and how you hope to embody them in your future career pursuits.

% Also, entering a work environment can easily be compared to entering a
% foreign county. The people around you speak a different language, have
% spoken and unspoken politics, and cultural norms. How have you
% navigated your internship culture?

\centerline{Journal Prompt \#3: Work Environment}

The Euroamerican work environment is designed to be consistent and
polite.
The American variant of ``professionalism'' is inherited from American
sales culture.
Sales is about communicating three main themes to your customer:
dependability, courtesy, and sincerity, often without particular regard
to the specific nature of the object of the sale.
Interviews, meetings, and nearly any form of non-casual discussion
become wrapped up in the language and structure of a sales pitch.
Because sales is rarely concerned with objective or even clear
communication of its object, neither are meetings, interviews, or work
communication.
Much discussion functions as virtue signalling, so buzzwords and
monstrously opaque conglomerations like ``multifaceted, comprehensive
solution'' abound.
Real communication ends up hidden in coded phrases, and distinct from
foreign languages, obfuscated by words or entire sentences that serve no
substantive purpose.

Fortunately, this trend is not universal or absolute.
I'm enthusiastic about the work I'm doing, and in order to effectively
produce software, I need to communicate substantively.
While often run through a politeness filter, I'm discussing the features
and functionality and issues of the program I'm working on, WellEntry,
with other people on the team.
I generally try to write concisely, which unfortunately contradicts with
``work language,'' meaning I spend much longer writing a response than I
would otherwise need to casually, especially because this writing also
needs to communicate virtues like openness to critique and humility.

This translation impedes oral communication less than writing because
mistakes are more readily forgotten, but it isn't free of professional
euphemism.
Non-committal phrases like ``if it is necessary, which it could be not''
occupy some of the space.
Interestingly, the mental costs of switching language are nearly
immaterial: the process of code-switching is practically automatic, so
staying to this subset of English naturally communicates and forces one
to only consider ideas which embody ``enthusiastic, confident, and
respectful.''
I will, necessarily, continue to use this style of language in my future
career, and depending on the available content (or lack thereof) to
discuss, embellish with empty words.
Works like Strategic Vision Plans are especially vulnerable to such
empty language, but I fortunately am not party to any such document, and
7Factor's particular culture seems to be less affected by those styles
(but not entitrely free of it).

Non-verbal norms are also important.
The language of body and attire were irrelevant during this internship
due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but a unique part of this work is code
reviews.
7Factor does theirs through GitHub mostly, but extra comments also end
up on Clubhouse, and a lot of communication happens in the mechanical
interactions with these systems.
Processes like ``requesting'' or ``re-requesting'' a review, or marking
a project as ``In Development'' or ``Ready for Production'' are
seemingly trivial processes which are actually moderately nuanced.
One possible concern is the time that other people can allocate to
looking at the code I've written: before I mark a piece of code as
``completed'' or even mention it to my supervisor or other developers
working on the same project, I need to be confident that it's functional
and finished before marking it as such, in order to demonstrate respect
for their time.

\iffalse
- Why are work environments' language so opaque?
- Politeness as an ideal
- I'm enthusiastic
- I focus on quality of work and participating in the team
- Return to code-switching (general) and professional euphemisms
- Non-linguistic norms
- Software teams existing before the proliferation of %bull$#*!
\fi

\bye
