Work / Working in Poland without speaking Polish [75]

local fella, curious as to your standards for judging the management skills of those from India. From which country do your hail, by the way?

Work / Working in Poland without speaking Polish [75]

Wulkan, how are you measuring "management skills" and why do you contend India (singular in English!) lags far behind Germany, The States and Poland? On which criteria do you base your assertions?

Work / What is life like in Poland for a student? [26]

As an American, pierogi, I can only concur with much of what you said. We are by in large superficial in our relationships, true, yet Europeans whom I've encountered (having lived there on and off for some time!) can frequently appear tactlessly abrupt, smug, arrogant in a different way from us Yanks, myopic and judgemental, often believing their way to be the only way - a path to which we poor Americans can only aspire, yet can never achieve:-)

Utopia cuts both ways, my friend. One man's superficiality is another's social lubrication. Perfection, like Utopia, is a chimera. It is pursued at one's own risk!

Work / What is life like in Poland for a student? [26]

Correct, monitor! I found the people in Dortmund, for instance, particularly loudmouthed and brazen:-)

Work / Working in Poland without speaking Polish [75]

The international language has always been numerals anyhow, so, just think back to those math conferences during the Cold War when the East Germans had their top man in front of the blackboard, the Poles theirs, and the Czechs theirs etc, none of them speaking the other's languageLOL. First guy comes up and puts his formula on the chalk slate. The next infuriated but not able to speak in German if, say, he's French... responds by feverishly putting his counter formula on the same chalk slate, working up a royal sweat in the process etc... This goes on for several hours at least, until each one is so exhausted that they can't continue. No "language", e.g. English, Esperanto etc. needed, only straight, pure math!!!!

:-)

Work / Working in Poland without speaking Polish [75]

As usual, I must qualify my feelings about this thread. If I were working for an international concern in Poland, for example IBM etc.. and I were hired as a software engineer using strictly ENGLISH with other American, British, native speaking colleagues, I'd have zero qualms about using English and probably not bother to learn all but bare minimum Polish to get by.

Other than that, if working with Poles, Germans, French, Italians, Russians etc.., I'd suppose I'd be forced by sheer necessity to use English, fully aware of the myriad pitfalls which would await me were I not careful to "inspect" all communiques, both spoken as well as written, for the perennial boobytraps:-)