The Hidden Struggles Of A Language Barrier
Either that, or I can’t accept when i’m wrong.
When beginning to work on an enterprise codebase as a software engineer, we learn to extend or compose things, not change them fundamentally.
This is because enterprise codebases are known to be so large, complex — and in some cases, fragile —that even the most mundane change can bring down an entire application.
As an example, I once rounded a number that was being used as a currency to two decimal places at the endpoint that was calculating the value to send to the client, rather than rounding on the client. Sounds harmless, right?
Wrong. There was a ‘randomNumberGenerator(seed)’ function that was using the lower decimals from this float — everything from like 4 decimal places onwards.
Long story short, it broke a bunch of things and I had to roll back my change.
Rough, but lesson learned.
At my current job, we started using an open-source charting library that was developed by a Chinese company.
It’s fantastic — Robust, well documented and modern with a clean API. There’s only one problem.
The docs were also in Chinese and I can’t read Chinese.
Initially, this was a non-problem. Google translate is pretty good and I could figure out the rest… Until I couldn’t.
I spent 2 days trying to get a chart to resize whenever the number of datapoints shown changes. Sounds trivial, but I just could not find a way in the documentation to solve this problem. I tried overriding emitted events in the component but just ended up breaking a heap of functionality in the process.
I eventually caved and took it to my manager.
He googled my question and solved it in about 35 seconds flat. Doh.
How? He searched the problem in Chinese, rather than English. No wonder the stack overflow posts were so limited for me. Most of the users were probably Chinese and hence were Googling things or asking questions in Chinese.
I was frustrated but then I had a crystal clear moment of empathy.
The challenges faced by non-english speakers/readers in Australia aren’t just the obvious ones (i.e. it’s difficult to read a road sign or order a coffee). They are varied and multi faceted. These barriers overtime are not small, but together constitute a large obstacle to overcome.
More broadly, our ability to empathise with someone is often limited by our ability to think broadly about all the angles of an individuals challenges.
In summary, being considerate can be challenging.
