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Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

In the USA as a low-level employee address the company CEO as "heya phil, hows it going?". Then address your friend with "Hello Mr. Smith". In most cases you won't get a positive reaction out of either one of those (yes exceptions exist).

How about this: address your husband/wife as "Mr/Mrs <lastname>", especially after a fight. Similarly when the kids have been doing something or you are frustrated with your partner say "your son did X".

Every language has explicit and implicit rules for expressing honor, respect, and closeness. Informal systems can vary more often and be more fluid but they always exist.

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According to a popular quote, "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey, not in what they may convey."

You can convey relative social position in English, if you want to. You don't have to, if you don't want to.

Korean is different. You have to convey relative social position in basically every sentence because without that you can't finish your main verb.

In English, you can't offend a reasonable person by saying "I heard it's getting hotter today!" or "How big was the pizza?" In Korean, you can. Because there's no socially neutral version of "How big was the pizza" you can use to everyone.

* Well, you may think it's an absurdly cumbersome grammatical system, and in some situations it really is, but generally you get used to, just like English speakers are used to having to know and specify the gender of everyone around them, including cats and dogs, and it generally doesn't cause issues - but then sometimes it does!

> Korean is different. You have to convey relative social position in basically every sentence because without that you can't finish your main verb.

Sure, by the currently recorded official rules of the grammar.

If young Koreans just stop doing it then it will disappear within a decade or two - something only crusty old people bother with. Not that I have any say in such things.

I find the process fascinating though. I like to imagine what English was like when grammatical cases were being dropped from the language. Who decided to drop them and why? Kids being funny? People from different regions having difficulty understanding accents or vowel changes? What would someone at age 50, having used cases their entire life, think about everyone from London or everyone under 20 (or whatever cohort popularized it) when they just said all the words "wrong"? And when chided for speaking incorrectly just shrugged their shoulders and continued doing it?

On the other hand despite everyone agreeing that English spelling royally sucks... no one cares to make major changes to it. Even when writing informally in text messages or whatever. We all just keep going along with the system.

I also wonder how much computers are affecting us. Auto-correction may end up killing some forms of change to language over time. If GUIs and better input methods hadn't been invented so quickly would latin-based languages drop diacritics or consolidate some letter forms? Would languages like Japanese or Chinese have adopted Korean-like writing systems for convenience? Who knows. English dropped some letters because printing press letter sets came from Europe and didn't have those oddball letters. Who knows what technology might have triggered or prevented.

> just like English speakers are used to having to know and specify the gender of everyone around them, including cats and dogs

Welp, you have no idea. In German and in Slavic languages you'd have to know and specify the gender of every single noun. Is a coat the same gender as a beer, or different? Is orange the same gender as capitalism? Every. Single. Noun.

And they have three genders, obviously.

A few years back I had a long back and forth (and productive) email exchange with an older engineer (in his 50s, like I was at the time) on a matter of a particular old computer. He lives in a former soviet state. At some point he mentioned job prospects in his country are limited and was willing to relocate. He had excellent English and as a fellow nerd who loves getting into the low level details, I thought he might be a fit at my large & successful US-based company that has offices all over the world. I said I'd be happy to forward his resume to my employer.

A few weeks later HR contacted me: Uh, that was really painfully awkward. The HR person had called to phone screen him and called him "Vlad" or whatever in greeting. The prospective employee went on a rant and said he had never been so disrespected, and it made a terrible impression of how unprofessional my company was by being so cavalier by using his first name.

Needless to say that was the end of the interview process, and I never heard from the guy again. Even if he was a technical fit, the cultural fit was off the charts wrong.

HR at multi-national not aware of culture. Is that ironic?

It's normal - at least for the big US companies, even with a large presence the culture is highly American. I remember when a VP of APAC sent a org email expressing strong feelings about the Black Lives Matter protests, and it was quite awkward since that wasn't really an issue discussed outside the US - he couldn't even understand how it couldn't be an issue for everyone.

Getting to hit the culture filter very early in interviews is probably a better outcome than ending up at the company and feeling awkward, not sure how intentional that is though.

> about the Black Lives Matter protests, and it was quite awkward since that wasn't really an issue discussed outside the US

Maybe outside of NATO. In EU we knew more about Black Lives Matter protests than about local news.

As every EU country could be practically the 51st state, we know any US news better than our own local news.

> The HR person had called to phone screen him and called him "Vlad" or whatever in greeting.

Is that measurably worse than the current new normal? Call him Mr. Vladsky, tell him he's a great fit and schedule an interview, then block his number and email and never contact him again.

That's preferable to running the gauntlet of six+ interviews because they can't make a decision after two.

I could be off-base here because I've been in tech too long but my understanding was that addressing people formally as Mr/Mrs/Ms has been outmoded in business virtually everywhere except in legal matters and (sometimes) when you work for a company and are speaking directly to one of your customers.

Everywhere I've been and observed, it's always been, "Good Morning, <firstname>" or similar regardless of who is talking to who on the org chart. (This doesn't mean you should talk like a surfer dude, of course.)

Agreed, this isn't a US or English only thing.

There are other languages that make this distinction. French. German. Just as other examples.

But as soon as you're past the interview, with your regular colleagues you're not gonna be on a "vous" or "Sie" basis. Maybe with your boss' boss or something, sure. Well maybe also with your boss if he's a dang stickler.

And it's been like that for well over 40 years.

I am not sure about that. I am a low level employee and I address the CEO and the occasional board member I meet on a first name basis.

I grew up in Texas with its culture of sir and ma’am. After leaving the military, I make it a point to address everyone on a first name basis. Doctor Dan. Father Frank. Nurse Nancy.

On the other hand, old habits are hard to shake. When someone is extra nice to me, I often address them as sir and ma’am even when I am much older than they are. I also get irritated when a young salesman addresses me by my first name and attempts to upsell me.

I put "exceptions exist" in my original post because I knew the pedants would jump on me with their individual anecdotes :)

The trouble with informal systems (which is how I personally classify English) is that practices and expectations vary a lot across every context you can imagine. It can vary between regions. Between demographic groups (eg age). On and on.

I suppose that isn't a surprise. Language is always evolving. Perhaps we are still in a transition phase (in US English) and haven't really settled on a new set of rules yet. See what some other replies have noted about using formal addresses vs first names in business scenarios.

FWIW this is hardly the first time. At one point ge (pronounced yee) was the informal pronoun, you the formal one. Saying "you" to your mates or lover would be extremely rude, implying distance. But you might use it if you were mad at them. But then it became a fad (probably among the kids) to use the formal pronoun. That eventually led to the loss of the informal pronoun entirely. I like to imagine kids and teens running around addressing everyone as "your majesty" ironically - because you can't call them out for being polite and formal even if that polite formality was opposite in intention. Being a smartass is a time-honored tradition :)

I actually think "heya phil" is more the norm than not. Certainly in tech that's the case. For example, we address the CEO of the company I work at (small but public) by her first name. From tuning into investor calls from my days in finance it's even common at non-tech companies.

Small tech firms are notorious outliers when it comes to this though

Can attest, I work at a fortune 500 and have addressed c-suite-2 by their first names, also seen the CEO adressed by his first name in Q&As by commom employees.

Your point is well-taken, but I've addressed two CEOs (that you might have heard) of by their first names, one named "Bill" and another one named "Steve". I still had a job for years after. But I was so low-level, they probably didn't even know who to fire.

Smaller companies, OTOH, have proven to be a bit hit-or-miss.

Gotta love when you're in a 2,000 person public company, and you can still "heya Phil" despite not being a personal friend at all, and he even prefers it

Unless you work for Conan O'Brien.

A fan saw him and briefly chatted, then Conan asked if he wanted a photo.

The man said "sure, Mr. O'Brien," to which Conan replied, "please, call me sir."

Coming from a comedian, is there any possibility that was a joke?

Great question, I'm glad you asked!

Surely they can't both exhibit Poe's law!

It absolutely was. He likes playing the pompous buffoon. He will also ask you to call him Dr O'Brien or Admiral O'Brien.

He’s made that joke a few times. It’s taking the respect implied in calling him Mr. O’Brien and turning the regular “you can just call me Conan” into something that is humorously asking the person for something more respectful.

Or try calling someone "buddy" with an annoyed tone.

I don't use titles. If you expect me to, you'll be disappointed.

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