As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this.
It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.
It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.
English is also not my mother tongue, but this translates to "I'm sorry you feel like that, but we don't care or change anything, can I call you to convince you into doing things our way while completely being off the record?" in my mind.
This is forceful and rude in my culture, but it's very rude and a no-no in Japanese culture AFAIK.
If the person wanted to help genuinely, I'd expect to read something like "I'm sorry you feel like this. I read your comments but I want to clarify some points so I can transfer these up the chain with utmost clarity. We might have made some mistakes and don't want to leave you out in the cold".
While I have written that comment somewhat quickly, that's not AI at all, I can assure you about that. :)
For instance, if I followed the principles of indignation culture, I could be offended by your "I can assure you about that :)" statement. I could say "Are you making fun of me?!?!"
To be clear, your statement is perfectly fine. I understand what you're saying, despite disagreeing.
Also, this happened in an English language forum. It's reasonable to expect that foreign speakers would be somewhat versed in the conventions of the English language and see that the comment was not offensive at all.
Some cultures value relational power in leadership, and so their language reflects preserving relationships as a base resources. Some cultures value authority, and so their idea of being polite might involve some maintenance of authority at the expense of perceived care or relationship.
I'm just saying the words that convey rudeness are not necessarily just a superficial dressing on the same thing. Politeness is a shorthand that is also about alignment with a cultural value. Cultural values differ. My being annoyed at someone else's cultural posturing as default, that's not just mindless indignation. Values matter.
It's of course impossible to say if this was just an unfortunate choice of phrasing or if it's a sign that Mozilla has become that soulless corporate entity (I say this as a Firefox user for more than 20 years).
What, specifically, about that phrasing is "very rude" and a "no-no" in Japanese culture?
I am genuinely curious.
Japanese are the latter. There's a polite dance of disagreement. Every side listens others with respect (with respect to the process even if they don't respect the others) and answer politely yet firmly.
This comment smells like there's already some disagreement under this, and none of them have been listened and they are steamrolled with the new workflow.
Implying "Hey you're overreacting, let us convince you" doesn't help on top of it.
The issue has nothing to do with Japanese culture, but with how you work with a community of volunteers over the web. "Let's jump on a call" is what you say to a coworker, not to a volunteer in an online community.
Let’s jump on a call is something you say when you feel that the tone and intention of your communication is getting lost in text. And whether it’s common in all cultures or not, tone and intention getting lost in text is universal.
I'm afraid you skipped this part though
I mean, that question is already well answered within the first (opening) comment of marsf, so that part smells "tl;dr. Can I call you".
This sentence makes it even worse. All the pain points are openly written there.
No, it's not. Half of the listed reasons are obvious enough, but the half is very vague. I don't know if they are something you would understand as an insider, but as an outsider there would be many open questions if it would be my task to make this work.
The whole communication seems like people on one or both sides lacking information, and one trying to fix this to start the process for solving the other sides' problem. Nothing wrong with this in a professional environment.
But it is not "forceful and rude" by any means and your interpretation is way over the top for what looks like two people from different cultures trying to communicate in a mutually non-native language using words on a screen.
Written messages can feel cold even when it's two native English speakers communicating over email or text and it's best to assume good faith until you see clear evidence to the contrary.
Nope. Start by apologizing for the impact of what YOU did. Contributor of 20y just quit and provide a clear list of what is wrong. "your feelings" and "your struggles" is not respectful.
You should be sorry that YOU pushed changes on them in a way that impacted badly their work and made them quit. Thank them for the feedback and try to open a discussion on finding a positive outcome.
Being sorry about how the bot works implies an intention to change/remove it.
"your struggles" (it's your fault that you were harmed by our bad behavior.)
"Hop on a call" (we are the boss, you aren't, and your concerns are trivial.)
But it's Mozilla. There is a segment of the community that will be pissed off by everything they do. Check the username of the person you're replying to.
It is about 50/50 though as many people don't seem to pick up on backhanded way that many English people speak.
> Also the reality is that "hopping on a call" can often help to resolve problems that would otherwise devolve into months of bikeshedding on mailing lists.
This is also sometimes done to shut you up as well.
Given the context of corporate doublespeak, I saw the response as "Oh shit, we can't refute your issues, but maybe we can bullshit you privately into putting up with them?".
(I see a few disagreements here, back up with "I'm a native speaker". Me too friend, but understand messages like this is (imho) more about the subtext than the text itself, so interpersonal knowledge is more important than linguistic.)
This is not to dismiss what happened, but to just address the poster who thinks this is condescending.
The idea that it is patronizing or condescending makes zero sense to me. It's a factual description.
I honestly don't understand where you're getting this cynical interpretation from. It's not in the words.
But this is a response to someone who has just announced that they are quitting an organization they had spent 20 years of their life volunteering for, because of the disrespect they have felt from the org. This is not a "hop on a call" moment. This is a "please accept to meet so I can apologize in person, and see if we can repair this" moment, preferably after acknowledging the disrespect.
Doesn't seem weird to me, seems apt to ask to escalate the method of communication when a serious issue like this arises.
Would you consider it more respectful to deal with this issue just by posting in the thread?
Also while it's phrased as a question, it doesn't offer any alternative next step. So a better approach would be writing down the initial questions you have and then offer that you'd be open for a call if the OP prefers that. If they don't, they can immediately engage with your questions, and they are open to everybody else in the community. Whereas right now if they say "no, I don't want to call you" that's all you've given them.
(To be clear I can easily believe the writer of the response is not intending any of that and means well, but that's how it comes across)
It comes across very condecending. Maybe it is a US problem
It's like how you say "How are you" when you really don't care but it's just how you start a conversation.
The "I'm sorry you feel this way" is quite a recent phenomenon. It started showing up in public apologies by companies and celebrities, purely for PR. It's basically a deflective euphemism for "I'm sorry that you don't like whatever happened" without really admitting culpability, sidestepping all responsibility.
With that said: I don't even know if the author (Kiki) is a native english speaker, since she's part of other language translation groups, so it might be 100% without intent. But that's how a lot of people perceive it today.
"I'm sorry I did that" is an actual apology.
To be clear, I'm agreeing with you. I think that the former version emerged as it's litigation proof. Corporate PR can say that without it being an admission of anything if whatever they fucked up results in a lawsuit.
It has spread to personal communications from corporate ones and it's now so prevalent that it is possible someone might use it and actually mean a real apology. But it's ... tainted.
Feels extremely disrespectful.
To be fair, Dutch culture is known for its directness[0] and for not interpreting even the harshest criticism as offensive, so I'm not sure I would trust your judgment on this… :-D
That being said, as a fellow European, I concur.
[0]: There was a great video on this a while back, which I don't seem to be able to find right now. https://www.tiktok.com/@letsdoubledutch/video/73822692756517... seems close enough, though.
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced.
This is an emotion that you are feeling, not an actual problem.
> Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?
I'm not going to say that anything is actually wrong, we just want to discuss the best way to dismiss this.
> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
Reiterating that the Japanese translators are the ones struggling to adapt, not that there could be a problem with the new reality.
From my perspective, this is typical middle management speak to allow people to complain into a void without promising improvements. The approach I would recommend if there was going to be some opening to change the approach would have been.
> I'm sorry that the changes to the workflows have disrupted your processes. Would you be interested in hopping on a call so that we can discuss the changes that we will be making, as I think that at least some of the issues have been identified and should be fixed soon? We want to ensure that we do not introduce problems with the community contributions.
This doesn't need any low-context/high-context nonsense to figure it out, given when the complainer's post was plaintive enough for someone from the Netherlands to appreciate.
"I'm sorry for how you feel" is the definition of non-appology...
Hey, even the AI overlords agree on this...
> The phrase "I'm sorry for how you feel" is often perceived as a non-apology because it shifts blame to the other person's emotions instead of taking responsibility for one's actions. Instead of a genuine apology, it can sound like you're sorry they are upset rather than sorry for your behavior, and it can imply their feelings are the problem. A true apology acknowledges your role and expresses sincere regret for the pain you caused.
In Dutch its something like "Het spijt me, hoe u hierover voelt" ... See the issue, the first part is a apology, that is then reflected to the other person.
"We want to make sure we truly understand what you're struggling with." ...
We do not understand why *you are struggling with this*. For us its perfectly normal, so why are you having a issue with this.
So in Dutch its something like "We willen echt verstaan, waarom u moeite hebt hiermee". Aka, sending the issue back to the other person.
See the issue how both parts flow and shift the issue to the other person. This is not a English language issue because the same way of writing is also done in Dutch if you want to do a non-apology with a dose of gaslighting.
I never see anybody write like this, beyond those that have the intention to rile people up. Its gaslighting 101 ...
Trying to dissect why it comes across, I think it's just me kneejerking to the 'pattern' of specifically "I am sorry you feel that way". I think my kneejerk disdain of that turn of phrase is correct, though.
Being blunt here: Because that's a terrible apology! You are sorry that I feel this way? We're barely using the same dictionary here; how I feel about a thing is textbook 'stuff you cannot change or barely even fathom', so what is there to be sorry about? You might as well say "I'm sorry for the fact that 2 + 2 is 4". It's not apologetic in any way. It says sorry without taking even a millimeter of responsibility.
A minimal apology that is slightly less condescending might be "I am sorry how our choices led to you feeling this way" because at least now you're sorry about your choices instead of being sorry about how I feel.
I wouldn't want to be buoyed by false hope either, so taking as axiomatic that the moz team wants to hear how to improve matters but are not willing to completely 180º on their sumobot policies, something like: "I apologise for how we've kinda steamrolled y'all with rolling out sumobot. We were trying to improve the state of translations of our knowledge base articles and might have gone too far. We shouldn't have done it without keeping you out of the loop either. Is it possible to have a video call, apologise in person, and try to work out if there's a way sumobot can be helpful for all japanese language users of firefox in a way that works with your excellent work maintaining the KB so far?"
I get that it's just american corpospeak, "hop on a call". But the number of times something that's perfectly normal in dutch culture (a bit brash, but not at all intended to be rude) gets jumped on by americans as being ridiculously rude... well, trying to write a way to be culturally aware of the recipient has to be a two-way street, right?
I dont think this 'apology' is rude, not at all. But it's not apologetic. If you're peeved off at mozilla for foisting sumobot on you, you've already decided to cut ties, and then team mozilla tries to mend the relationship, this is a very poor attempt. In the context of an attempt to mend the relationship this is condescending. Or at least bad diplomacy.
At this point getting on a call is seen as a major chore for a majority of people. It's an already tense situation, trying to defuse it by "hopping on a call" is just not great IMHO. They should at least acknowledge they're putting undue burden on the other side and are asking them to go the distance when they're already volunteering their time.
I'm saying that setting aside the opacity of moving from an public to a private setup.
This is a pointer to a somewhat US related POV, but this is nether a generational thing nor a limited phenomenon:
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced.
"We have zero regrets about the changes we made and have no intention of making any changes - the problem is how you feel about them".
> Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?
"I can't be bothered to engage with the points you already raised. You can do some venting in a Teams call, but we don't want there to be a record so we can't be held to any promises we might accidentally make."
> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
"You are the problem: you haven't embraced our glorious changes yet. Accept our "help" to adapt to your new reality, or get out"
So no, that's not what you'd write if you genuinely wanted to help: that's what you write when you want to get rid of someone who is bothering you.
If they genuinely wanted to help, the response would've read something more like this:
> Dear marsf, > It is shocking to me to learn that our recent rollout of sumobot has caused enough friction to make a 20-year veteran of our community quit. Our intention has always been, and will always be, to use new technology like sumobot to help our communities - not harm them. Reading your report, we have clearly failed at that. > To prevent it from doing additional damage, we have chosen to pause sumobot for the moment. We still believe that it can become a valuable tool, but it'll remain paused until we have discussed its modes of operation and the impact it has on the way you contribute with representatives of the various communities. We'll work out an approach over the following weeks. > I hope this is sufficient for now to change your mind about leaving - people like you are essential to open-source applications like Firefox. If you wish to discuss it face-to-face, my team and I am more than happy to hop on a call with you to make sure we are doing the right thing.
In particular I think your alternative response is excellent and what I would have hoped for in an ideal world.
In order to sound truly friendly, one has to break the script
Personally, I don't think this is that bad. This is a public thread and he's Mozilla staff - the wording has to be clinical. The worse part is the _recently introduced_ bit, but I would look over it.
Not really painting us in good colors here, are you.
"I'm sorry for how you feel" without more explanation often sounds like "The thing that makes me feel bad in this situation is your reaction to it". It can come across as blaming the person for the feelings, regretting not being able to control others' feelings better, or dismissing the root causes of the feelings and any agency in them.
It's a bad apology because of the ambiguity, though passive aggressive types like that aspect. It's honestly a bad way to sympathize as well.
you don't reply like this to just open forum
lazy ass business world reply
you get in touch ASAP and personally, if you really want to keep them