5 results for “cliffle”
Over half of my close friends are out of work, and some haven't been able to find jobs for over a year. It's super privileged to be pushing back on recruiters like this. I know this, believe me. But that's also why I think it's important.
Some people seem to be excited about hiring me, and (while I'm not looking for a job) this might give me a small lever to nudge them in the right direction. I did this at Oxide, and that's worked out okay.
Even though I'm not actively looking for a job, the "I don't join companies with no women in leadership positions" recruiter response is still scary to send.
Like, on the one hand, I want them to receive this feedback (I see what you're doing over there, with your page of faces that look suspiciously like mine). On the other hand, it's still scary to close off potential work, even though I'm employed.
On a similar note, when I'm in England or Scotland, I wind up shifting a bunch of my vowels around and introducing more tone changes in my speech. To me, it sounds like I'm doing a bad accent. To the guy at the coffee shop, I'm speaking clearly -- it makes it a lot easier to understand what I'm saying in a hurry.
There was this "Mid-Atlantic Accent" thing in the early 20th century, but curiously, the vowel shifts that seem to matter the most aren't the ones that it shifts. (I strongly suspect that the mid-atlantic accent was more about class signifiers than being understood.)
I was helping a friend figure out why Spanish speakers have a hard time understanding him when he uses Spanish words. The answer is a property of English.
Or, American English. Or, particularly, eastern seaboard American English. There's a very, very strong tendency to downgrade an unstressed vowel to a schwa. A schwa is that lazy unshaped vowel that sounds like "uh."
So when this guy from Philly says "plátanos" it comes out "PLAHT-uh-nuhs" or even "PLAT-nuhs" and he gets a double-take, even though the person he's talking to speaks perfectly good English. Maintaining the vowel shape on unstressed vowels turns out to be an important tip that I hadn't really thought about (having grown up in a Spanish speaking area).