I came across a really interesting post on Twitter/X that reminded me of my first corporate job, where I worked on a team with Germans and Dutch colleagues. One day, a client called, shouting at me because his delivery hadn’t arrived on time. He demanded to speak with “someone more competent.” I transferred the call to my Dutch colleague, who told him exactly the same thing I had just said and suddenly the customer became calm, friendly and completely understanding. It was like watching a switch flip.
That said, I still prefer the Western work culture and even that slightly artificial politeness over the typical “Januszex” style you often see in Poland. Of course, it always depends on the people and you can encounter all kinds everywhere.
I’m curious about your experiences with this “presumed competence” dynamic and with how Central‑Eastern European employees are treated. Have you come across anything similar or are your observations completely different?
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1rmaiz5
Posted by WineTerminator
32 Comments
Idk, as an IT professional and a Pole in Sweden I got nothing but respect and politeness:) okay, and an occasional joke about buying cheap vodka from Polish truck drivers
I am a Polish guy working in academia in the so called west (Europe) and I have never experienced this. In fact I feel like I was always very appreciated. My experience is limited to Germany and France though.
Dunno about academia, but Poles in IT have a pretty strong rep from my experience
One dude projecting his own insecurities. Not worth going much deeper into that.
>One day, a client called, shouting at me because his delivery hadn’t arrived on time. He demanded to speak with “someone more competent.” I transferred the call to my Dutch colleague, who told him exactly the same thing I had just said and suddenly the customer became calm, friendly and completely understanding. It was like watching a switch flip.
Was the conversation in English or Dutch? The customer’s bias could have more to do with your accent sounding generally foreign than with you being Polish specifically. Of course, that doesn’t make the situation any better, but xenophobia can easily be confused with xenophobia against a certain nationality.
In my field, poles are considered one of the most competent (automotive)
As someone who lived and worked in the scientific sector all over the world, I would say it is very difficult to work with Western Europeans, their arrogance and sense of superiority are all over the place. No place is perfect, every system has its own quirks, but ah… the Western European arrogance!
As was spoken centuries ago… For some we are still the “Blacks of Europe” 😞
I never felt overly discriminated as a Pole like this, working internationally. Plus, honestly, Japan may not be the best example here. It’s probably mostly an effect of distance. To the Japanese, a German, a Pole and an Englishman are all equally “foreign”. Japan is also generally known for being xenophobic (while polite), so it might be that to them, they all fall into a single “not-Japanese” category. The Japanese can also have stronger opinions on foreigners from countries they had more direct past dealings with, like the Chinese or South Koreans.
In other words – no shit, he went to a place that barely ever heard of Poland and was surprised to find they aren’t overly prejudiced.
As a Western German who lives in Czech Republic now (and before that in Görlitz/Zgorcelec), I can very much understand what he means. But the attitude issue is not only coming from Western Europeans, it’s even worse from Americans. You basically have people from trailer parks asking whether the “eastern euro trash” has even electrity or running water. I had to educate people a lot for the last 20 years.
It’s not presumed.
I’m not in academia but corporate science-adjacent positions in Pharma and I found the opposite – the west always sends shit our way when they don’t know how to get it done in budget.
I think he meant academia
I use to work in customer service. On UK and US line. I remember people usually where happy to talk with us. In few cases I remember someone saying “thank god your not from India”. What was very homophobic.
Yeah spot on. As an Irish man I’ve to admit it took me a long time to get over this and to get over myself if I’m honest.
Maybe stop caring about what others think about you instead of running away.
All depends on the career stage you’re at. IT specialists get a ton of recognition, pretty much all white collar workers with hard skills do (Ops, Data, Analytics, even Performance Marketing).
But as soon as you try to get to leadership positions, beyond middle management, suddenly you’re met a wall where your Eastern Europeaness is again a significant hindrance. Working in London, I once got feedback that while I’m technically stronger, have better experience, and my teams perform better, promotion was given to someone the C-suite had a better “vibe” with – obviously a British person.
Specifically for the UK, I heard of a colonial complex, where the upper class don’t mind workers from Poland (and other parts of the world) as they’re culturally used to foreign help, but it’s hard to stomach giving a non-Westerner a position of power.
As an immigrant in Poland this post made me laugh
I find it both iritating and kinda funny cause in a vast majority of the cases it’s the exact opposite – in my experience westerners are generally less competent and have substandard work ethics.
In the corporate world it’s a big chain of western europeans discriminating on central europeans discriminating on eastern europeans discriminating on indians discriminating on africans.
I’m not sure who the africans are going to get to discrimnate on.
I’ve faced this a few times. In Sweden, Germany and England. Every single time it was old guy who thinks he knows better just because he is from said country, or jokes about how we spend all the time in church, or bribe our way through life.
I also know few people from Poland who think they are superior in compare with Ukrainians or Belarusians.
Dumb fucks are everywhere, and they will always find a way to feel superior because of some bullshit reason.
I just can’t see this sorry. I live in the UK and Poles and Brits get on very well. Yes there was some community tension in the mid-00s as 100s of thousands came to work but honestly, Brits respect Poles. Many Poles have businesses in the UK and work in academia without problem. The cultural difference is not as big as you think.
Just remember people generally don’t report on positive experiences, only negative so you have to consider a wider scope.
yeah I have gotten the I want to speak to someone without an accent experience more than once. very upsetting. that said I know where they’re coming from sometimes because I hear my colleagues’ English all the time, and their limited language skills do make them sound incompetent. not saying it’s the case with the OP from the tweet but just in general.
if someone’s grammar and vocabulary are bad, that seriously impacts their ability to communicate complicated issues and their sentences end up failing to convey important nuance or completely distorting the meaning. They also fail to pick up nuance or misunderstand stuff completely. (And I’m speaking about people who have years of customer service experience handling English speaking customers, I find it sad that they never feel the need to improve beyond this barely good enough level in a job where communication is crucial)
As an American living in Poland, I find more often than not polish people think people look down upon them when it’s rarely true. The arrogance the western Europeans have is largely (today, not historically) something they do to everyone, not exclusively poles.
Americans can be just as arrogant and that’s also simply because they’re ignorant more than anything–even the highly educated.
Only humans I’ve met who are well traveled are meritocratic. I can believe japanese culture is more meritocratic than western Europe or america, but my point here is poles think people look down on them and that’s USUALLY false.
The West suffers from acting like their shit doesn’t stink. I feel Poland has grown in the last 20 years partially because they’ve walked a good tightrope of maintaining good relations with the West, while simultaneously adjusting economic and geopolitical strategy based on reality, rather than the Wests peddled delusions.
Poland has done well in terms of education and safety which are foundational pillars of a healthy, happy and self sufficient society. Poland teaches people to live in the world, not whatever bubble their patch of dirt put them in. It has it’s problems of course, but compared to most countries, they’ve done an impressive job.
I did my postdoc in the US. Didn’t encounter treatment like Piegziu did.
It happens all the time. Many people refuse to see it.
Piegzik got a scholarship in Japan but I really don’t understand what he’s so butthurt about. Probably it dawned upon him that a lot what you achieve in academia is through effective networking. I mean, it’s not like he got the job at Napier because he simply had applied for it. Meanwhile, in Japan he will always get the “foreigner bonus”. Which is fine,
Recently I was thinking that in my industry (video game development) this was the biggest change over the past 20 years.
20 years ago we had to prove ourselves over and over again. The approach was “we got this contract, that’s the first time this company is doing business in Poland, they are not sure if it’s a good decision, so we only have money for the first few months, we have to deliver on time, blow their mind with quality, and do it all in 2/3 of the time and at a quarter of the budget of a western studio”. This whole legendary “kultura zapierdolu” – this was seen as necessary, because if we slipped, we would not get a second chance. And even fresh out of university guys like me accepted this. We would complain about the management fucking up schedules, or the scope creep, or the umpteenth stupid design change, but we didn’t question that despite all that we had to deliver, on time, or we are toast.
Nowadays of course clients still complain if we don’t meet the deadline, or if the progress is slow, or quality is not there yet – but no one questions our basic ability to deliver the product and to do it roughly on time.
I mean, it might seem that way in Japan, since they’re so racist and xenophobic that the best complement they can give to you is “you’re really good for someone born outside of Japan!”, since, to them, if you’re not born and raised in Japan, you’re most likely lazy. So the best workers will always be Japanese and everyone else is, at best, second place.
So being among “everyone else” might seem like you’re being treated equally. I guess?
From my experience, Western Europeans just have more confidence, specially in business-related roles. It’s not like this with every country, but some regions (particularily UK from my experience) have a tendency to look down on CEE.
With that in mind, I believe that human resources are of a much higher level in PL than in, i.e, UK. At least in business roles.
I am senior engineer working and living in Sweden several years. I have never felt treated differently because of my nationality. At first I think I expected it, but after many years I now know it was just my polish inferiority complex — fortunately, I’ve gotten over it.