anon77887

I'm still getting over a situation which occurred a month ago, and as it stands I will probably have to leave my job.

I hired a female contractor engineer (in the UK contractors are paid daily, supposed to be easy to hire/fire), my manager is also female. 2 weeks after the engineer started, I knew she wouldn't be able to stay in the team because her work was not good (she was spending a lot of time chatting around, and not producing good quality code). Everybody complains to me that my engineer is not performing well, but my manager makes me keep her. A month later my manager asks for a meeting with me, and says that my contractor has been complaining about micro-management, and that it can be seen as bullying or harassment. Because of that I leave for 2 weeks, and it takes another month to get rid of the contractor.

Learnings: I actually handled the situation very well, but I suffered a lot from the way my manager handled the situation. I have myself managed, hired and fired dozens of people in my career. Yet as soon as it was a girl, the rules of the game completely changed, and it didn't matter who was right or wrong. No matter how much I want to be inclusive and how much I want to give equal rights to everybody, other people (and even females) don't see it that way, and still want to make a distinction between sexes.

I find it fascinating how mixing vocabulary and grammatical rules from two different languages can create something which is not understandable by speakers of only one of those language, especially when spoken fast.

In my circle of friends/family we're all bilingual french/english, so when speaking to eachother we tend to speak with a mix of both while conserving proper British and French prononciation. Sometimes conjugating English verbs in French and vice-versa. A normal sentence would be: "Je book a table et on se voit downtown". In an isolated society it would probably evolve into a creole, but our little pidgin will certainly die with us.