Our team works with people on the other side of an ocean. At some point we stopped treating that as a language problem and started treating it as a knowledge one, so we began writing down the things we kept having to explain.
It is an internal reference pack, organised in ten parts, and it is still openly a draft. Not a course, not an onboarding programme. A shared reference, so that everyone working across the gap reads the same signals the same way.
The part that takes longest to land
The section on communication and etiquette.
The idea underneath it is that friendliness and closeness are not the same thing. A warm greeting from someone you barely know is usually politeness rather than an opening. “How are you?” is frequently a greeting rather than a question. None of that is insincere, which is the part that takes a Romanian speaker longest to accept, because in our own register that level of warmth usually signals an actual relationship.
Get it wrong in one direction and you sound cold to someone who is already anxious. Get it wrong in the other and you sound like you are performing.
Why this is an operations document
Because it shows up in the work. Someone who feels handled ends the call and goes elsewhere. Someone who feels heard stays. It is a measurable outcome and a learnable skill, so we treat it like any other operational knowledge: written down, revised when we find we were wrong, and available to anyone who needs it.
The same reference is used by our internal tooling. If a system is going to interpret what someone actually means, it needs the same context a person would.
What is in the rest of it
Broadly: what Americans tend to believe about themselves, how much regions differ from each other, how families and generations work, how work and money and class get talked about, everyday life and leisure, religion and civic life, questions of race and immigration and identity, media and internet culture, and a timeline of the events people assume you already know.
None of it is complicated. All of it is specific, and specificity is the only part that actually transfers.
It is a working document rather than a finished one, which feels like the right status for anything trying to summarise a country.
What Brașov is actually like to work in
The city, the commute, the mountain at the end of the street, and the shift that puts you in the office when everyone else is leaving.
The one-button billing robot
Why Phase 0 of every automation we ship is deliberately, aggressively dumb, and why that turns out to be faster.