Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Key takeaways:
- Expect your technical credibility to transfer and your cultural standing to start from zero, and don’t read the gap as a verdict on your ability.
- Budget extra time and energy for one-to-ones, interviews, and cross-team trust, because that work runs on cultural fluency.
- Treat a comprehension gap as a work item: log the phrases you miss, train your ear for accents, and ask what jokes mean.
In 2019 I moved from Finland to Los Angeles to become lead backend developer on a mobile title at an EA studio. Before that I had co-founded a game studio in Russia and run it as CTO. I assumed the hard part of the move would be solving engineering challenges of a large scale organization, but it was not.
The hard part was that, for my first six months, I could not reliably understand what the people around me were saying, and that turned out to be a leadership problem rather than a social one.
Being a co-founder of a game studio builds a particular kind of person: accountable, attentive to details, and therefore in control. I knew where every moving part was. If something was drifting, I knew before anyone told me. I also knew my team that I built from scratch. It is through establishing personal connections with my fellow team members that I managed to build a healthy, energetic, lightspeed startup that delivered fun on schedule to our dear players.
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Even before I moved to Industrial Toys EA studio I sensed a good spirit of close tight connections between team members. I joined an established team of seven to ten engineers who had worked together under my manager for years and know each other for decades with their own history, shorthand, and rhythm.
I came in as a specialist, picked up one direct report, then a second soon after, and coordinated constantly with EA’s central technology organization. The title said backend but the calendar filled up with one-to-ones, interviews, and cross-team negotiation.
One of the team leads of that team was almost unintelligible to me. Ian, our tools and editor lead, never said anything plainly. He spoke in vivid, polished phrases that made the room lean in. We should “kick the tires” on a build, not test it. We should “dogfood” the new editor, not just use it ourselves. We ought to “touch base,” never simply talk. I sat in those meetings nodding along and catching perhaps half of what he said. Ian was an engineering manager and a great leader, a peer I had to coordinate with constantly, so waiting it out was not an option.
Just ten minutes after one of those meetings I could walk the same people through how we would handle player data at scale without a flicker of doubt. I could talk about architecture, failover, big data pipelines in AWS cloud, and tradeoffs all day. I just could not always follow the conversation around it. Three things came out of closing that gap.
Technical credibility crosses borders, cultural credibility does not
The respect I had earned was held in a currency that did not fully convert.
In the room on day one I was fluent in the professional language: distributed systems, live-service backends, and the grammar of how games get built and operated. That language is close to universal. It crossed the Atlantic with me intact, and in my first week, I could disagree with a senior engineer about a caching strategy and hold my own.
I was not fluent in the cultural language. That meant American workplace English, the dialect of the US games industry, the accents I had to retune my ear to, the inside jokes built up over years, and the idioms everyone used and nobody explained. English is not my first language, and I learned most of it from documentation and code. Yes, I watched sitcoms, and business books, but I have never watched US sports or held any hallway conversation. I knew “the system” but stalled on “let’s circle back” or “that’s a stretch goal.”
These are two separate accounts, and only one of them transfers. Cultural standing has to be rebuilt locally, from zero, however senior you were somewhere else. Knowing that in advance is what stops you from reading an empty second account as evidence about yourself.
Most of leadership happens in your second language
For a while, I told myself the idioms were decoration. I was the backend lead, and my job was the backend. Then I moved into the part of the job where the decoration was the job.
Running a good one-to-one is not an architecture problem. It is a cultural one. It depends on reading tone, catching what someone is not quite saying, and knowing when “it’s fine” means it is fine and when it means the opposite. Interviewing well in a culture you are still learning means decoding a candidate’s register, humor, and idiom in real time, not just their answers. Trust across teams is built on relationship and implication, which live between the words rather than in them.
All of that happened in my weaker language. The work I had been hired for was the part I could do in my sleep. The work that determined whether I was any good as a leader ran almost entirely in the register where I was least fluent. You are promoted for your strength and then spend your days operating from your weakness.
The practical consequence is a budgeting one. If you are moving into people leadership in a culture you are still learning, assume the soft skills will cost you more time and energy than they cost your peers, and plan the rest of your week around that.
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Mistaking a comprehension problem for a competence problem
Control runs on comprehension and you cannot keep something under control that you cannot fully hear. Every meeting where I caught 80% instead of 100% was, to the accountable part of me, a failure.
Over time I started to misread the problem. A gap in comprehension began to look like a gap in competence, and I wondered whether the engineer and leader I had been back home had been left at the border. That is the trap worth naming, because the control mindset under pressure cannot easily tell the difference between “I do not understand this room” and “I am not good enough for it.”
What got me out of it was treating the language as a work item rather than a verdict. Three things helped:
- I kept a running list of every phrase, reference, and idiom I did not catch, written down during the meeting and looked up the same day.
- I trained my ear on accents, because the same word landed differently from a colleague raised in the South, one from the Midwest, and another transplant like me.
- When I heard a joke that I didn’t understand I started asking what they meant. People were happy to explain, and several of them told me later that asking had raised their opinion of me rather than lowered it.
As comprehension came back, so did confidence. Every idiom I worked out was evidence against the story I had been telling myself. I had not lost my edge. I had lost my footing, and footing is recoverable.
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Comprehension comes before control
There is a detail I did not understand until much later, and it reframes the whole experience.
Ian was not being difficult, and he was not performing. He simply does not say things plainly. He reaches for the vivid phrase, the image, or the turn of speech that makes a room lean in.
In Russian I also prefer this ornate, image-heavy language. Just the same way as Ian does. The person I spent six months struggling to understand was, functionally, me, rendered in a language I had not learned yet.
That dissolved the control problem. I had not landed among people who were impossible to read. I had landed among people who were entirely readable, in a code nobody had handed me. The room was never out of my control. It was out of my vocabulary and culture reference frame.
These first six months of my work at EA were one of the most stressful and self-humiliating in my entire career. However, my enormous sense of curiosity and stubbornness to figure things out opened me to an entire new dimension of US vocabulary, cultures, and workstyles.
I made close friendships with some of the team members. I thought I had lost control of the room. What I had lost was the vocabulary to hear it. Control was never the job. Comprehension was, along with the trust that comprehension buys.
