Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

If you want to get into executive management and can get into a top school, getting an MBA is a good idea. Consider going the management consulting route. You'll get a substantial pay increase a couple of years out, and exiting to upper management after being a consultant is not uncommon.

I detect you're a non-native speaker. A noticeable accent is going to be bigger problem if you're gunning for executive management than in tech. I'd invest in some language coaching.

View on HN

Hi, thanks for the comment. Yes, I grew up in SE Asia and moved to US at the age of 23. Did you find some sentence structure unusual or was it lack of article use that gave you hint ?

Articles and pluralization. My dad moved here from SE Asia at 40 and a few months with a speech coach did wonders.

I'd recommend getting a writing coach. I also grew up in Southeast Asia and only started to speak and write in English as an adult. There are a number of major grammatical patterns that we tend to struggle with, since our languages are quite far removed from English, historically and culturally. For me it took a few highly-educated native speakers pointing them out in my own writing to truly understand many subtle rules and I'm still trying to internalize them.

If any native speakers would like to help their fellow HNer, I still welcome non-native error/style detection with sincere appreciation. ;)

Any recommendations?

For me it was the dry tone and staccato prose structure (the latter is accentuated by the missing articles).

Bachelor instead of Bachelors

"Last question is, "....

If it makes you feel better, I only very quickly read your OP and didn't notice it. Looking back more carefully I can see it though.

Lack of pluralisation of BIGCO in first sentence.

Good catch about the non-native thing! I felt the same as soon as I read first two lines of his post. Anyway, in my experience there are only two guaranteed paths to break in to "Executive Management":

1) You need to bring in a client who contributes big revenue $ to your company or division's bottom line. Or,

2) Develop the next big rain-maker product or service.

MBA can help you become a manager, associate, or AVP but that's about it.

Offtopic: Which part of the post gave away he/she is a non-native speaker?

The first hint is there are lots of little grammar errors in the post. Mainly missing 'a' or 'the'. Nothing bad enough to make it unreadable or give ambiguous meaning, however enough to realise English is probably not the writers first language.

The second hint for me is the sentence structure of the first paragraph. Every sentence only has one fact / idea in it, however a native speaker would be more likely to string those ideas together into fewer sentences.

For me it was his choice of words; he is phrasing all questions using SE Asia vocabulary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com