My buddy exploited this during the "breaking down the door" Chinese wedding tradition. We (the groom's party) showed up at the bride's apartment, and the matron of honor (bride's sister) opened the door and demanded a bribe to be let in. The groom knew the bride's sister was often non-specific, so he got a bunch of Vietnamese currency (dong) from a local bank, and used that to pay the demanded bribe when the currency wasn't specified. As tradition, we were then subjected to mild hazing by the bridal party until they were satisfied the groom was worthy of the bride.
The exploit relied partially on the negotiations being conducted in Cantonese, so the matron of honor asked for "500 lumps [of money]", with most/all currency using "lump" as the measure word. The same thing could have been done in English, had he figured out which of the world's various currencies called "dollar" had the lowest exchange rate vs. the USD. The exploit was helped by the fact that Cantonese treats currencies more uniformly than English, so it's syntactically easier to substitute a different currency.
(My friend just went to a local bank and asked which currency they had on hand that had the lowest exchange rate vs. the USD. It happened to be VND.)
Thanks for the correction. I don't understand much Canto and I over-extrapolated to Cantonese from my knowledge of Mandarin. I thought man was the same as Mandarin's kuai.
While I've got you... I've heard "ya man" for HK$ 20 in the North Point produce market in Hong Kong. One of my friends said that this is a "local count", but didn't give specifics. I'm familiar with the normal "yi sap" for 20. When is "ya" used for 20 in Cantonese? (Side note, 20 is "yi sip" in Thai, despite "yi" not being 2 in Thai... an interesting borrow/carry-over from Southern Chinese dialects.) Is "local count" something more formal than slang? I know it's written as two tens in a single character, but I'm guessing Canto slang also has dedicated characters in some cases.
It was definitely Cantonese. My buddy's father-in-law only speaks Cantonese (grew up in Manhattan's Chinatown, poor enough English that he thought his son-in-law Dave's name was "Day" for long enough to spell it that way on his new-year's red envelope) and his daughters are bilingual in Canto and English.
It's probably that easy even before GPT, given the number of times people offer me Android roles because of iOS experience, or Javascript roles because of Java, or ask me if I want to work in the UK when I clearly moved away to Berlin between the Brexit vote and the end of the transition period…
Heck, even had one code challenge pre-interview a few years back at x2-x3 the salary I was aiming for at the time, for a C++ role, even though my total experience of C++ is half of one job that I only stayed in for about 15 months. Obviously I didn't get that interview let alone the job, but that's why they don't just rely on the contents of self-promotion documents we write and which they barely read.
I keep getting recruiters asking me about jobs in London, despite being quite clear that I don't want to move 600 miles south to a shithole town, so I now just have a note that my contracting rates for London are £15,000 per day.
I've had a few messages saying "you won't get many offers with that rate", which is kind of the point! That being said, if anyone seriously did offer me fifteen large for each of the three days minimum (two travelling days, at least one working day) then I'd take it...
THIS is exactly the right strategy for many things.
Don't say "No.".
Instead think about it, figure out how much it would be worth TO YOU to do the thing, add some, and quote that.
A friend with his own firm/ consulting practice was an expert in a particular kind of database work, was asked by IBM to do a months-long project in Turkey (iirc). He didn't want to go but used this approach. A week later he was in Turkey (they didn't even blink at his outrageous quoted price). Said it was totally worth it because he'd taken that approach.
The timing of your move to Berlin is not a very strong signal that you would never return to London because people continue to cross the channel in both directions.
What is the polite response to this nonsense? Are you still supposed to respond to recruiters who clearly didn't spend a minute reading your profile? Or do you just ignore them and don't respond at all?
The answer is in the question - the "polite response" is a polite response.
Bit if you're just looking for validation from the internet to not be polite, then here you have it - it's ok if you don't respond to a recruiter who you don't want to respond to.
Spam does not deserve a polite response, and responding to spam is, in fact, detrimental to the rest of the Internet and rude to the rest of us using it.
So you are being rude when you do respond to spam - and including LinkedIn spam.
Now you're just making up new meanings for these words. While I agree that you shouldn't respond to spam, there's nothing "rude" about responding to spam, and nothing "polite" about ignoring a message.
If they definitely didn't read my profile, I ignore them. Also if they contact me when I'm not even looking, which is most of the time.
The companies that such people are attempting to recruit for, probably share my dislike for those that can't tell the difference between platforms or languages.
