Do you really disagree with brokenmachine's premise that poor English makes communication impossible?
Or is it, rather, that Sam and YC {and venture capital in general}, by proxy through you, are annoyed at decreasing access to low-wage workers from a developing country notorious for unintelligible accents?
Pretty sure I have no low-wage worker agenda, but perhaps you see the dark corners of my soul.
From a moderation point of view, it's not a question of disagreeing. We can agree with someone and still ask them to stop. In fact that's common. In this case it was about asking people not to go on offtopically about peeves, because that's not interesting, and also about HN being an international community. Respect across national divides is important here.
All I said was that I had trouble understanding heavily accented English. I never said I don't like the accent. It's irrelevant if I like it or not. It's that I can't understand. Being able to understand is IMO a basic requirement for effective telephone support.
I have no problem with the people themselves. I actually don't care what their nationality is or where they are physically located. But they need to be able to do their job. The system is broken if I can't understand the person who is trying to support me over the phone.
The only reason I'm writing this is in case some future CEO is reading these comments, hopefully they won't be blinded by the cost savings and fall down the same trap as so many companies who roll out such ineffective and irritating phone "support".
