How to get people skills (Wall Street personality)?

[DominiConnor]

BBW has a point, and pretty much the first thing I say on the CQF soft skills lectures is that they are skills not talents. By that I mean you can learn how to do it better, it's not a deterministic function of your genes.

Part of the reason for the apparent skills deficit here is that firstly people in this line of work have to prove themselves only in areas where expression is not significant.
That seems to have led to a cultural failure in logic where many of us feel that it is somehow 'dishonest' or 'creepy' to put effort into communication and other other soft skills.

Although I am by nature really quite rude, I have put serious effort into softening this, enough that many people have referred to be as a bullshitter or decried my geek credentials. That says something about both me and our particular culture.

I do part company with BBW on it being foreigners...
Firstly I am one, but also I'm not a great fan of excuses, English is learnable and necessary.

but...
Some of the stuff we explain is just hard. A decent science grad has a richer culture to draw upon than most arts grads, since ours includes theirs, but not vice versa.

I have been paid to explain things to people for things like the CQF and PC Magazine, and it can be very hard, and the temptation to use baby talk is so great that the editor of PC Mag absolutely forbade any of us from saying "it's like your car, the CPU is the engine, the bus is the drive shaft..." Partly because this leads to to saying "the hard disk is like the fuel tank, the applications are like seats and the wing mirrors are like anti-virus software".

 

[bigbadwolf]

English is learnable and necessary.

Necessary, maybe, as the world's lingua franca, but I'm not sure how learnable it is for adults, or what level of mastery we're talking about. My father earnt a PhD from Bristol but he was never comfortable with reading anything more complex than Reader's Digest or Newsweek. His spoken English contained absolute howlers in syntax, egregious errors that persisted decade after decade. My mother earnt a master's from Manchester and her English was even poorer than my father's. So I'm a trifle sceptical about the extent to which English can be mastered. I'm reminded of Enoch Powell's contention that only the English can speak English.

A decent science grad has a richer culture to draw upon than most arts grads, since ours includes theirs, but not vice versa.

I'm reminded of C.P.Snow's famous lecture, titled The Two Cultures, delivered at Cambridge in 1959. Here is a more recent (1994) perspective on it by Roger Kimball.

 

[euroazn]

My father earnt a PhD from Bristol but he was never comfortable with reading anything more complex than Reader's Digest or Newsweek.

That's actually pretty good mastery for a foreigner...!

 

[Stuart Truax]

Necessary, maybe, as the world's lingua franca, but I'm not sure how learnable it is for adults, or what level of mastery we're talking about.

As far as structure is concerned, English is a monstrosity. Additionally, our language has perhaps the worst spelling conventions of any language written in the Latin alphabet. "Ghoti" could conceivably spell "fish". People who try to learn it late in life are commendable.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Does anyone notice that we keep on going on about this when we haven't settled on a definition of "Wall Street personality".
What is it anyway?

 

[Stuart Truax]

I'm reminded of C.P.Snow's famous lecture, titled The Two Cultures, delivered at Cambridge in 1959. Here is a more recent (1994) perspective on it by Roger Kimball.

Thank you for this contribution. Keep them coming

 

[Stuart Truax]

Does anyone notice that we keep on going on about this when we haven't settled on a definition of "Wall Street personality".
What is it anyway?

I think at best it is an elusive concept. Something the Aleksey Vayners of the world may have taken too seriously.

 

[euroazn]

Does anyone notice that we keep on going on about this when we haven't settled on a definition of "Wall Street personality".
What is it anyway?

When you're on Wall Street, you feel...

LIKE A BAUS.

Even if you're in Operations, which actually really ticks me off...

 

[atreides]

I will disagree with you on this one.. I have a friend who started to learn English at 20. Prior to that, she lived abroad and was fluent in French and Swahili. Fast forward five years, she now has a very good command of the language, even better than most Americans in my opinion.

If you heard this individual behind a closed door, you will be awestruck to learn she had spoken little or no English before she turned 20. She just made it into one of the Ivy Law programs.

I think English is quite learnable,..why? you've got a lot of material to work with, it's all around you.. it's everywhere. It can't get any more immersive than that.

Somehow though, I feel babies brains are wired to pick up languages faster..maybe people loose this ability with age.

Necessary, maybe, as the world's lingua franca, but I'm not sure how learnable it is for adults, or what level of mastery we're talking about. My father earnt a PhD from Bristol but he was never comfortable with reading anything more complex than Reader's Digest or Newsweek. His spoken English contained absolute howlers in syntax, egregious errors that persisted decade after decade

 

[Andy Nguyen]

A student from non English-speaking country coming to US to study in an MFE program, spend a semester or two before he gets to be ready for an internship or a full-time job.

What would he do to be Wall Street ready, communication wise?

 

[bigbadwolf]

A student from non English-speaking country coming to US to study in an MFE program, spend a semester or two before he gets to be ready for an internship or a full-time job.

What would he do to be Wall Street ready, communication wise?

Read the business papers and periodicals -- WSJ, Barron's, Fortune, Business Week, The Economist. At least he will know biz speak. If he has a bit of time, look at magazines like Harper's and Atlantic Monthly. Try to get involved in groups where English is spoken or practiced (there's a temptation to stick with one's own kind, which severely retards picking up a new language).