Silicon Valley and Scandinavian cultures are very flat, so it is possible for "the man on the floor" to tell management that it doesn't work to put diesel into a gasoline car.

In authoritarian cultures this would be a mistake as it's seen as embarrassing the management by saying they made a mistake. If you want to continue being employed then it is much better to pretend there is no problem.

Catching problems early saves a lot of money in software development, so a non-authoritarian culture can save a lot of time and thus have a lot higher wage.

The US collective mentality is sometime overly optimistic specially in public. This is sometimes a positive since it removes almost any inhibition regarding challenges, but it can lead to things blowing-up spectacularly, and then having to put in place hacks and brute force to make it kind of work relatively inefficiently and inelegantly.

But it also leads to great successes (biggest economy in the world, lots of major companies, very attractive country for talents) and innovations never seen before.

This positivism is prevalent in public statement but in private cracks start to appear. It gives me the impression that this positivism is pretty much a cultural obligation, so while not authoritarian, the group mentality is geared toward not talking to much about possible difficulties out of fear of being seen as too negative by the group.

It is an infuriating challenge to deal with, especially when you're faced withacompletely passivebusiness interface only committed to answering exactly the question you ask, not taking the question and doing the bit of contextual fill-in and translation one would expect. As a result, to cope with that, you have to ask heavily qualified, context bearing questions to Get to the bottom of anything; which after a certain point becomes unintelligible if you don't have someone actively willing to follow along, which manydon'tsee the value of, because they don't see it as doing anything of value.

It's a vicious cycle really.

I had a real heart-to-heart with the CTO where I worked since he only gets along with one of the managers and doesn't like his directors. He said the only reason he approved my promotion was because he was tired of hearing Yes Men telling him things were fine right until they blew up in his face. He's a tech guy, not a business guy so probably outside the norm.

That's the first step. Proposing a complete solution that takes in the needs of the various stakeholders and doesn't just move the problem and does so in a way that makes the whole situation easier is the hard part.

If you've done that and nobody is listening, it's time to change the culture or leave.

There's a fine line between being thorough, and doing the job of several other people for them. The latter isn't what you're being paid for, and in some companies isn't appreciated if it risks some of them losing face.

The systems engineer (who was a friend, but maybe not the smartest tool in the shed) spec'd a system, and (high level verilog) simulated the system, and gave the output to the circuit guys (led by (also a friend) one of the most talented mixed-signal circuit designers I know - but abrasive as hell), said: "It won't work. Too much power draw on on modules off the bus. And besided is you power them through the bus, you're going to get a lot of noise and chop and brown-outs".

The manager - who was not an idiot - but to your point (1) above, was NOT aware of the issue and didn't want to believe it was issue and was NOT keenly aware of the issue (he was in denial), so they ran the wafers.

Chips come back - they don't work. Power draw issues.

My circuit designer friend (remember the abrasive part?) - gloated and mocked them for being idiots that did not know how to listen. (He was right - but he didn't have many friends in management).

They said: "OK. Make the changes. We'll do another run.". He said: Give me a couple of die. He went back to the lab - laser snipped a couple of traces - and voila! It now worked! (He had designed in a way to solve the problem as if they had originally decided to do it his way)

He cut 3 months off the schedule - saved millions of dollars - but were mad as hell. I think they wanted to fire him.

I learned a couple of things from all of that:

- Sometimes smart people don't know about problems because they don't want to know

- Pride is a horrible sin - I would have been grateful to have my bacon saved - they were not

- Nobody ever gets a bonus or promotion for putting out a fire that never actually gets started.

EDIT: Formatting. It's stil not great.

- Being excellent becomes a baseline expectation if you do it long enough so it's best you never put out your best possible work in the office?

Pretty interesting story, thank you for it! Seriously though, my main takeaway is that you can be a genius and not an ass -- at the same time. But in your particular example the guy was completely in his right to mock them.

And sadly yes, pride overrides a lot of other, supposedly much more important, factors. Learned that over my career as well and it's not one of the lessons that I enjoyed receiving.

People from cultures where sarcasm isn't common don't understand this nuance and seem to find this kind of dialogue abrasive and unconstructive. Perhaps the sentiment is that if you can't articulate it clearly, then the issue is non-existent, for better or worse, or you're just being lazy and unhelpful.

What also helps, counter intuitively, is providing multiple sarcastic statements in quick succession. People listen to spoken words at set rate but the nonverbal parts of communication are instantly clear. This allows the listener the opportunity to consider the extended thought in a single context allowing for a richer sample of sarcastic communication to think over.

Sarcasm + empathy for those around you dealing with the problem = powerful form of communication.

Sarcasm + being an asshole = being an asshole.

(Note: This is from my Australian background/culture/point-of-view, and I don't for a moment think it applies cross culturally - we are the culture where calling someone a cunt can be either a sign of deep profound friendship, or a reason to be punched in the face. When in the US, I need to be careful with that sort of instinctive interaction/language...)

You can be cynical and sarcastic without being personally abusive or a sexist troglodyte.

The "militant counter culture" you speak of definitely does exist. But codes of conduct didn't start appearing out of thin air, they exist because they need to exist. Anyone who doesn't recognise that is almost certainly coming from a place of oblivious privilege. (Hell, I admit to being obliviously privileged a lot of the time, and _I_ can see the very real need for codes of conduct to exist so that assholes and troglodytes can't continue saying "It's a joke, calm down", or "I'm just being blunt, you can't handle the truth" or all the other gaslighting bullshit they so often get away with...)

They exist because projects have been bullied into doing that. On top of that the conditions were pushed in. Do you really need to have a thing to say "don't deadname"?

Expectations of conduct have, and continued to, existe(d) before that and they were enforced. The only thing this does is to try to give people who don't like how a group is run room to bully the people running it.

Last weekend Elon Musk put a couple of people in space at a fraction of the costs NASA originally spent.

I think and hope many industries can still be disrupted in a similar way.

You seem to be comparing the cost of doing something the first time with doing it 40 years of technology later

Perhaps it’s wording and I’m sure private companies are more cost effective compared to government

Most people are very hesitant about giving honest feedback even in US businesses because of these pressuring forces. If your manager wants to put diesel in a gasoline car, you often have to agree, then have a sidebar conversation directly with that person so their negligence, ignorant mistake, or intentional malice isn't put on a large group or public display.

Very few US workers are in positions to give blunt feedback. This was pretty common in software development due to leverage developers had but it's, IMHO, been on decline.

That should be obvious. Most people I've worked for can be challenged in private if you've actually got a point - even if you're shot down in the end. The ones who are still assholes when handled correctly are usually not worth working for. The best ones can handle a public challenge on the merits of course.

That's exactly what different cultures look like: it's absolutely not obvious in Eastern Europe where I live. We call each other out on our BS freely and directly, and almost nobody ever gets offended.

It is quite the cultural shock for many of us when we suddenly have to sugar-coat and positive-tone-first every work criticism we express. It can feel like a huge waste of time and energy while if somebody tells me "Dimi, your code in module X sucks!" and I'll just laugh and say "dude, I had only a day to finish that, sorry -- if you don't like it, talk to the boss to give me one more week on it and it's going to be swell".

So no, such things as the one you quoted aren't obvious at all for many. I'd even argue they are only prevalent in the USA but I've seen evidence in both directions so I can't claim anything absolute there.

I sometime am, and will continue to be that guy.

At least partly because it's the right way to handle post mortems, but partly because coworker X is only a symptom of the problem - and the underlying problem here is a manager who hasn't got a process in place to ensure Friday afternoon rush fixes on production don't happen. That's a process problem which is neither your nor coworker X's fault. That's my fault. Sorry...

(And maybe coworker X is a serial offender for this type of fuckup. Also my fault.)

I wouldn't rush to blame you if you were my manager. It's not the manager's job to breathe down everyone's neck -- they have to make sure to foster the right culture (like don't push potentially breaking changes to production at Friday afternoon) and ensure that the people hired are actually able and motivated.

From then on though, all bets should be off. Maybe the guy/girl had an awful day and is otherwise excellent. Maybe they felt pressured due to miscommunication (or a coworker being an ass and they took it personally and figured they'll speed through the task), or maybe they simply were novice in that particular problem or technology.

None of that would be your fault.

"He/she knows they screwed up. No need to pour salt on the wound."

Which is completely fair. But I've also seen fairly clueless people in responsible positions screwing up again and again and again and never being called out -- and those scenarios are not okay.

One kind of employer only retains crappy employees.

The other gets all the good ones.

Health care industry coding seems to along the lines. Solve the immediate issue. A few years later the complexity is off the chart.

You ain't seen nothin' then.

Try challenging an elder boss in Japan (or China or South Korea, but Japan is especially bad) and watch what happens, for example.

I find that very few cultures allow challenging authority like the US does.

Then you have limited experience with Japanese bosses.

Under most circumstances, they simply avoid trying to commit to ANYTHING. They will never give you a definite yes or no and will move glacially slowly.

However, when driven to against a wall in which they must make a decision, it is fairly common that they can, and will, spew some of the most jaw-droppingly stupid things, and nobody will ever contradict them--certainly not publicly.

Yes, when things go really bad, they will have to apologize and fall on their sword. However, the failure has to reach epic proportions before that will happen--normally they just shovel the blame onto subordinates exactly like US bosses.

If you are using this as a metaphor for a decision you personally consider stupid, then maybe.

If it's actually putting diesel in a gas car, then no, I can't imagine any case in which an intern couldn't safely tell that to their director or CEO.

When something is obviously not going to work akin to diesel in a gas car, I have never met someone who wasn't willing to at least take a second look at their "solution".

    Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the 
    communication is.

We had a lot of fulltime employees working in other countries. The company paid pretty well, and we were essentially paying US salaries to folks living in countries where that would be considered very, very good money.

This, combined with the cultural issues you mentioned, resulted in management mistakenly thinking it was doing a good job -- privately, the foreign engineers shared my concerns, but they were not willing to "rock the boat" and bring those concerns to leadership.

Years ago (not my current employer), there was a big offshore team that was a huge pain in the neck because their entire development culture was one of deception and defensiveness - they'd deliver garbage but then spend enormous amounts of energy managing up and propagandizing to their reporting chain and executives that everything was finished, high-quality, etc.

One of the security teams practically begged for someone to help get this team to fix the bugs they were filing. The other team was straight up closing pretty much anything they could as "incorrect" reports or classifying all the bugs as ultra-low severity (which is basically "will not fix") so that their metrics stayed perfect. Lots of issues like this. When they were challenged on it from the outside, by one of the guys who didn't have a sense for the political situation, the best way to describe the reaction goes way beyond "circling the wagons" - they went full nuclear, politically, on that guy. No holds barred, a total nest of vipers. For engineers who have never experienced companies with deep and vicious politics, it's hard for them to understand what it's like at companies like that.

Then one day, one of the best executives at the top of the chain decided that he was going to re-organize his directs and fold these teams together, under someone from the side of the house into which the security team reported.

Now, cultures of managing up are good at reading the waters and so you'd expect that they'd change their tune anyway, and they did, but the part that was shocking to all involved is, as a side effect of the exec shuffle, the security guy above was given an important-sounding but meaningless title, and suddenly the interactions between that organization and the security guy went from a one of subversion, political smearing, etc. to one of absolute and total deference overnight.

The offshore team wasn't any _better_, they were still marginal and you couldn't trust a single thing they said, but the instant attitude change from "defiant, we-are-power-adjacent, you'd better watch yourself" to "oh XXX, we're helpless, nothing can be done, yes we will try but.." due to what was essentially the change of a string in a database somewhere was just crazy to observe. Everything went from "that guy is terrible, that guy doesn't know, blah blah' to "yes, oh, XXX is great, we love XXX, he is helping, ..."

Scandinavians communicate more directly. At the moment of giving feedback, Americans lack initiative, communicate vaguely and avoid confrontations.

First a little background:

The military is a highly confrontational culture, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In that kind of culture you tell people the disagreement immediately without tripping over pleasantries. It also means people are not easily offended until you try to waste their time or bullshit them with cleverness.

In the military people have to certify to do anything (super bureaucratic) so you generally know who your actual experts are without guessing and without a bunch of lying Dunning-Kruger insanity. It also means people are generally better about knowing their limitations and staying in their lane.

That being said, in the military I have no trouble or reservations about telling a superior they are wrong and why when it comes to an area I am well qualified. Knowing that the superior can immediately reconsider before making the authoritarian decisions of an iron fisted dictator. Superiors are generally better about considering the advise of their experts because the decision maker owns all risks and consequences.

In the corporate world you have to employ tact and really be careful how you deliver the message if the topic is not something already extremely objective. There is a lot of noise in the corporate world and far less interpersonal structure leaving everything open to interpretation. I find when I am at the day job communicating anything comprising more than two steps I go far beyond normal to be precise in my wording just to be clear.

There also exists a common phrase being thrown under the bus or more commonly known as a scapegoat. This does exist in the military but there are many conventions in place to catch those kinds of failures. Once that is identified it is a major reputation destroyer, which results in a huge occupational risk. It seems to more commonly apply in the corporate world when people are pushed into a corner and risks associated with that behavior are minor.

In most of my corporate employers there generally isn’t a central authority that owns any significant business risk or job terminating consequence when things go sideways (except maybe some senior management), which is certainly different from an authoritarian culture. In the corporate world there is plenty of room to blame external factors when things fall apart.

Even though it still does not literally happen anymore, there is still the tradition of the captain going down with the ship. The captain's authority was unchallenged on board the ship. But, if the ship sank, the captain paid for it with his life. This would inherently cut a lot of the bullshit. If you are the captain, your life depends on your people telling you the facts, not just what you want to hear.

Only in the extreme short term. In the medium term, the dictator inevitably ends up severed from reality by the inability of (true) data to flow back up to the authority, which results in their decisions becoming increasingly suboptimal over time.

This is the pragmatic argument in favor of free speech, really. If for the sake of argument we ignore moral and philosophical issues, the reason why free speech is important is that in its absence information does not properly flow back up to the authorities. Free information flow does not guarantee proper functioning of the system, but impeded information flow guarantees improper functioning. If your authority dictates the use of 4-inch long bolts in a place where there's only 2 inches of clearance, and nobody in the organization has the ability to feed back to the authority that information, the only possible outcomes are bad ones. This all compounds, too; the next dictate from the authority won't be able to take into account the fact that in order to fit the 4-inch bolt in, a new hole was cut in some vital structure that shouldn't be there, and some new bad decision will be made to add load to this structure, which will cause other effects. The authority ends up living in a fantasy land.

Note how this toy example seated entirely in engineering-space doesn't have any moral or philosophical component, and yet it is already sufficient to cause a bad outcome even in pure engineering terms. Moral and philosophical issues can cause yet more problems, but they'll be arriving to a space already broken.

It also doesn't matter for my purposes why the information can't flow back up to the authority. Even a well-meaning, "enlightened" dictator can end up in this situation by sheer inability to process the incoming information. The dictator may be the nicest, most well-meaning person in human history full of compassion and love and every other virtue you care to name, and they'll still break things if they insist on authoritarianism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAFU_Principle

These are extremely hard to find, and anyone who thinks of themselves as one is missing at least one of those properties.

Mao became undisputed leader. His purges were bad enough that the party decided to implement a 10 year term limit.

Xi removed that limit, and now China is swinging slowly towards authoritarianism. We're still in the early years of his rule at this point. Wait till he makes a mistake and his grip starts slipping, then he will see enemies everywhere.

When someone makes themselves ruler for life, it tells you that their character is not suitable for that position, because they lack the humility to hand over their work to a successor. Because they've decided they can't trust other people's motives and competence.

"Doing the work," "managing the people doing the work," and "making the decisions about what work should be done" are not simply three ascending levels of expertise in one domain. They are three completely different domains. All good so far; the Peter principle takes this into account. Someone who's good at "doing" gets promoted to "managing", and doesn't have that skillset, and gets stuck there.

But it's also true in reverse. Just because a particular person is not good (or, more generally, less good than the best) at "doing", that doesn't mean they'd be bad at "managing". And just because someone is not good at "managing" doesn't mean they'd be bad at "deciding".

So you've got people who are good at working being promoted to manager, people who are good at working and managing being promoted to decider (which, I admit, is a bit more likely to work out than the others)—or, in many cases, people who were simply hired as managers being promoted to deciders—and then people who are good at managing or deciding, but only OK at working stuck at the worker level forever, unable to use their skills to help make things better.

However, too much focus relative to the complexity of the task at hand is never good, because focus requires ignoring some things. I would theorize that the more complex the task a team is working on, the less authoritarian it can afford its culture to be.

In an Eastern-European "authoritarian" (Bulgarian) setting, you are given tasks with not much room for interpretation and are expected to deliver a tangible "no-bullshit" result within a reasonable time frame. Not much time is spent on meetings, you don't want to ask too many questions, praise is won by delivering a technically-efficient solution which doesn't question the business intents and preconceptions of management.

In a North-Western European setting, everything is questionable and debatable, sometimes at irritating levels. Fairly incompetent people are raising their voice on insignificant matters and the decision-making debate changes direction quite sporadically. By everyone focusing too much on the business side, what you get is a technically-mediocre product which solves many problems to many people, but doesn't have much value as an integral part.

Disagree. A team can be coached to commit to a common goal.

A dysfunctional authoritarian culture is probably faster than a dysfunctional democracy, for sure. But then you are comparing which broken system is less broken, not what would be the optimal setup.

Take a sports team. They are not micromanaged. They are given a common task, a common strategy, guidance, but in the field they are alone.

They are more and more micromanaged.

* Training has become the land of measuring and controlling each detail, and has expanded into controlling your whole life as much as possible.

* Before the game, with more and more accurate and often static tactics. Don't you act another way or it means disobeying and the bench is near.

* During the game. Hardly 15 seconds go by without the coach (or the coaches) yelling orders at 1 or 2 players. Now there are even real-time data collecting and analyses, sometimes from sensors.

Perhaps the worst example of micro-management is cycling, where I am pretty sure that the only directeur sportif's dream not yet fulfilled is to be able to radio-command electrodes implanted in riders' muscles. They already get the position of almost everybody in the pack in almost real-time, they get radio-communicated real-time speed, power, heartbeat sensors measurements and two-way audio communication with each rider of the team. For now they have to do with giving imperative orders through each rider's earpiece (so the reaction can be delayed or the order not quite obeyed), otherwise managers would be computer game players. And silly (sometimes collective) punishments for those who dared disobey when they felt the orders were stupid are not uncommon: even though it means losing chances on that day or the next, the manager has one priority: showing who the boss is.

Only for relatively simple situations with a relatively known process for solving - which is the opposite of most software dev, although that seems to be changing in some ways.

Once you really understand that, you'll understand why it's difficult for those in other cultures, using other primary languages, and sometimes even remote employees to develop effective software without difficulty.

Much of software development assumes that specifications are perfectly understood, translated, and captured. This is rarely if ever the case. Developers are very frequently inferring and making microdecisions within the context of what they're developing using their personal knowledge. When they don't do this, you often get products that just don't solve the target problem.

One factor businesses really shot themselves in the foot when they butchered agile into a micromanagement time pressuring system to squeeze work out is that it made localized workers even more of a necessity because it has to be done (and interpreted) fairly quickly. This, IMHO, puts remote workers, especially those in other cultures, at a huge disadvantage as well as the systems/tools they're developing.

I don't doubt for a second talent can be distributed world wide but I do doubt that there's enough talent that can understand the context of the systems they're building to make project managers, businesses, clients, etc. happy.

    Whenever you hire someone from a different culture / country, you 
    need to start from the basics by explaining the very core of your society.

    An American programmer might not be too concerned if a body temperature
    measurement returns 45 degrees Celcius. Similarly, a patient height of 
    95in probably wouldn't immediately raise alarm bells for a European 
    developer.

In addition to what you wrote, I think it may actually go beyond that?

There's a certain "team unity" that binds good teams together. It's that extra "something" that helps you get through those tough moments and really work together.

I've worked on remote, international teams that HAVE had that kind of esprit de corps. And I've worked on local teams inside the same building that haven't.

But, overall?

In my experience that kind of unity and teamwork is MUCH harder to build across cultures and/or remote work arrangements. And the difficulty is often multiplied by the "mercenary" nature of consulting work in which consultants obviously aren't really incentivized to worry about that sort of thing - in fact you kind of need to form emotional armor and avoid it to an extent.

It can be done, and is absolutely worth doing. (And, in my opinion, it's a form o institutional racism not to...)

In my experience it's often as simple as giving employees some space to banter and chitchat and get to know each other. Can be as simple as a #random or a #chitchat IRC/Slack channel sometimes and/or a company culture that allows for some chitchat and getting-to-know-eachother during daily standups. And if you are working cross-culture, at an absolute bare minimum, do some homework to at least understand each others' holidays and intangibles like differences in etiquette and so forth.

Thing is, in typical offshoring arrangements, much of this is impossible.

I am quite the outgoing and easily sociable guy but I'll agree this is impossible and will tell you why it's impossible for me:

What you propose happens on the company time. Remote contractors always have this anxiety about "am I spending my time being focused enough on the work I am paid for?"

Shortly before I was laid off from my last job I realized that I constantly postponed getting to know the team better because of that.

It's hard to let yourself be looser if don't have the status of an employee (vs. being a contractor) and/or if you aren't shown you are a valued member of the team.

But I am absolutely not interested in their political opinions, what they had for lunch or what their girlfriend told them last weekend.

In my corner of academia, programming is almost always seen as grunt work and delegates to undergrads and junior grad students. Of course students aren’t trusted to actually manage the project so usually mid-level scientists or post-grads are assigned to oversee and manage them. The managers usually have no idea how to program or what it entails, nor do they have any interest in the project. At most they’ll want to use the software after its finished. If agile/waterfall programming annoys anyone, just be thankful you have a methodology for software development at all. Since literally everyone is senior to the programmer, but nobody else knows how to program, everyone just justifies their time by suggesting new features. Since no one knows how long anything should take, all new features are accepted into spec at anytime. Eventually, the project starts to run long, and since nobody knows why, management responds by adding more layers of management. Finally, the programmer either quits or graduates and the grant for the project runs out. The final product usually either has no resemblance to the proposal or only works on sample data. If it’s a website, no one bothers maintaining the server. If it’s a package, all dependencies go out of date within a year of release. The PI, or a PI down the hall gets a new grant to do basically the same project again, and the cycle repeats itself.

The best markets for selling software are the wealthy countries with their cultures. You need people in those countries that are part of those cultures to develop that software. So your employment market is limited by people within that culture that have that skill, which is why there is still a software development skills shortage.

For purely technical things like kernel, database, network or driver development the job market is much smaller but it's also much easier to move those jobs to lower income countries, which is very common.

But most software development jobs are at the application level where having a matching language and culture with your users is essential.

Something as trivial as a signup form that asks for firstname and lastname and then refers to the user by their firstname later in the application is something you wouldn't even need to spec out for an English speaking programmer. They would just implement it like that by default because that's the culture.

But this rarely happens, if at all. So there's something that's still amiss.

It's also starting to happen with banking / finance apps. Nubank is growing very fast in Latin America, Africa is starting to have a domestic ecommerce sector, and so on. The internet is new and many countries, particular developing ones that have a sufficiently distinct culture to not just adopt Anglophone products are only now starting to have the talent and infrastructure in place.

It's also happening in messaging. Telegram is overwhelmingly more popular in Europe/Russia than it is in the US. LINE is the most popular app in Japan and Thailand, Facebook Messenger and SMS still dominate in the US.

Other countries tend to use communication applications and platforms developed at or near their country (WhatsApp seems to be one of the bigger international exceptions from my experience).

There are a few exceptions to this where massive US companies have the scale to setup native teams in markets that understand culture well. Outside of that, it tends to fall apart. Some examples come to mind: Taobao, QQ, Baidu, Yahoo Japan, Weibo, VK, Aliexpress, Line, TikTok, etc.

(Note not all of these examples may be good because I'm not intimately familiar with all of them--since I too tend to use systems developed in my country).

Facebook, Google... they seem to span cultures probably due to providing services people fundamentally want to have across cultures. Large businesses typically have the capital to invest in addressing the cultural barriers and developing solutions.

Apple has a massive share world wide but when you look at Samsung in South Korea or Huawei in China, you'll see more adoption. Some of it may be nationalistic preference but I argue much of it is due to developing products/services that properly address demands in the market (which is tightly tied to culture).

And the best US companies have developed an internal culture that might not be easy to develop.

I'm baffled by this statement... I worked in the medical device industry for years at a company of 10k people and you would be hard pressed to find a sw engineer that didn't default to Celsius. Almost all sw engineers there either had EE, CpE or Biomedical Engineering degrees; Celsius is not remotely foreign to these types of engineers. I would be incredibly surprised if it was different at any medical device company.

The average programmer at Instagram in California probably doesn't have much more in common with the average Instagram influencer or feed-scroller than the average programmer in India (both programmers tend to spend most of their time thinking about computing and abstract math/CS concepts, while the influencer spends it thinking about marketing, social relationships, travelling, etc. and the feed-scroller is all about instant gratification and pop culture).

There are a number of technology-specific hubs around the world and even just in the united states. Silicon Valley is one of the most obvious ones, but Raleigh is another one, as are Nashua, Boston and Salt Lake City (there are others).

What all of these have in common is that each of them had, at some time in the past there was a massive company with out-sized returns. In the Valley were were _several_ - Intel, HP, ... and many more. NCR (and others) in Raleigh, Westford, Petaluma (optics), Boston as a geography absolutely dominated storage until Netapp, and so on.

When you have companies like this, they produce a lasting geographic concentration of talent, especially early in a given sector's life. Think Michigan and especially Detroit for automakers or California for aerospace.

The experiment we're doing with the work-from-home thing will be interesting if it goes forward, because as a few locations in Canada demonstrated, a very active de-centralization of a given kind of expertise (in that case, the network element management software) can render a given tech hub a memory at best. If history is anything to go by, disassembling Silicon Valley, if possible, will not result in more uniform distribution, it will just move from one concentrated area to another.

I agree that domain knowledge is invaluable. But in the examples given, the difference in domain knowledge between local talent vs remote may not justify the 5x salary.

Perhaps not all the nuances, and many aspects are arbitrary choices and only the spec would reveal what the business unit chose, but there's a lot of domain knowledge required to be productive.

If we need to outsource stuff, that has to be to some outfit that has developers experienced with banking nuances, and often times they are more experienced than internal devs (because they have worked on this parictular tricky corner of banking for multiple different institutions), and if we hire devs from outside the industry, we expect the first 6 months to need a lot of handholding because they don't know the nuances of banking and they can't be productive at all until they learn at least most of them, because no realistic spec will be sufficient for a programmer without a domain knowledge, at least not in the financial domain.

It really bothers me because I generally get put on projects with little acceptance criteria and not something I've done before, yet I deliver on time and the end user is very happy because I take the time to ask good questions up-front. Why can't someone deliver something that makes me that happy.

On the topic of communications. I've consulted on projects where I've said that something I noticed should be done a specific way, even though it was not part of AC, technically worked correctly, and making the change would be feature creep. My advice was ignored. Weeks later the end users kept complaining that the software was difficult to use and could not communicate what they didn't like. Since they refused to use the software and they refused to accept it as it was, I was brought back in. I sat down, found out what work the end user was doing, and did some of that work. I literally did someone else's job. I used the software. I made a huge list of areas for improvement. The PM agreed to everything. All of the changes were made, the end users were now saying it was awesome to use.

To summarize, learn to read between the lines of the acceptance criteria. Would you want to use the software you're making? For me, small issues annoy the heck out of me. I notice these things. End users tend to just say nebulous things like "it doesn't work well".

Worked in healthcare IT in the USA. Beans counters were utterly determined to send our work overseas. Old story of training our replacements.

We could teach them programming, testing, our stack.

But we couldn't teach them our healthcare system. Stupid small stuff that challenged us were completely opaque to our colleagues. Stuff like definitions of "visit" vs "episodes of care" and how each customer had different rules. (Made worse by sharing data between orgs.)

(My billion dollar idea was to help our counterparts adapt our stack for their local markets. India, Malaysia, and Vietnam have healthcare too, right? Get in on the ground floor of those emerging markets. Alas.)

Well, that's task-dependent. For healthcare billing software, certainly.

But if you're hiring someone to implement the SVG spec in a web browser? Bézier curves are the same no matter where you are in the world.

Indeed, if knowledge of culture was the key wouldn't comparative advantage lead to low-cost-of-living countries' developers dominating technically pure, well-specified work like web browser design?

The one thing about culture that matters is the work ethic, which indeed is hard to reproduce in many countries, but other facets of culture aren't really significant.

except the vast majority of FAANgs work force are immigrants.

- with higher "programming literacy" in a country they might have more top class programmers, top class programmers where able to optimize their career early by moving to western countries.

I would be questioning professional qualities of these programmers at this point. That’s just a common sense and base knowledge about the world you live in and people you write code for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...

You give the AI instruction and explanation in English, preferably as clear and as detailed as possible and you get back code.

Essentially its very similar workflow when working with offshore developer, in the future you could in theory replace the offshore dev with AI, except with much less latency.

It's called a compiler.

I specifically referring to English though, not computer language.

Those of us that have been doing it a while, know that the single biggest issue in any commercial code project is bad input to the process; otherwise known as Requirements. No one knows what they want, or, even worse, they know what they want, and what they want, sucks.

Steve McConnell wrote about how projects mess up, and how much the damage can propagate throughout a project lifecycle; with bad requirements being the nightmare scenario. This was about a quarter century ago. It is not new (https://stevemcconnell.com/articles/software-quality-at-top-...).

The best requirements for a software project is code. Even an AI will need extremely high-quality, detailed, and well-considered requirements that are likely to require their own language (so AI requirement-generation will look a heck of a lot like "coding").

What AI gives us, is (maybe) speed between requirements and executable, so, theoretically, we could have a really high-power, effective iterative process, where bad input results in bad output, and we see that quickly, then refine the input; much like we already do with code, and run the build again, to see how that results in executable.

I learned development back in the "big iron" days, where CPU time was the most expensive part of the process, and we were required to debug our code in the design phase. If we borked during our slice, we were penalized.

Nowadays, I tend to just write some junky "strawman" code, fire up the debugger, and step through until it breaks.

Working with separate contractors, whether domestic or offshore, needs really good requirements, and some kind of fast feedback and a flexible, iterative lifecycle process; which is frog-fur rare.

If we don't have a fast feedback cycle, then we can't iterate effectively. In-office staff helps to make feedback fast, but it's quite possible to have fast feedback in a distributed environment (I used to work for a Japanese corporation, so I can tell you about "feedback lag"). It's just that we then need some kind of process to afford and regulate that feedback loop.

I think that the process of software development is fundamentally broken, and that the industry is still thrashing around, trying out all sorts of "silver bullets" (See Brooks, Fred).

I also believe that overbuilt process is an enormous issue. I call it "Concrete Galoshes" (https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/concrete-galoshes-a5798a5...), and it affects new-fangled, agile shops, as much as it does old-fashioned waterfalliers.

Unfortunately, if we want to reduce "tribal knowledge," and treat our engineers like interchangeable LEGO blocks, then we need a pretty heavy process. It's still a heavy process, even if we call it "agile."

"Tribal knowledge" is a bad term in the software development industry, but it is the most effective way to have a light-touch process.

It also requires treating engineers well (not just paying them well), so they stay around. I'm not sure that foozball tables and on-site beer are doing the trick, as the average stay at a corporation seems to be less than 2 years.

I do not have the answer. If I did, I would own a private jet for every day of the week. I have my own personal process that works quite well for me, but I don't think it scales particularly well to others.

The books that are published feel like they're targeting entry developers and it's a lot of stuff you'd learn on the job. It feels like we're over-promoting way too quickly and demanding delivery over experience or quality.

Interviews: You have developers that refused to learn this skill and they just skim a few leetcode problems and expect the interviewee to solve it in 15 minutes.

Best practices: What happened to developing standards and demanding/expecting tests (and their appropriate categories unit, integeration, smoke, feature/functional, etc)

Though things could get fun if AI can enable more flexible declarative programming.

Have you read laws? That is the style of language that tries to make a "precise and clear enough description" in English, but it does not go far enough, it's still not sufficiently precise to be applied directly, you would have to use something like 'super-legalese' for that.

So even if you had a system that could accept English, nobody would want to use that because it's difficult to express precise and clear enough descriptions in English, and easier to do so in Python or some other programming language; and in any case, the difficult part of programming is thinking up the precise and clear enough descriptions.

This comes up in writing specifications for outsourced programmers. Writing a specification in English that's clear and actually precise enough takes more work than just writing the code directly - since you have to do all the hard part anyway, and then have to express it in a language that's poorly suited to do so. And a reasonable specification is very much not precise enough to be executed, it relies on the programmer putting in a lot of the details based on their domain understanding and common sense, leading to very different implementations as that domain understanding and common sense varies.

Yes but in the future this can be solved by the smarter AI.

Essentially that what a lot of developer do, they turn other people idea or english description into working code.

Say I was born in X (low income) and raised there, and then move to Y (high income) and work there as a programmer for several years, then it should be easy for me to hire programmers from X and be the bridge to management at Y?

This. The value a programmer brings to the table is almost entirely their cultural knowledge. It's the same reason why rarely do chart topping hip hop albums in the U.S. come from India or wherever.