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.
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.
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.