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East vs. West: Culture and Distributed Development
CowboyRobot writes "ACM's Queue has an article entitled, Culture Surprises in Remote Software Development Teams
that reviews differences in cultures and explores the impact they have on distributed software development teams. From the article: "In Western societies, decisions are made on the basis of input from those involved. In cultures with greater hierarchies, group members assume an authority will decide and they are only to enact the decision." Some stereotypes and some common sense, but I recognized myself in the descriptions of the 'typical American'."
It's amusing to see everyone assume 'American' when mentioning the West. Has Europe moved into another ideological sphere that separates them from the rest of the world, and if so what is it?
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
When I first started reading the article, I figured they were talking about New York versus California. I've worked on bi-coastal projects, and the cultural differences in how things get decided (and even coding styles) are palpable.
The difference between east and west culture and the ramifications for the world have been in the news for a long time. For instance, the traditional religions in Asia have absolutely no problems with cloning or experimentation on embryos (which is basically verboten in western countries), so the majority of work in that field is in China or other countries which accept the future for what it is. The global marketplace is shrinking, and as we become more and more interconnected cultural differences will no doubt become more and more of an issue.
In cultures with greater hierarchies, group members assume an authority will decide and they are only to enact the decision." Some stereotypes and some common sense, but I recognized myself in the descriptions of the 'typical American'."
Agreed. This is consistent the projection that not-so mind/cognative-intensive software work will continue to go overseas while the R&D/high-cognative software related work stays here.
I personally don't feel much pity for the M$ visual basic ppl (ie, mega-corp software cogs) who whine about their job going overseas (let alone the gov't interfereing legistation to support that ideal).
G-Force music visualization
"...At the end of the videoconference, the Americans immediately disconnected the call. The French and Germans continued for another five minutes wishing a departing French teammate well in his retirement, and reminiscing about good times. The Europeans viewed the American behavior as rude and insensitive. The Americans viewed time as money, focusing on the cost of the videoconference. In other countries, entire meetings are devoted to establishing relationships, without conducting the core of the task at all."
Building relationships is a strong thing. Time is money but with a good repor you can get a lot more done easily. This is a time and money saver too. Just not as easily trackable of one. And not in the short term but over the long haul of a project. It especially great if the project is going to last severa years.
Evolution or ID?
These cultural differences aren't exactly minor, and I think they can have a real impact on how teams work together. I've worked in multicultural teams, and the way the team is built into a unit is by getting to know the individuals over time. This process happens much more easily when everyone is in the same team room working together.
Something that many companies don't seem to consider when they send jobs to other countries, or split the work between different teams in different countries is that without the face to face interaction it's much harder to get to know the other people. These cultural problems would show up in reduced productivity. Rather than being worked out and adjusted for, cultural differences would have a real chance of becoming a serious issue. It might look tempting to companies to send work out to cheaper countries, but the costs can be accrued in other ways than in just salaries.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
Hasn't the tragedy of Tupac and Biggie taught the world anything? Eastside vs. Westside accomplishes nothing, homies!
Peace out!
Word...
- c -
Maybe you should be offended that it implies that "Western" cultures are full of people who are argumentitive, subversive and prone to waste time questioning decisions.
I'd imagine you'd take offense at this, even though it fits your post to a tee.
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Open Source Sysadmin
Who cares, the point is that the guy is American so he is talking about the country he is from. Why is it every time someone mentions 'the west' and America every European jumps up and say you see, American are so self centered thinking they are the west. Seems to me Europeans have a confidence problem. Also last time I checked you're on the same fricken land mass 'the east' is on.
We have taken over a software project for the UK gov from another company.
The previous company appeared to be lost in touch with the requirements of the client. Althoguh they had a lot of good coders, things were not implemented to the clients liking. The greatest problem was that only the project managers maintained contact with the client.
Our policy on the other hand has greater client interaction at all levels. And despite the development team being a tenth of the size of the previous company, everyone gets involved, are creative in their solutions, and less time is wasted coding and then correcting irrelevent features.
If there is any greater case for NOT outsourcing software projects to offshore, our case is a good example.
Have a nice day!
Depends on what side you are and how you see yourself.
If you read the article thouroughly you will notice that it talks mainly about how different cultures see each other...
People from the East will see Americans as rude while the Americans themself find it normall to argue with an superiour.
On the other side the Americans will see the Easteners as sheepish for not arguing in public. It says nothing about wheter the discussion actually takes place, just about were and with whom (private or whole world).
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
"East" and "West" are terrible descriptions. California is the most West, so it's kinda East. What about Hawaii? Australia? South Africa? The real difference is how old the society is. China has a very old society. So do Jews. Both societies are marked by lots of negotiation. Texas has a new society, as does Alaska, where individuals can get away with big moves. As societies gain collective experience, roles become established, forms have more persistence, communications are more complex and referential. While new societies take more risks, unencumbered by the lessons of past failures.
As "civilization" has generally moved West across Eurasia and the Americas, while largely surviving culturally in earlier establishments, the "East" (starting at the Asian Pacific coast) is older than the "West". Of course, major paradigm shifts and even genocides have distorted even that simple gradient. And the 20th Century's cataclysm migration and telecommunications means that the meme pool has a whirlpool, swirling the cultural codes around the globe. But actual mores are encoded deep. So there is a persistent ghost of the underlying gradient. Nowadays, individuals can choose how traditional or neo they want to be in their lives. And the lack of geographic rhyme and reason is making front lines of conflict everywhere, with new syntheses in every neighborhood. Let a thousand hydroponic flowers bloom!
--
make install -not war
I think you two have just described, with reasonable accuracy, the way that many people of East and West view one another's cultures.
It extends far beyond IT. I recall an article on culture clashes in some other business. The big boss (from Japan) felt disrespected when his American subordinates questioned his orders; the Americans felt disrespected that the boss wasn't listening to their concerns. It can be counterproductive and even dangerous to assume that "everybody who is decent does everything the same way I was taught." And the conflicts tend to come in areas which we are least likely to consider as questionable.
The correlation between culture (as defined in the article) and nationality is very, ver often exagerated. At least that is my experience, after having worked/studied in plenty of multinational environments and with people of multiple nationalities.
/.ers, for example, have a cultural outlook more similar to one another than to the average of his/her national peer. Same applies to many other online communities.
Stereotypes do apply, but anti-stereotypes are plenty, as well. You will find the organized Greek, the warm German, the shy Italian, the Brazilian who does not like soccer and the American who knows world geography.
I have experienced much more consistent cultural environments going from ony company (corporate culture) to another, than crossing national borders. I have seen corporate environments absorb various nationalities, even operating in different countries, and retaining its own (original) corporate culture. And I have seen, as well, plenty of cultural clashes and disagreement over world view within more than one country.
The internet makes the dissociation between nationality/geography and culture even starker.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
When I first started reading the article, I figured they were talking about New York versus California.
Never a truer word spoken about cultural differences.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
When bell atlantic combined with GTE to become verizon, the powerrs-that-be decided to make bell atlantic the "management" and replaced all the west coast GTE exec positions with BA people. The stodgy east coast guys were infuriated by the laid-back california work style, so they installed GPS transponders on all trucks and instituted random monitoring. Now if you stop to take a crap, they'll page you and demand to know what you're doing at a [gas station/restaurant/whatever] for more than a couple minutes. It's insane.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Culture Surprises in Remote Software Development Teams
ACM Queue vol. 1, no. 9 - December/January 2003-2004
by Judith S. Olson, University of Michigan; Gary M. Olson, University of Michigan and Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work
printer-friendly format
recommend to a colleague
sections in this article
1: You Can't Hide from Culture
2: Dimensions of Culture
3: Cultural Differences in Development Teams
4: Groupware and Cultural Differences
5: An Emerging Internet Culture
6: References
"When in Rome" doesn't help when your team crosses time zones--and your deadline doesn't.
You Can't Hide from Culture
Technology has made it possible for organizations to construct teams of people who are not in the same location, adopting what one company calls "virtual collocation."1 Worldwide groups of software developers, financial analysts, automobile designers, consultants, pricing analysts, and researchers are examples of teams that work together from disparate locations, using a variety of collaboration technologies that allow communication across space and time.
Although solving the problems of space and time is difficult, these are not the only issues. Work that takes place over long distances means that communication will often involve different cultures. Participants may be surprised by such interactions because they have not considered various cultural differences and how they impact the daily work of long-distance teams. Our own culture is invisible to us. "We don't see our own ways of doing things as conditioned in the cradle," writes Esther Wanning, author of Culture Shock! USA. "We see them as correct, and we conclude that people from other countries have grave failings."2
The goal of this article is to review various cultural differences likely to appear in the work setting and explore their implications for virtual collocation of software development teams. We begin with a definition of culture and various dimensions of cultural difference that have emerged. Then we examine two cases: (1) one in which the team members are collocated; and (2) one involving the team in virtual collocation. From this analysis we draw some practical implications.
CULTURE AND ITS DIMENSIONS
Larry Samovar and Richard Porter3 have defined culture as:
The deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.
Culture is acquired. It helps people categorize and predict their world by teaching them habits, rules, and expectations from the behavior of others. It helps people "read" the world's signals--the meaning of symbols of artifacts, gestures, and accoutrements of others.4 Culture also molds the way people think: what their motivations are, how they categorize things, what inference and decision procedures they use, and the basis on which they evaluate themselves.5 It sets the gestures, space, and timing of interactions.6
There are multiple kinds of culture: national, regional, occupational, organizational, avocational, and generational. Any of these might have important effects. Here we focus on national culture, assuming that knowing at least what a member of a culture shares with others is helpful in understanding how to interpret unusual behaviors. There are cultural explanations and new signals to read in understanding various interactions with people who are unlike oneself.
JUDITH S. OLSON is the Richard W. Pew professor of human computer interaction at the University of Michigan. She is a professor in the computer and information systems department of the business school and the school of information, as well as a professor of psychology. Her research focuses on how groups get their work done and how they feel about each other when they communicate over various digital media. S
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Also found: the brave Frenchman, the Irish master chef, the lazy Japanese man, the Slashdotting mack daddy...
Comedy gold.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
It can be counterproductive and even dangerous to assume that "everybody who is decent does everything the same way I was taught."
This is a problem in software design in general. In my years of debating my view of the non-merits of OOP, I realize that people tend to assume that others think (process information) the same way they themselves do. When others don't "get" how one thinks about something, one tends to assume the other person is ignorant, misguided, or not as smart. Software design is more related to psychology than to math (assuming machine performance is not the primary cost factor). There is no standard method of communicating "head models" to one another, so it often ends up in arguments and paradigm battles where everyone involved is confused and bewildered by their inability to convey their viewpoint.
It is far easier to describe what you want software to do than how to best organize it for grokkability and long-term maintenance.
Table-ized A.I.
And similarly, there is a great difference between Northern and Southern, West Coast and East Coast cultures: In the South, "Yankees" are viewed as pushy, rude, and cold, while Northerners view Southerners as ignorant, slow, and too informal. This comes down to Southern preference of wanting to take time to get to know the person they are working with- his viewpoints, his family, his work habits, while Northerners want to get the job done quickly and in the most efficient manner with the least amount of wasted energy. I come from the South, and my drawl has elicited a ton of stereotypes about Southerners- the most prevalent is that I am not knowledgable. My 2 cents
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
I think this comes from decision making.
In my experience there are two ways.
Western (Canada/US), get an idea, get some information, quicikly make a decision. Hopefully if it is wrong, someone points out the mistake before it gets too big.
Eastern (Japan), get a lot of information, make a good well documented decision. Pointing out mistakes means you think that their work in making the decision is wrong, likely you haven't done the same investigation.
When everyone makes off the cuff decisions, there is value to second guessing.
When someone takes a lot of time and energy to make the right decision, it is insulting to be constantly second guessed.
In Western societies, decisions are made on the basis of input from those involved. In cultures with greater hierarchies, group members assume an authority will decide and they are only to enact the decision."
The "West" is a complex, stratified society with more hierarchies than Chinese society for example, and these tend to be much more arbtrary -- 'race' for example. Caste and such in India are misunderstood as being the result of oppression, not differentiation of the means of production in agrarian societies. That oppression exists in caste-based societies is a fact. That it is the result of the very caste structure itself not the means of its control and manisfestation is what you can't get through to people. Anyhow, creative thinking is not the exclusive domain of "Western" culture. And assuming that it occurs on an individual level ignores socialization as a culural force.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Self-selected groups, like corporations and blogs, have more selfconsistent cultures than groups selected by criteria other than culture, like countries.
--
make install -not war
cragen
It's simply stating the cultural differences that do exist. There are advantages and disadvantages to the approaches innate in each culture. It would seem that the American culture is better suited to innovation and creativity, but that other cultures are better suited to precision and perfection. Both are important in the development of technology.
This didn't say they cannot think for themselves, rather that they defer to authority, and in many situations, that's a good thing. Conversely it seems to suggest that Americans don't have much appreciation for structure, heirarchy and procedure, and that might explain why some software is as flaky as it is even if it is innovative.
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The difficulty of having Asian parents while growing up in an entirely American culture has been pretty evident... it's slightly different for every Asian-American, but from my experience and all my cousins (yes, all 15-20 of them) there's always been culture shock when it comes to girlfriends, spouses (don't get married 'til you're 28!), life decisions (you should be a doctor or a lawyer -- although at the time, software engineer was a respectable decision), and general parental control of your life. :-) Ask any Asian-American that grew up here about it, and chances are they've also been torn between the clear individualistic culture here and the clear group-oriented culture their parents came from and raised them to be.
And precious few books have been written about the subject, too... but that's starting to change. The Joy Luck Club was a start.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
The issue is more complex than this. You break down a broader philisophical notion of: When does life begin and how valuable is it? into an only religious context. For some discussions, this is fine since religion is one of the few feilds that societies seem comfortable in discussing morality. However, this issue goes further than this.
The West has a cultural memory of WWII. Part of this legacy is the idea of Eugenics, championed by Those Guys Who Lost. They did some of the original work on cloning, and selectivity in people. In fact, the believed that some sub-groups of humanity were intrinsically better than others. When we research cloning and embryo modification, these issues become important because it will ulimately allow people to make decisions on which traits propogate. Thinking about this before the genie is out of the bottle shows amazing restraint and forsight. Honestly, it is hard to beleive that anyone could be against contemplation and rational discussion before fundamental changing the human condition.
In the east, less prohibitions against eugenics exist. Again, this arises from many aspects of the cultures, and not mere religion. At a small level, this is evidenced by gender selection. Several asian countries have practiced eugenics, in that a gender was selected for, to such an extent that the male/female ratio is not 50/50. This is known to such an extent that even Newsweek had a recent article on this topic. Furthermore, taboos about favoring race tend to be less prevelent than western culture. This lack of social stigma to racial favortism and genetic selection allows this type of research to progress. This has little to do with seeing the future for what it is, or any greater mission of free flowing ideas.
Ultimately, will the world be a better place as stem cell research increases? Honestly, I don't know, but then again, neither does anyone else. Blaming any restraint on persuing this science is larger than the trite case of "religion bad, science good." Larger issues are at stake, and need to be taken in total context of where the human entity is as a people, and were we want to be.
my two cents,
-Iowa
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
I have an interesting kneejerk reaction for an American, I stick up for the French. Perhaps this is influenced by living not too many doors down from the Marquis de Lafayette's local residence during the Revolution combined with childhood heros including Georges Guynemer and Roland Garros; not to mention possible bias from being able to trace my father's family back to Louis X (Ok, such a bad king that encyclopedias go staight from Louis IX to Louis XI) and hence back to Hugh Capet ( a cutthroat, but hey, a successful one).
The French has always had a reputation for being among the bravest of the brave (ok, so sometimes they were bravest when following behind a teenage girl, but we'll overlook that). Nor have they had any traditional reputation as loosers ( and when they did lose you could count on the fact that the winner was going to pay dearly).
Google on Verdun. In WWI Germany decided they were going to win the war by "bleeding France white." And they did. What they didn't count on was that France could bleed white and remain standing.
Verdun did not fall.
What the French have, as a culture, is a sense of the gallant. The problem here is that the ultimate in gallantry is to go down fighting for a noble cause. The role model is Roland, dying while defending the pass (as it is for the Greeks if it comes to that. The battle at Thermopolyae is one of the most remarkable events in military history).
Alain Prost once noted the irony that he was vilified in France while he was winning in a French car, but became a national hero when he started coming in second in an Italian car.
The point being that the French car was superiour. Almost not winning in a superiour car is the inferiour performance from the point of view of the gallant. Almost, but not quite, winning in an inferiour car is glorious. A Pomeranian taking it to a German Shepard, and going down in defeat, but in the process leaving the Shepard so bloodied that it must retire from the field and seek the ICU.
It isn't even fair to say the French like losing. Jacques Anquitil is a French God. He was a winner, but he won with guts and spirit. Raymond Poulidor is also a French God although he was the perenial bridesmaid to a Belgian, but pushed the Belgian all the way, with guts and spirit even though the cause was laregley hopeless.
To the Frenchman it's the spirit that counts more than the end result.
Elan!
And in WWII there were an awful lot of dead Germans as the result of brave Frenchman refusing to give up the fight just because their government did.
KFG