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Glad to see this at the top. This is a very cynical take that applies wildly general negative sentiment and statements to a huge group of people. It's not just

• wegs 6y ago
  Cultures have different professional cultures. * Executive ethics focus on maximizing shareholder value, while individual incentives, on personal returns. If I can pollute a lake for an extra buck to my stock price, I'm expected to do this. * HR ethics focus on protecting the company. If they can lie to you as an employee to minimize legal risk, that's what's gonna happen. * Legal ethics focusing on protecting your client (no matter how evil), while practice focuses on maximizing billable hours. ... and so on. It's not good or bad. It just is. As a programmer, you'll be off-putting to people from those groups for reasons just as valid or invalid. And generalizations are often accurate. If you don't show a certain modesty and humility in gift-receiving in China, you'll be an outcast. If you don't show a certain opulence and over-the-top gratitude in some parts of the Middle East and show the same, you'll be an outcast just as much. Guess what happens when the two cultures come together? People are viewed as jerks. A little cross-cultural training goes a long ways to avoid that. I'm sorry you don't like the tone, but I viewed this as a fair guide for programmers managing corporate settings running into those barriers. This article appears to do a fine job explaining HR's role to people coming from e.g. CS undergrad degrees which will prevent them from getting hurt. It's no better or worse than a guide for e.g. American women as to what to expect if they marry someone from Saudi culture. As a footnote, quotation marks suggest you're quoting someone. Your claimed quote doesn't exist in the source article. Your point would be stronger if you commented on what the author wrote than your (somewhat inaccurate) read-between-the-lines. That's another place cultures differ a lot: how things are implied and subtexts. People misread subtexts, which I think you did here.
  • rocqua 6y ago
    > A little cross-cultural training goes a long ways to avoid that. I'm sorry you don't like the tone, but I viewed this as a fair guide for programmers managing corporate settings running into those barriers. T > his article appears to do a fine job explaining HR's role to people coming from e.g. CS undergrad degrees which will prevent them from getting hurt. It's no better or worse than a guide for e.g. American women as to what to expect if they marry someone from Saudi culture. I agree that cross cultural training is important, and indeed what is needed here. But I don't think this article is framed properly to be seen as cross cultural training. Instead this article portrays one culture only as seen from the other. It lacks the opposite view, failing to consider how the management culture might perceive the coders. The article neither suggests that the actions by management might be a reasonable response from their culture, nor does it suggest ways to better interact. > If you don't show a certain modesty and humility in gift-receiving in China, you'll be an outcast. If you don't show a certain opulence and over-the-top gratitude in some parts of the Middle East and show the same, you'll be an outcast just as much. In the context of this analogy, this article would be much like a Chinese rant on "how all Middle Easteners are Jerks for displaying their opulence, and therefore cannot be trusted". That is not an article that helps in cross-cultural training.
  • plif 6y ago
    Point well taken about culture and great examples. I completely agree with your premise. However, tone is an extremely important part of cross-cultural training, and the tone of this article takes its premise from: _you may have a conflict of interest with group B_ to something between _group B is out to get you_ and _group B is evil_. I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone because of this. > As a footnote, quotation marks suggest you're quoting someone. Your claimed quote doesn't exist in the source article. Your point would be stronger if you commented on what the author wrote than your (somewhat inaccurate) read-between-the-lines. The original post has always had the exact paragraph that I derived my subtext from in it. Emphatic quotes are a bad habit of mine, so I removed those, but c'mon -- this is a pretty common grammar mistake and the sentence preceding it pretty clearly "implies" (emphatic quotes) that it's only my interpretation :) > That's another place cultures differ a lot: how things are implied and subtexts. People misread subtexts, which I think you did here. Can you please explain how you would otherwise interpret the exact paragraph that I quoted? I'm usually pretty good at seeing the other side, but I genuinely can't see this one. Maybe it's because I've been in management too long (or maybe I'm too Canadian). Either way, I'm genuinely curious. I'll quote the paragraph again directly from the article for you: > Expert gaslighters, they are. What really makes me wonder is how the people keep doing these jobs. Many of them are in the very classes that get abused by other people regularly. How can you honestly keep doing that job when you are just enabling the abusers? The only other interpretation I can think of is the author was referring to the people in the previous example. However, she switches from singular ("person A" / "person B") tense in the example to plural ("gaslighters" / "abusers") tense in this paragraph, so it's either an uncharacteristic grammar mistake or a generalization applied to a broader group. The generalization is that HR people are "gaslighters" and managers are "abusers". With that in mind, how would you interpret this sentence? "What really makes me wonder is how the people keep doing these jobs." I can only see: _how can these people live with themselves_. How is that subtext not correct here?