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Titles and Formality
I got a good chuckle when I read this small story of how overdressing can be just as bad as dressing too casually; at least in certain, rare cases. Reading this reminded me of a humorous incident at work that I heard of. Before I go into that, I’m going to be a right bleeding bastard and post the punchline of the story above:
“At Singletrac, we’ve never really had anything like a dress code. But if you feel so inclined to wear jeans with holes in them to work, or to flip your baseball hat around backwards while working on the game… please feel free!”
There, I ruined it for you!
Here at work people were planning a product that would operate together with products coming from a large Eastern company. (Don’t you just love how precise I am?) Once technical problems started emerging, a visit from high-ranking people from said company was planned. They were – basically – going to come here, tell us what they wanted, and make sure that we were going to do things correctly.
One developer here had the task of explaining the technical problems. An engineer and a manager from the visiting company listened gravely as our developer described why the current implementation would not work. In order to make this story more interesting I will use my literary skills to their utmost, in order to illustrate the exchange that ocurred:
“The current implementation will not work well!”
“Ah. Solve it!”
“No, seriously: this won’t do. It will be a bad solution.”
By now the visiting engineer couldn’t hold his tongue anymore.
“What are you doing? You’re just a developer. Are you disagreeing with the manager?!”
The ending to this minor conflict will be left in shadows, to keep you in suspense. The interesting thing about all of this is how titles were extremely important to the visiting people; the manager automatically had not only right, but his opinion held precedence over that of a lowly developer. This was a major culture clash, since this behaviour was unthinkable for Swedish developers. I’m pretty sure that even the cleaning lady could come up to a project manager here and say “hey, you’re making a bad decision not to include preauthentication support in this product,” and he would nod and go: “you’re right – I almost made a terrible mistake!”
May 25th, 2006 at 1:22 am
I am very fascinated and intrigued by the “Far East” and how things work there. Or perhaps, I am fascinated that they do work at all, despite the fact that they do so many things so incredebly wrong. I had a friend who went to China for a summer to a “praktikplats” at a large company which were partly owned by the government. The things she told me about the company and how they handled there makes no sense to me at all. The organisation was extremely top-managed. When someone got an idea they had to go to their project leader to tell him about it. The project leader would then discuss the idea with his boss, who would take it to the CEO who would (and this is the really suspect part) take it to some kind of group working directly under the government itself. And it could be an idea of anything, like for example moving one person from a part of the project to another. When she finished her three months in China at the company she asked her supervisor if she could get a diploma or something written about the time she’d been there and what she had done. The supervisor came back to her with the diploma, sure, but it took them more than a month since it had to go all the way to the CEO and back (the government was left out of the loop on this one though) before they could grant it.
How can a country working like this be the single most interesting country in terms of growth, opportunities and in a couple of years be the most developed country in terms of almost anything you would like to measure? It really beats me…..
Note: Also heard about a guy in Japan who got sent home from his “praktikplats” after having an introduction seminar for the manager about the stuff he would do at the company, and when the manager asked a question he said “If it’s okay with you, I’ll rather take all questions afterwards.” Doh….