10 ms·

Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the communication is. Silicon Valley and Scandinavian cultures are very flat, so it is possible for "the man on the fl

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

bluetomcat 6y ago
An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus. The whole "democratic" decision-making process takes time and leads to a sequence of decisions spread throughout the time domain, which, taken together, might lead to a suboptimal result compared to what might be achieved by following the steps of an "enlightened benevolent dictator".
- bitwize 6y ago
  The problem with that is that dictators usually fail to be sufficiently enlightened or benevolent.
  - teatree 6y ago
    Somehow China has been an outlier to this norm, so far.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      Enlightened in the sense I think it’s meant here, but not benevolent.
    - solarkraft 6y ago
      It significantly depends on who you are. Uyghurs and Falung Gong practicioners would probably disagree.
    - GlennS 6y ago
      I disagree, China seems to fit right into the pattern. 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.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    The closest to an enlightened, benevolent dictator in modern times I think is Lee Kuan Yew.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > enlightened benevolent dictator These are extremely hard to find, and anyone who thinks of themselves as one is missing at least one of those properties.
- dugmartin 6y ago
  The problem is that due to the Peter principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) the people making the decisions are not competent to make them.
  - danaris 6y ago
    While this is certainly true, I've felt for a long time that the Peter principle is missing something very important: "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.
    - bcrosby95 6y ago
      A more visible medium where you see this happen is in sports. Average players can go on to become great coaches or even managers.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  There is certainly a reason many cultures gravitate towards authoritarianism, focus is an important quality of productive teams and authoritarianism increases focus. 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.
  - bluetomcat 6y ago
    I have experience as a programmer in both worlds, and there are certainly pros and cons with each culture. 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.
- fsloth 6y ago
  "An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus." 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.
  - wott 6y ago
    > 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.
- gilbetron 6y ago
  > An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus 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.
- jerf 6y ago
  "An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus." 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.
  - andybak 6y ago
    > 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAFU_Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAFU_Principle
- whatshisface 6y ago
  You're conflating the "do what they say" aspect of authority with the "drive them off a cliff without saying anything, when they tell you to drive forwards" aspect of authoritarianism. Too many times have I heard people say, "yes we know this isn't what he wants, and yes, we know that he would change his orders if we provided him with the information only we have, but he told us to do this and nobody will be able to blame us for the resulting fallout."
- systemBuilder 6y ago
  Only certain types of work and usually very mundane work can be done with authoritarian culture. Note that creative people do not enjoy working in an authoritarian regime. Universities are an example of an anti authoritarian organization where creativity often flourishes.
JohnBooty 6y ago
Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the communication is. Yes, absolutely this! I worked at a company where the engineering culture was IMO very dysfunctional. 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.
kakwa_ 6y ago
From an European perspective, this has not exactly been my experience working with an international team. 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.
- viklove 6y ago
  In my experience Americans are pretty blunt, and will not hesitate to point out flaws and make cynical jokes about them openly in the presence of their team.
  - wahern 6y ago
    Cynical or sarcastic jokes are arguably the opposite of blunt. They're a way to acknowledge or broach a subject which the person, and most often the group, is uncomfortable or incapable of articulating more clearly. For example, because they're being forced to do the impossible, or because the character, cause, or resolution of an issue is poorly understood. 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.
    - cuddlybacon 6y ago
      I think cynical and sarcastic jokes are blunt, and are something that arises when the culture is open about discussing problems but people don't have the agency to solve them.
Frost1x 6y ago
Business culture in the US is also quite authoritarian. There have been decades of strategic peeling away of labor rights to put labor in a more leveraged situation, leading to restricted freedoms. Sure, you can tell your manager/director/CIO/CTO their choice is idiotic but the fact is, you'll be fired instantly and depending on circumstances, you may be in a bad situation financially and future career wise. The very hierarchical structure is authoritarian with layers of authority built in. 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.
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> 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. 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.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    > That should be obvious. 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.
austincheney 6y ago
As a part time military officer (extreme authoritarian culture) and a corporate software guy (no interpersonal structures to be heard of) I find that this is a common assumption but it’s actually quite wrong. 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.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > Superiors are generally better about considering the advise of their experts because the decision maker owns all risks and consequences. 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.
29athrowaway 6y ago
Having worked in both of the locations you mentioned I can say that Scandinavian culture is much less dogmatic than the American engineering culture. Scandinavians communicate more directly. At the moment of giving feedback, Americans lack initiative, communicate vaguely and avoid confrontations.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
foobiekr 6y ago
I think this is a massive problem, and it produces just bizarre situations. Flat cultures produce weird side effects (you can have a stalemate that shouldn't exist) but extreme-status-hierarchy cultures just produce an entirely different level of crazy. 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, ..."
M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago
I wonder what the advantages were for these authoritarian structures to have stood for so long.
hkai 6y ago
It's ironic that as someone from a similar "shy" culture, I do not dare to tell my manager that our outsourced programmers in a low-cost country sometimes don't write a single line of code in a day, and one of them is not even familiar with programming beyond a "hello world".

bluetomcat 6y ago

An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus. The whole "democratic" decision-making process takes time and leads to a sequence of decisions spread throughout the time domain, which, taken together, might lead to a suboptimal result compared to what might be achieved by following the steps of an "enlightened benevolent dictator".

bitwize 6y ago
The problem with that is that dictators usually fail to be sufficiently enlightened or benevolent.
- teatree 6y ago
  Somehow China has been an outlier to this norm, so far.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    Enlightened in the sense I think it’s meant here, but not benevolent.
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    It significantly depends on who you are. Uyghurs and Falung Gong practicioners would probably disagree.
  - GlennS 6y ago
    I disagree, China seems to fit right into the pattern. 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.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  The closest to an enlightened, benevolent dictator in modern times I think is Lee Kuan Yew.
pjc50 6y ago
> enlightened benevolent dictator These are extremely hard to find, and anyone who thinks of themselves as one is missing at least one of those properties.
dugmartin 6y ago
The problem is that due to the Peter principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) the people making the decisions are not competent to make them.
- danaris 6y ago
  While this is certainly true, I've felt for a long time that the Peter principle is missing something very important: "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.
  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    A more visible medium where you see this happen is in sports. Average players can go on to become great coaches or even managers.
SuoDuanDao 6y ago
There is certainly a reason many cultures gravitate towards authoritarianism, focus is an important quality of productive teams and authoritarianism increases focus. 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.
- bluetomcat 6y ago
  I have experience as a programmer in both worlds, and there are certainly pros and cons with each culture. 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.
fsloth 6y ago
"An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus." 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.
- wott 6y ago
  > 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.
gilbetron 6y ago
> An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus 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.
jerf 6y ago
"An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus." 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.
- andybak 6y ago
  > 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAFU_Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAFU_Principle
whatshisface 6y ago
You're conflating the "do what they say" aspect of authority with the "drive them off a cliff without saying anything, when they tell you to drive forwards" aspect of authoritarianism. Too many times have I heard people say, "yes we know this isn't what he wants, and yes, we know that he would change his orders if we provided him with the information only we have, but he told us to do this and nobody will be able to blame us for the resulting fallout."
systemBuilder 6y ago
Only certain types of work and usually very mundane work can be done with authoritarian culture. Note that creative people do not enjoy working in an authoritarian regime. Universities are an example of an anti authoritarian organization where creativity often flourishes.

JohnBooty 6y ago

Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the communication is. Yes, absolutely this! I worked at a company where the engineering culture was IMO very dysfunctional. 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.

kakwa_ 6y ago

From an European perspective, this has not exactly been my experience working with an international team. 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.

viklove 6y ago
In my experience Americans are pretty blunt, and will not hesitate to point out flaws and make cynical jokes about them openly in the presence of their team.
- wahern 6y ago
  Cynical or sarcastic jokes are arguably the opposite of blunt. They're a way to acknowledge or broach a subject which the person, and most often the group, is uncomfortable or incapable of articulating more clearly. For example, because they're being forced to do the impossible, or because the character, cause, or resolution of an issue is poorly understood. 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.
  - cuddlybacon 6y ago
    I think cynical and sarcastic jokes are blunt, and are something that arises when the culture is open about discussing problems but people don't have the agency to solve them.

Frost1x 6y ago

Business culture in the US is also quite authoritarian. There have been decades of strategic peeling away of labor rights to put labor in a more leveraged situation, leading to restricted freedoms. Sure, you can tell your manager/director/CIO/CTO their choice is idiotic but the fact is, you'll be fired instantly and depending on circumstances, you may be in a bad situation financially and future career wise. The very hierarchical structure is authoritarian with layers of authority built in. 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.

phkahler 6y ago
>> 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. 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.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  > That should be obvious. 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.

austincheney 6y ago

As a part time military officer (extreme authoritarian culture) and a corporate software guy (no interpersonal structures to be heard of) I find that this is a common assumption but it’s actually quite wrong. 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.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> Superiors are generally better about considering the advise of their experts because the decision maker owns all risks and consequences. 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.

29athrowaway 6y ago

Having worked in both of the locations you mentioned I can say that Scandinavian culture is much less dogmatic than the American engineering culture. Scandinavians communicate more directly. At the moment of giving feedback, Americans lack initiative, communicate vaguely and avoid confrontations.

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foobiekr 6y ago

I think this is a massive problem, and it produces just bizarre situations. Flat cultures produce weird side effects (you can have a stalemate that shouldn't exist) but extreme-status-hierarchy cultures just produce an entirely different level of crazy. 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, ..."

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago

I wonder what the advantages were for these authoritarian structures to have stood for so long.

hkai 6y ago

It's ironic that as someone from a similar "shy" culture, I do not dare to tell my manager that our outsourced programmers in a low-cost country sometimes don't write a single line of code in a day, and one of them is not even familiar with programming beyond a "hello world".