4 ms·
I've been bought out by a French company twice in my career and worked closely with developers in Paris for years, and at least in my experience, this is still
by mrj 3y ago
I've been bought out by a French company twice in my career and worked closely with developers in Paris for years, and at least in my experience, this is still very much the case. There wasn't a track for senior IC and at the time I was a Principal Engineer who had reported directly to my (exited) company's CTO. I was used to pretty much free range, being treated as equals to the front line management.
Paris managers didn't know what to do with me, why this keyboard jockey kept requesting meetings and taking on projects. One manager treated me like I was lost and even tried to add me to his Jira board. After quite a few conflicts I finally asked for a title change. Boom, instant cred, no more weird issues.
Super generalization of course, but my experience was harsh and blatant. I could tell a lot more stories to back it up mainly because I thought it was so odd.
- ianmcgowan 3y agoAnd of course the opposite - a manager wanting to sit in on technical discussions and architecture reviews is considered weird :-)
- slimsag 3y agoHuh? If people are having a technical discussion or architecture decision.. it seems totally reasonable for an EM to want to be involved and aware of what is going on. That's not weird. The best managers I've ever had are aware of technical details at a high level decision POV
- makeitdouble 3y agoYou're told in no uncertain terms that it's not what you're paid for. You can do it "for fun", but it won't help on your evals even if your contribution to the discussion was critical (well, hopefully it still helps if thanks to that your project doesn't derail), and will be negative to you if you prioritized it over other "manegerial" taks. That's one reason we sometimes saw managers just leave for a startup where nobody gives a shit about titles.
- bwanab 3y agoRight. This is an aspect I'd forgotten about. When I first arrived, the developers thought is was really weird for me to not only sit in, but have some pretty strong opinions about the subjects under discussion. They got used to it pretty quickly, but my upper managers didn't know what to think about it.
- makeitdouble 3y agoYes. And as anything, there are exceptions, in particular in smaller and newer companies. Otherwise architects, DBAs and security experts seem to have an easier time to carve a niche in their shape and be paid enough without the managerial part.
- dotcoma 3y agoNo surprise to me. France is the most top-down country in the world. The org chart is everything over there.
- klausa 3y agoYes, absolutely, there are no other parts of the world notoriously known for their hierarchies and formalities being very important; France has got the title, for sure.
- pier25 3y agoJapan?
- gumby 3y agoHaving worked in both, and lived in one, I can definitely say France is much more hierarchical. Perhaps in reaction to that, France can be more chaotic than Japan. Those are different axes.
- hawk_ 3y agoWhat new title did you pick?