Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

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I completely agree with you - as someone who is deploying the same technology system, with the same team, in eight different countries (USA, Brazil, Luxembourg/Germany, UK, Portugal, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia) - I can tell you that having a clear understanding of the culture prior to engaging with the customer significantly enhances our chances of success in each endeavor.

One example - Germany has a reputation as being a rule oriented/structured country, so taking an extra few days of preparation prior to deployments, was very much appreciated there, and we went to the extra effort to do so (and totally enjoyed having an appreciative audience for our wonderfully laid out test plans).

We also discovered in Brazil, that if the customer showed up 5 or 6 minutes late for a conf call, that we shouldn't stress or be concerned that there was a problem - but that culturally, meetings/calls don't always start exactly on the minute. We also learned to be careful to leave an extra 30 minute window for meetings to end a little later than they were scheduled.

Contrawise, We were always careful to dial in within a 30-45 second window at the start of a call when working with the UK. And those meetings (almost) always ended precisely on time.

These are things that you need to be aware of if you want to work effectively in different countries. Don't always expect that other people's expectations of what's appropriate are the same as yours.

This is what I mean - these are things that completely vary from one person to another and one company to another and somehow this is being attributed to countries. Within any country, there are rule-oriented structured companies and individuals and relatively unstructured companies and individuals. There are companies and individuals who don't care if you're late to meetings and there are companies and individuals who do. If someone is telling you, this is how things work in this country, in regards to this kind of variation, you're being lied to and it would be obvious to you someone tried to tell you the same thing about your own country.

And no, you can't have a clear understanding of the culture by having someone tell you a couple of things before meetings - most people have no idea how a different subculture in their own country is like, let alone having a reasonable picture of the national culture. A foreign culture with which you have a brief contact? Clear understanding? Get out of here.

Our briefings on what to expect, and how a particular country might be different from the "American Median" comes from our in-country teams. I.E. People who were born there and have had to deal with American Companies.

You can certainly have variability around an average, but, it's also certainly the case that average norms for various countries can be (dramatically) different.

And, as one who has travelled quite a bit, I can tell you German Culture and (for instance) Hong Kong Culture, around things like queues/rules, are so different as to make your head spin. The meeting thing in Brazil is really true. And, if you come out to Silicon Valley, 90+% of engineering companies are fine with you wearing a T-Shirt. Strongly suspect that's not the ratio you would see in London. Culture is real.

Except almost no one has any idea what the American median is, or the Brazillian median is. These are large diverse countries with huge internal variation to which you have not been exposed. New York is a lot more like London than Silicon Valley, even though New York and Silicon Valley are part of America and London is part of England. Even within New York. there's huge variation that most people are unlikely to have full understanding of. A small design studio in Dumbo, a large financial institution in financial district and an advertising company in Midtown are going to have completely different cultures and norms.

If someone tells you, in our country, people are like this, the chance is that you're being mislead. Lots of people tell me that in their country of origin, there are no gay people or something along those lines. People have a very narrow view of what constitutes their own national culture, largely oriented around their own peculiar and individual experience.

I recommend this submission:

If Correlation does not imply causation, then what does? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6030627

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