I had great fun earlier today participating on the cross-cultural engineering panel at the Pasona
Tech conference in Tokyo (here, here). We addressed
cultural, language, and career issues facing Japanese engineers as
they engage employers and developers around the world. This is not only
an interesting subject for me, but it's also an important issue since
economies are globalizing and software development is
moving to open source community development. Dealing with people from around
the world every day is now normal. It's not an occasional
interaction. So, having a sense of language and cultural issues is
critical since these things pervade our jobs -- even if
you work in the country in which you were born and even if you work in
your native language. Since I have an interest in China, I talked a bit about the changes occurring in Chinese technology universities, and especially how students, professors, and administrators are now assertively engaging westerners in English. That was not necessarily true a few years ago in China, and it's not especially true in Japan today so it will be interesting to see where those trends lead in the future. A side note: when I'm in China I talk a lot about what the Japanese are doing to build community here and how they contribute to communities in Japan and around the world (their contributions are substantial but many times difficult to find at first). So the learning can go both ways since both sides have a great deal to offer.
At the event, we also talked
about different communication styles (face-to-face vs online)
among Japanese and American developers. Again, both sides could
do a bit more reaching out to each other in these areas. Americans tend
to be direct and Japanese tend to be indirect, and this very obvious
difference
can lead to some rather interesting situations. Balance is critical. If
you have too many Japanese in a given situation, it's too far skewed to
the Japanese language and thought processes. The opposite is true, too.
When
you have too many Americans in the room there is too much English and
American thinking going on. You need both to balance things. You should
try to offer
enough communication channels for everyone to participate at some
level, while encouraging the bilingual people to serve as conversation
facilitators reaching out to both sides simultaneously. I think Tokyo2Point0 and the Tokyo Linux User Group
are good examples
of communities who recognize this issue and address it very well. I'm
sure there area
others, too. This is how I'd like to work with the OpenSolaris
community in Japan. If the community is built with an international
focus as its foundation, then it has a good shot at growing large and
connecting globally.
Many opinions were shared on the panel and at the nomikai afterwards and they all had validity. No single person has all the answers covering such subtle issues like these, and there is lots of room for humility and opportunity to rule the day. I look forward to the next cross-cultural engineering event in Tokyo. We should meet quarterly to continue these conversations. All posts on cross-cultural engineering will be here.
Thanks to Toshiharu Harada, Edward Middleton, Gosuke Miyashita, Iwasa Takuma, Hiroumi Mitani, and Tomoyuki Sakurai for their participation at the event. And thanks to Shoji Haraguchi for snapping this image.
