Post: Cultural prints impact behavior.

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Cultural prints impact behavior and judgement
+tags: [ self-development ]
+published: true
+---
+
+The greatest thing about attending conferences is that they expand your mind in
+more than one direction. Particularly in my case, [Agile
+Portugal](http://agilept.org) has definitely caused an impact on my assertion
+of knowledge, judgment correctness and acceptance of life. More than anytime I
+have come to realize that being a developer takes more than just knowing how to
+type some kind of jargon, soft skills are just as demanding.
+
+I've come across American developers lately, not so young but still as
+passionate. I felt their passion when they were talking about ways to improve
+software development through Agile practices, and these are people with more
+than thirty years of experience. There must be something they value greatly
+that drives them forward and makes them argue about stuff in a reasonable yet
+remarkable manner; it's called _culture_.
+
+A picture of culture
+--------------------
+
+Culture is a topic studied by experts and it's not surprising to see why.
+Cultural prints affect people's ability to make decisions and judge behavior
+and/or people. Political portraits of countries like Germany, United States or
+Portugal are very different.
+
+In Germany people are better paid to do their job. This is a sign that they
+trust people to do their job well; _and they do!_ It's considered to be a great
+country to live in because german people are naturally good professionals; it's
+in their blood, sort of speak.
+
+On the the other hand, Portugal has the exact opposite behavior. People are
+badly paid because of we have this cultural cancer called «pull-it-off-ness».
+It's in our blood to support corruption and get paid for it, we avoid paying
+taxes whenever possible because we'd rather do it than start a revolution and
+actually make things better. We talk more than we act because we're hipnotized
+daily by this false sense of democracy and socialist government.
+
+The United States have this _American Dream_ thing. You gotta work for it but
+you can achieve it. American people value action and knowledge over cheap words
+and desperate bashing. They'd rather choose to be pragmatic over yelling at
+dogma. Better yet, they actually believe they're capable of doing things and
+they refuse to believe otherwise. There's this culture of enticement and
+supportiveness towards one's will to chase something better.
+
+* * *
+
+So does this means I'm portuguese and I'm cursed for life...? well not exactly.
+These confrontations I have every now and then mess with my core values and
+that's a good thing, it keeps me focused on what really matters for me. I still
+have a long way to go regarding my way of making the world a better place.
+
+Considering the impact of culture in software development:
+
+* A team is supposed to work together. I grow tired of cronic entropy.
+* A team that's heavily influenced by such a bad culture such as my country's
+  won't succeed in the medium to long term.
+* Individuals ought to constantly seek a better way to improve their work and
+  stop bitching about how lousy they are. And if you think about it, one does
+  not critique their laziness, rather they blame the system. Sometimes it 
+  happens to me and I should be more careful.
+
+Teams should embrace the right side of their culture and dramatically reject
+its bad parts. I finished my last talk with my personal goal in life: “be
+happy”. It should have been _be happy always_ because my country wants to be
+happy one way or another, and I like that goal but not its cultural approach.