---
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.