Disclaimer :

This blog post is based upon my experience, it does not pretend to generalize anything for one culture or another.

I have the chance to work for awesome customers in both France and the USA and that gives me the opportunity to work with people with different cultures and mindsets. So I thought that could be interesting to write down my experience with these two cultures and try to describe the differences.

There is one sure thing : American people care about IT, not only because it makes your life simpler or because this is serious business, but also because they simply invented it. If you have a look at the last decade you’ll see that almost any major technological invention comes from the USA. If you have a look at the Alexa top 20, you’ll see that almost all websites are from American companies.

American people are what I call superlative oriented, everything has to be great, awesome, excellent etc, etc. They are in constant need for heroes and rock stars. In my opinion this is a bit too much, but that is the way they are and I respect that.

On the project management side, one great thing is that most project managers (I have worked with, cf the disclaimer ) actually have a real technical background. I remember one day there was a problem on a big website and the editor in chief (yes, the editor in chief, they guy who care about contents, not tech) told me something like “I think there is an issue with mod_rewrite, most likely a regex, can you please have look at it ?”. And guess what ? He was right. If I compare with my experience in France, there was a small problem with an import system that had to be fixed quickly and the project manager told me pedantically “There must be an infinite loop somewhere” …

There is one main difference between the american and the french culture and I am not sure it will disappear in the next few years. American people have a deep respect for developpers (or engineers the word does not really matters here) whereas in France being a developper makes you be that weird guy who writes lines of code nobody else have a clue about. No matter what you say you are a “geek” so who would think you say interesting things anyway ? In France real men become project managers. It is acceptable to write code for a few years after being graduated (the lesser, the better) but at some point, you have to “grow up” and be a manager. I actually can not imagine the CTO of a big IT company going to the sysadmin’s office and say them “you are useless”. Think that can not happen in France ? It actually did I was there when that happened and that was not a a small company, that happened at a very big company I used to worked for from times to times.

American people (well, people living in an english speaking country) have an strong (who said unfair ? ) advantage, every technical documentation / article / paper, well everything is written in english. If you have a look at how your program is built, it is all in english as well (if/then/else, while, for loop, function names, class names, etc, etc). So programming gets a bit more “natural” because they do not have to do any translation effort. And that gives them the opportunity to dive into any technology in record time.

On the contrary, French people have to make this effort all the time, it is no big deal when you to do this on a daily basis, but still this is not natural. This is why I personally think that the very first language any french developper should know is English, nothing else.

Everything is not of course black and white, and we have the chance to have pretty big websites in France as well like Meetic Dailymotion Netvibes (BTW : I would love to work you ) for example. But I am not sure we will see (even though I’d love too) a lot of websites of that dimension emerging quickly in the future in France.

I know this post is a bit messy but this is all I can do for the moment given my spare time. Any feedback welcome