I’ve made oblique references to my various disappointments with modern millennial software engineers and to some of the cultural differences I’ve encountered with engineers from different educational, cultural and religious backgrounds. I generally hate management books in part because they are usually crafted to sell books not actually convey applicable wisdom which can usually only be acquired through painful experience. The nice thing about having my own blog is that I don’t need to make money from it and I don’t care if I offend anybody, which means that it’s a great forum to explore the truth about some management and recruiting issues that nobody else seems to be comfortable or able to discuss openly. As usual, my perspective seems to be unique and is probably unpopular but then I’ve never been one to embrace convention.
Today, at the request of one of my readers, I’m going to address some of the cultural differences between engineers from different cultural backgrounds in the hopes of shedding light on how different cultural backgrounds seem to shape approaches to engineering and productivity. My perspective may seem “unorthodox” but I come from a very unorthodox background. I never graduated from high school, I am an almost completely self-taught software engineer and mathematician. I have 23+ patents in technology, have founded and run several software companies and of course was responsible for launching DirectX for Microsoft. What I know is WHY I am successful in spite of my complete lack of formal education and training and what I look for when trying to recruit other talented people. More usefully and perhaps most “offensively” I know what personality and cultural traits I look for and AVOID.
I have also had the tremendous privilege of working with giants, people so exceptional in their talents and achievement that they cannot be said to fall anywhere on an ordinary performance scale. They are literally OFF THE CHARTS. One of the most remarkable things about Microsoft when I joined in the 1990’s was the amazing concentration of this kind of talent at that time. Prior to Microsoft I had worked in the East Coast technology industry which was a lonely experience surrounded by highly educated respected people who didn’t seem to be able to operate their minds to any great extent but had lofty educational pedigrees. Microsoft was systematically devoting itself to actively recruiting and cultivating GIANTS, engineers who’s productivity wasn’t 1X or 2X better than their mediocre peers but 20X or simply off the charts by virtue of their ability to single handedly build technologies no “TEAM” of ordinary people could ever produce. John Carmack of id Software fame and Tim Sweeney of Epic were two great examples of these rare and valuable kind of people from the game industry. One of the most fascinating things about the early 3D game engines was that big companies with teams of PHd’s and “EXPERTS” on 3D couldn’t produce the real-time engines that kids working from their parents basements were turning out.
Having worked with many of them over the years, I have come to appreciate that there is something “special” about these people that set them far apart from their wage-slave counterparts and having realized it, I have come to prefer recruiting for it over anything else. What I love about these people is that they are often overlooked or avoided by most employers because they don’t “fit” conventional recruiting profiles. I have also come to realize that the combination of personality traits that produces these people is fragile and that they can easily be ruined or broken by getting traditional jobs or educations before discovering their own potential.
In this article I will discuss how to “identify” and cultivate GIANTS and along the way, how to spot the personality, cultural or ideological traits that ruin them. One of the wonderful and amazing properties of the Internet is that it is completely race, age, local, culture, gender and religion blind. The internet just doesn’t care who you are when you start an online company and none of your customers or audience can tell or cares either. I’ve seen hundreds of examples of no-name, uneducated kids from all parts of the world, who created successful online companies with no capital, no training and no help and became multi-millionaires. There are no political correctness excuses for failure as an Internet entrepreneur, so all of the conventional wisdom about the “unfair” things in life that hold back minority populations DON’T APPLY online… and yet we find that successful internet entrepreneurs are still predominantly young white males. Why? Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks. Why? The young white males I’m referring to aren’t even privileged or educated in any special way, the kid who wrote the Eclipse 3D engine that WildTangent’s core technology was built around was a grocery bagger from the Midwest when we hired him. I also find more Asian and Indian founders TRYING to be successful founders in US than women and people from other ethnic backgrounds. Why? It’s pretty hard to use discrimination, bias or privilege as an excuse when nobody on the Internet knows who you are or cares and there are tons of successful examples of poor, young, white males doing it.
Obviously, I’m setting up a point. The “giants” I have known share several common personality traits;
Generally anti-social. They have a low need for social validation and consequently feel no pressure to “believe” the same things as their peers.
They have a strong passion for their own ideas, almost a compulsion to pursue them in spite of any rational obstacles.
Because the things they “value” aren’t relative to other people they don’t feel a need to “justify” their ideas to anybody, to get “approval” or to make excuses to anybody when they are struggling. More importantly they don’t care about “failure” because it has no social consequence for them. Management books call it “risk tolerance” I call it “failure indifference”
Tremendous dedication for these people, is the result of compulsion to pursue something they are passionate about. They don’t think they are “working” and never get tired of it… even when the task is dauntingly huge, seemingly insurmountable or tedious.
No work is “beneath” them to accomplish their goal. They don’t care if other people view their efforts as “menial”.
They are “learners” because achieving a goal only they care about ALONE is their primary focus, they will undertake to learn whatever they have to do get it done.
They are often specifically from a less privileged background which has prevented social conformance pressure from shaping their interests and personalities.
They are “humble” and generally always believe that they have a lot to learn.
The root of all of these traits is a certain kind of anti-social Asperger’s like obsession with an idea they have to pursue. Interestingly “being intelligent” isn’t exactly an appropriate or descriptive term for how these people become accomplished. I’ve met many who’s “aptitude” did not seem exceptional, they were “savants” in the area of their pursuit as a result of total dedication to pursuing it in spite of any intellectual obstacles the idea may have presented them with… they just studied harder to master subjects other people would have excused themselves from learning if the subject seemed too challenging or uninteresting. Inversely I know a much larger number of “brilliant” useless people. Sadly the accomplishments of real-geniuses are often compromised by laziness, arrogance, delusion and a sense of entitlement that seems to develop in people who know they are brighter than others and have been able to rely on that to succeed in life with LESS effort. Real-geniuses can afford to coast and often do, they are also too smart to listen to others which can result in them being prone to delusion. As my many blog stories may recount, the biggest messes I ever created were the result of arrogance and self-delusion and the greatest achievements were the result of dedication and perseverance. In my old age I have come to place a much higher value on dedication and perseverance over IQ. Being too smart for your own good can be very costly. I achieved a lot more in life, out working my competitors rather than out-smarting them.
I always hated that adage “work smarter not harder”… If you REALLY want to do well may I suggest trying to work harder AND smarter?
In short, when you combine a little IQ with a lot of passion for achieving a tangible goal and a low interest in social validation, the result can be truly amazing. In my experience the people who blend these traits well are often found at the top of some of the Internet’s biggest success stories AND they are often the individual contributors that are responsible for pioneering some of the most amazing technology achievements we take for granted. I find that one of the most interesting things about some of the most accomplished of these people is that others don’t know that they are relatively anti-social. I used to have to prep Bill Gates for presentations and it was painful, he could remember and recite everything he needed to in one pass but his presentation was abysmal. I used to hold my head backstage watching him mechanically recite something I had lovingly crafted to sound inspiring and visionary. He was never nervous either, he just didn’t care what the audience thought. Over the years he developed more and more “apparent” social skills but I could always tell that he was running “simulations” of social skills he had learned and memorized to accomplish a purpose. Learning to socialize is just one of the tools that self-motivated people choose to “learn” in order to accomplish their goals, often much later in life. I wonder if Bill still addresses the table in large meetings instead of the people around him…
Advice for the average:
I recognize that most of these gifted folks were fortunate enough to just be born this way and that it’s not something anybody can learn to do to become giants themselves. I can however make some observations about what people who do not exhibit these personality traits might be able to learn from these super-achievers. The most important one is the destructive or counter-productive influence of a strong need for social validation. People who value peer-approval or social status highly are often achievement crippled. Their idea of success is fame and recognition rather than the achievement of a goal that was important to them personally. If you ask somebody whether they would like to be a famous actor or musician or to dedicate their lives to making a great scientific discovery… which would they pick? The phrasing of the question is important because one implies instant popularity for no significant achievement other than fame itself and the second implies no social reward or even ultimate success or acknowledgement for a lot of hard work. What answer do you think MOST kids would pick these days? Do you think the answers to that question might break very differently across age, gender, racial and cultural lines?
Craving social validation is often toxic to innovation and entrepreneurial behavior because people pressure each other not to outperform one another and reward homogenous values and ideas. It also makes people avoid the social risk of “failure”. People who get their internal validation and drive externally from the reactions of other people also readily accept “excuses” for their failings. There are many “socially” acceptable excuses for failure, for giving up, for quitting, or for not working too hard. If your boss tells you that you’re not doing a good job at work, we have vast bodies of law and social consensus for acceptable “excuses” for low performance that nobody is allowed to question;
“I don’t suck at my job, YOU are just discriminating against me because of my age, gender, religion, skin color, looks, weight, etc.”
“I’m as productive as I can be while maintaining a healthy work-life balance”
“If you want me to work harder you should pay me more”
“I do everything that is ASKED of me”
The truly sick and debilitating thing about these laws and social norms is that they specifically handicap the potential of the precise groups they pretend to protect by offering them socially acceptable and validated “excuses” to not listen to criticism or consider that THEY are the reason for their own failings in life. People who don’t have “acceptable” excuses are much more likely to ultimately consider the possibility that the reason for their career struggles is themselves and that they might benefit from some personal introspection and consider the outrageous possibility that all truly accomplished people are regularly faced with and overcome “insurmountable” adversity to get where they are in life. So WHY aren’t certain demographic groups that should have NO excuse for having very little entrepreneurial presence on the Internet represented? They have been taught to accept victimhood and don’t believe that they can or should have to overcome some adversity to achieve success, especially if the obstacles they face can be rationalized as “unfair”. People with no socially acceptable excuses for failure… seem to be more successful for some reason… imagine that? When a group of people of some gender, racial, or religious background decides to identify with some perceived “unfairness” in life (real or imagined, it doesn’t matter) they excuse themselves from success because their ”identification” with victimhood is a handy “out” in any situation where they face adversity. People who excuse themselves from overcoming obstacles of any kind… never become great achievers.
This issue is especially true of modern Millennial employees. We have whole generations of children who grew up entirely sheltered from hard physical work, competition for resources and negative feedback. The result is a generation of software engineers who are emotionally fragile, entitled and think that sitting at a desk moving a mouse for a living is strenuous hard work that has to be balanced with abundant free time. Technology GIANTS almost invariably come from backgrounds where they faced significant adversity to become successful. Without that experience, people develop a fear and aversion to risk and hardship that is very hard to break them of.
Here’s a classic interview trick I used to recruit kids for WildTangent early on. We’d deliberately go to really mundane job fairs where people were more likely to be looking for lawn maintenance jobs than game company opportunities. When they approached our booth we’d hand them a questionnaire with some goofy brain teaser questions on it and tell them that if they scored well we’d interview them for a job. Interestingly, very often the ones with Computer Science degrees, polished resumes and straight A’s would take one look at the quiz and disappear… too much effort. It would be some hungry kid who loved games who would KILL themselves over it, if they did reasonably well, especially if they didn’t give up, we’d give them a shot. The other great interview question was;
“Show me something you’ve written on your own.”
This is one of the most valuable interview questions of all time in my opinion. People who are self-motivated make things on their own with no other reason or motivation than their own intellectual curiosity and passion. I can’t tell you how many straight A CS majors I would get who could not tell me about or show me anything they had just coded for the love and/or interest in programming. When I found a kid who was killing themselves TRYING to make something for no external reason, it was a very strong clue that they were the genuine article. They didn’t do it to get a grade, they didn’t do it for money, they did it out of genuine interest…. GOLDEN. Those people will learn whatever they have to. Those people I could put to work for old gamer geniuses and know that given a few months or years they would become “geniuses” themselves. Those people won’t quit in six months to get slightly higher pay or a promotion somewhere else after you’ve invested a lot of effort in developing them because they are working for you to learn. Those people want to finish the things they start working on. Some of the best people I ever hired, showed me absolutely horrendous game demos they had obviously poured their hearts and time into. (See Travis Baldree, CEO of Runic Studios, I’m sure he’d never want his DHTML RPG to see the light of day) When you told them that something they were doing sucked, they didn’t fold up tent and quit or give up in despair for lack of positive validation, or worse dismiss the feedback by rationalizing that it was somehow personal or pretend that it was your TONE that really upset them, they were just eager to learn how to do it better.
Entrepreneurial Engineering:
Now that we’ve talked about what personality traits produce technology “Giants” and what uniquely Western cultural conditions produce modern “Educated Idiot” millennial employees, let’s talk about some of the interesting cultural traits often associated with Asian and Indian engineers that distinguish their talents from their Western counterparts. In general, Asian and Indian engineers come from very high social validation cultures, the result is that they are often far more prone to homogenous thinking AND conditioned to believe that conforming and doing precisely what is asked of them is sufficient for success. Unlike their modern American counterparts, they have often come from very high adversity environments which makes them much harder workers and much more appreciative of the tremendous privilege and luxury it is to get paid to sit at a desk all day moving a mouse for a living as opposed to the third world conditions that most of their friends and family live in. The challenge for these folks as employees is that they are often uncomfortable with taking a lot of initiative or engaging in creative “push-back”. They are less likely to proactively suggest that their management take a different approach to a problem or to undertake tackling a problem they see or anticipate without being asked. They are also more prone to short-term or expedient problem solving over big long term thinking… and more likely to job hop at a better offer. I attribute some of this to a sort of cultural lack of confidence not shared by their counterparts who were raised in the West.
These folks could often be 2X-3X more productive than their entitled Western counterparts but you couldn’t brainstorm with them or usefully harness their collective intelligence to come up with better approaches to solving a problem. As such I always found it best to mix them with the westernized entrepreneurial engineers who were happy to have people who would listen to them and execute on their ideas.
Asia and India are the almost exclusive source of FEMALE software engineers in the US. They are highly sought after by employers because they tend to bridge technology acumen with management and organizational skills
Interestingly some of the most amazing talent I’ve hired are people whose parents are from third world countries but they grew up Westernized themselves. The result can be a great combination of work ethic and dedication combined with proactive problem solving and active participation in suggesting better ways to solve a given business or technical problem. It has always amazed me how difficult it can be to get people to develop a sense of ownership or personal responsibility for the things they are working on and this set of westernized Indian and Asian engineers have always impressed me as representing a great balance of discipline and dedication with shoot-from-the-hip initiative taking. As a technology company CEO, there was nothing I loved more than an employee who would come to me on a Monday morning and say; “X has been driving me crazy, I spent all weekend and rewrote it… look how much better it works now!” That’s the guy I’m going to give a raise and a promotion to. Especially if the “problem” was something tedious or mundane that needed to be fixed but nobody wanted to work on it. Personally I suspect that although they are generally a very entrepreneurial set of people who are more likely to start companies, they are still often “less creative” or comfortable with crazy out of the box thinking than some of America’s “native” innovators.
I’ve been to China, Singapore, Japan, Thailand, and Korea many times and the cultural differences there are striking. To grossly and unfairly characterize them, the entrepreneurialism in these countries is a lot more hive-like. The individual genius, startup successes that we find in America and Europe are far less common in favor of more communal operations that generally involve successfully copying some previously successful product idea backed by some large investor, company or government institution. Crazy individual innovation isn’t something these societies appear to foster well. Hive style management can be great for established products that require constant incremental refinement but is troublesome for innovative development.
Creating an innovative climate is very difficult and fragile. I didn’t fully appreciate HOW difficult it was until I tried managing one in California which appears to be the place where great talent goes to die. The worst of millennial culture is rampant there with mostly emotionally fragile, job hopping, entitled prima-donnas burning VC money in bonfires. The best and the brightest are quickly discovered and consumed by the big wealthy players like Facebook and Google and new talent imported into the market is very quickly “corrupted”. Once people learn that they are highly sought after and have lots of socially approved excuses for not working… they don’t. Those who aren’t corrupted get recruited by a big player for far more money than any startup can afford. People with the potential to be 20X producers quickly conclude that life is much simpler if they just do 1X and collected the paycheck. San Francisco in particular had a business climate so caustic that it was impossible to justify the enormous expense of hiring interns out of college in the hopes of training and retaining them over time. It was the last thing I EXPECTED to find in the legendary Silicon Valley. Tragic.
European and Eastern European engineers are generally MUCH better educated than our kids are. The math skills many of these guys develop are phenomenal. They can also be real workhorses but often generally lack a sense of “product”. The result is that they are often technically brilliant and innovative but don’t know how to make products without Western management. American’s seem to grow up with a much more innate instinct for what a consumer product needs to look like. I suspect that it’s an inadvertent feature of wealth and constant exposure to media and competing products. As I’ve mentioned previously when I was looking to recruit a team to create Direct3D, I went to the UK because they were producing superior mathematician engineers at that time. Unfortunately a lot of Europeans from especially socialist nations have had entrepreneurship conditioned out of their populations. People there are strangely “embarrassed” at the idea of trying to be extremely accomplished in life and wouldn’t want to upset their neighbors by living better than them. They often lack ambition. Very strange…
Oddly my best experience with outsourcing development work was to the Philippines where we found hardworking educated people who spoke English and generally liked American culture and wanted to learn and embrace Western Entrepreneurship. We had similar experiences with game studios we hired in Argentina and Chili of all places so it is possible to find isolated bastions of “the right stuff” in other countries if you know what to look for. My Chilean studio founders went on to very big things as a result of producing some really great early downloadable games for WildTangent.
Overall I regret to confess that the US in general is becoming an increasingly hostile place for startups and small companies. Talent quality is decaying even as costs, regulation, taxes and outright government harassment of small companies has escalated. It’s tragic to watch when you know from experience how extraordinarily rare and valuable that uniquely Western brand of entrepreneurship is. It’s especially difficult to witness the state of Silicon Valley, which is arguably the world’s greatest testament to Western capitalism. I think Sandhill road is one of the most remarkable places on Earth, creating tremendous wealth and employment for ANYBODY, regardless of background, who are able to persuade wealthy veteran entrepreneur VC’s that they are a good investment and able to execute on a vision.
To summarize, I have taken the liberty of devising a completely arbitrary continuum of core personality traits that I believe most fundamentally shape an engineer’s potential for exceptional productivity and/or achievement;
Confidence
Need for social validation
Initiative
Dedication
Immigrant engineers from Asia and India generally exhibit:
Low Confidence
High need for social validation
Low initiative
High dedication
Interestingly all of these traits are relatively consistent with “low-confidence” behavior because they come from high social pressure cultures and are trying to fit into a new foreign culture and prove themselves. They don’t know the ropes, so they substitute hard work and obedience for initiative. They are also from relatively poor, hardworking societies so they appreciate their tremendous fortune at having the opportunity to make a living by moving a mouse for money and are not inclined to create any waves that my jeopardize that position. Overall, conforming is a good tactic for adapting to a foreign work environment but you generally want to help these folks find the confidence to feel ownership for their products.
Eastern European engineers exhibit:
High Confidence
Low need for social validation
Moderate initiative
High dedication
I have cause to believe that many Eastern Europeans view American society through a similar lens to my own. They think we are lazy, naïve, irresponsible, spoiled and relatively ignorant… as a consequence they are not too concerned about how we judge them and they are generally confident that they can compete with us. Interestingly because they have come from fairly recently very oppressive societies they don’t necessarily have big aspirations for themselves so they are more likely to be expedient versus exhibiting high initiative. Despite this, they also value being paid a lot to move a mouse and work hard.
Second generation westernized engineers tend to exhibit a positive combination of;
High confidence
Moderate need for social validation
High Initiative
High Dedication
They generally make great employees, managers and leaders.
Modern American millennial engineers typically exhibit:
Over confidence (More closely resembling arrogance and self-delusion)
High need for social validation (very prone to aggressively embrace group-think)
Over initiative (job hopping and doing whatever they like instead of working as a team)
Low dedication
This is one of the best illustrations of the “victim” mentality. You can find an excuse to be a failure anywhere if you just look hard enough for it! …and it’s IMPORTANT to find for some reason…
Traits common to under-achieving minority groups are also pretty consistent:
Low confidence manifesting as emotional fragility, excuse making, “wall-flowerism”
High need for social validation
Low initiative
Low dedication
Finally the people who really seem to really overachieve are:
Low Confidence
Very low need for social validation
High initiative
High dedication
So what is distinct and interestingly unique about over performers is that they exhibit the least social motivation of the set and exhibit the strange combination of low confidence and low need for social validation or approval. These people’s “response” to low confidence is to try harder in life. Lack of interest in social validation seems to free them to be highly innovative and entrepreneurial… they don’t necessarily WANT to work with other people in an office. Low interest in social validation also seems to translate into high initiative because they are motivated by pursuing their own interests. The combination of low confidence and low need for social validation also seems to result in people who are receptive to input but do not feel social pressure to adopt ideas they don’t agree with. They are learners. Over time these people often transform into high confidence people but not necessarily into arrogant people who can’t listen. There are myriad reasons why these people seem to exhibit low-confidence usually associated with having come from non-privileged backgrounds and having faced and overcome some adversity in life (humbling life experiences). People raised in the more modern sheltered American view of parenting generally become “educated idiots” and end up like our modern millennial engineers. Highly qualified yet largely useless.
One of the things that fascinated me about Microsoft during my early days there was their emphasis on private offices with doors. Everyone had them. This was extremely contrary to the widely adopted communal office space layouts used and eagerly embraced almost everywhere else in the tech industry. I suspect that without even being entirely conscious of the decision, Microsoft had made the choice to organize themselves around individual anti-social over achievers rather than highly social validation seeking teams. While employees in California offices seemed to relish the constant distractions, impromptu meetings and social dynamics of constant social contact with their peers, Microsoft people avoided meetings, avoided unnecessary communication and preferred to work long hours without distraction. Much later I realized that most companies were structured to achieve productivity by employing ordinary people who function best with a high degree of social contact and that this arrangement was not necessarily ideal for highly innovative, self-motivated people who find constant social contact stressful and/or distracting. (yeah, I’m one, big surprise)
Despite the amazing high productivity traits of these people they have some serious shortcomings. They are hard to manage, they don’t work well on teams unless they are in charge, they don’t communicate well and they don’t care about getting along with others. As a hiring manager I find that I generally favor getting them young before they have developed bad habits that are impossible to fix later.
Obviously I despise modern American millennial engineers because the twisted combination of a sense of unearned entitlement combined with emotional fragility renders them useless AND unteachable. Annoyingly their minority counter-parts response to this cultural disaster is to embrace one of their own, victimhood and excuses. Neither group actually aspires to achievement for its own sake! Both groups share a common emotional fragility reacting to even gentle or well intentioned feedback with excuses, rejection, total demoralization and job hopping in the middle of critical projects. American parents, I don’t know what you are doing to your kids, but you are ruining us all! … or maybe it’s not your fault, it’s the video games I’m making….
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