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Culture Clash


By Allen Holub
December 1, 2005 — 
The Nov. 1 issue of The New York Times ran an article on the front page that seems to have gone completely unnoticed in the trade press. The subject of the article affects our industry, however, particularly those of us who are considering outsourcing.

David Ji is a Chinese-American “electronics entrepreneur.” His company, Apex Inc., imports large numbers of DVD players and other electronics gizmos, many manufactured by the Chinese company Changhong—a formerly-state-owned defense-contractor-turned-consumer-electronics company. With clients like Wal-Mart and Circuit City, Apex was perhaps the top brand of DVD player in the country.

Allen HolubThe two companies ended up in a business dispute: Apex claims Changhong produced a substandard product, which cost it money dealing with dissatisfied customers. Changhong claims it satisfied its contract but wasn’t paid by Apex. Though we’re talking about manufacturing here, it’s easy to imagine an outsourced software project in the same predicament.

In October 2004, things took a Kafkaesque turn. Ji was in China on business, and he decided to call Changhong to arrange a meeting, hoping that he could work out their problems once and for all. The next morning, seven men claiming to be police officers forced their way into his hotel room and proceeded to spend the entire day “interrogating” Ji. He was then flown to Changhong’s company headquarters.

According to the Times, Changhong “cordoned off a floor in one of its guesthouses and barred the windows, a makeshift jail.” Ji was tortured in a low-key way (not allowed to sleep for several days, threatened with life imprisonment, intimidated into signing false confessions). Changhong used the obtained-under-duress paperwork to attempt to take over Apex, with Ji forced to act the part of a willing participant. Eventually, these shenanigans drove Apex into bankruptcy.

After seven months in Changhong’s private jail, Ji was handed over to the Chinese government, which continues to keep him a prisoner. Meanwhile, the Chinese prime minister has praised Changhong’s handling of “the matter,” and has even “ordered state banks to provide emergency financing totaling nearly $1 billion, roughly three times the amount Changhong claimed Apex owed it,” and seven times what Apex claims it owes Changhong.

There’s so much to say about this story that it’s difficult to know where to start. What interests me most, however, is the cultural side. I wrote recently about a client of mine whose software development was outsourced to Russia, but the Russians hijacked the product to market it themselves. Though that’s not as severe a consequence as kidnapping and torture, it does speak to the same issue: Different cultures have different rules.

Modes of behavior that we see as unthinkable are considered reasonable business strategies in other places. The cultures are different. The Russians and Chinese do not see themselves as evil; they’re just exploiting a perceived weakness in a competitor. As Nietzsche said, “evil” is a relative term.

Developing software is a cultural activity—one that centers around communication. Bad communication, which is a given in cross-cultural endeavors, affects the outcome of software projects negatively.

The same issues apply to communication between the development team and the customers. The cultural issues go even deeper. A UI that’s intuitive in one culture may not be so intuitive to another. (I think about the difficulty designing switches for the international space station: In some countries up means “on,” in other countries it means “off.” They had to use pushbuttons that lit up.)

Even the computer languages we use, which are based on an Indo-European linguistic model, affect the way that the code is organized in a fundamental way. Someone who doesn’t know English or Hindi will write very different code than someone who does. You could, of course, develop a computer language based on a Japanese or Chinese linguistic model, but the cultural problems of integrating two modules built on different linguistic models are enormous.

I would expect that the fundamental structures of the libraries would be as different as the languages. Think about maintenance problems that arise when the program structure reflects the culture of the writer but not the maintainer.

Given these difficulties, it’s remarkable that outsourcing would work at all, and I can’t imagine that it will ever work well for anything other than rote programming projects that solve well-understood problems. Not until the world becomes a monoculture.

Allen Holub is an architect, consultant and instructor in C/C++, Java and OO Design. Reach him at www.holub.com.


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