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Les Malheurs de l'Entreprise

Les récents drames dans l'industrie automobile française (plusieurs suicides de cadres en quelques semaines) mettent à nouveau à jour la pression sous laquelle travaillent nos concitoyens.

Si effectivement la situation est grave, je ne partage pas l'alarmisme délirant de ce Rebond dans libé (notez la grande sagesse des 2 premiers commentaires - quel discernement !).

Le remarquable ouvrage de Thomas Philippon que j'ai déjà évoqué ici avance de brillantes théories sur notre grande difficulté à travailler ensemble, que ce soit dans le privé ou le public d'ailleurs. Entre parenthèses, il s'agit d'un des grands regrets de Mitterand que de ne pas avoir pu/su fluidifier et harmoniser ces relations.

Ce que j'ai pour ma part remarqué c'est qu'il est aussi très pénible de travailler en France pour deux raisons principales : a) un grand investissement affectif et donc un manque de distanciation et b) une culture du conflit.

Mon travail, mon enfant

On ne sait pas, comme les anglo saxons par exemple, avoir le recul necessaire pour faire la différence entre ce que nous produisons et ce que nous sommes. Ainsi la critique est-elle très mal prise car on se sent critiqué personnellement alors qu'en fait on critique le produit avec pour objectif que celui-ci soit le meilleur au final.

Il est très difficile d'admettre que ce qui importe ce n'est pas de mettre en oeuvre sa propre idée mais de mettre en oeuvre la meilleure idée pour le projet.

Le coup de gueule comme affirmation de soi

Une autre chose terriblement épuisante dans les relations professionnelles en France est cette culture du conflit, avec le coup de gueule comme vecteur d'affirmation de la personnalité. Alors que dans les cultures protestantes il s'agit là d'une attitude hors de propos et égocentrique.

Le latin identifiera cette reticence à gueuler comme de la lâche soumission alors que pour les protestants il ne s'agit là que d'accepter l'interêt général : ne pas casser les oreilles, épargner aux collégues des débordements impudiques et se maintenir dans un échange constructif.

L'art et l'avant garde du capitalisme

Enfin, ce que trouve particulièrement ironique c'est que les plus grands détracteurs de la vie en entreprise viennent du monde du journalisme ou du milieu artistique.

Tout le monde sait qu'il s'agit là de deux milieux de franche camaraderie et de grande convivialité. Cette hypocrisie prend une autre dimension lorsque l'on lit Pierre Michel Menger (Portrait de l'artiste en travailleur) peignant le monde artistique comme l'une des formes les plus abouties du nouveau capitalisme (winner takes all etc ...).

Et si nous essayions plutôt de trouver ensemble des solutions intelligentes et pragmatiques plutôt que benoîtement tout mettre sur le dos du grand méchant capital ?

Missing : Kathy Sierra

I used to be a Professional working in airline distribution system business. Man, life was great : I was making good money in the countries I wanted (I even managed to reject an offer from Qantas, stupid me) being international consultant in this niche market with old techs. Then came September 11.

Within half a day my professional skills were made obsolete (okay there were worth things around, but still : it was still bad). I then decided then to switch to new techs in general and Java Programming language in particular. I started this self-training to prepare for the Java programmer certification.

This is when Kathy Sierra came into my professional life (messiah image dressed in white surrounded with a halo of dazzling light). Seriously though : thanks to her books and the amazing JavaRanch site I had the certification and could get a job in that technical area. I've carried on and passed another two professional certifications thanks to her brilliant Head First Series : these allowed me to get a great job (well, surely my favorite job ever) back in my country. I am sooooooo grateful she helped me when I needed the most : she had a definite and positive influence on my professional life.

And then there was this a-ma-zing blog (ranked #1 in The Viral Valley top 25 of marketing blogs). Creating Passionate Users allowed me to keep the pace with Web 2.0 technologies and culture and gave me the energy to blog (this last bit may not be such a good thing though).

And then there was this death threats issue which saw her stopping the blog.

Kathy : I do hope you're well. We really, REALLY are missing your blog.

Please come back to your witty and cherry self and blog again. The IT industry and the blogosphere are definitely not the same when you are not around.

La France et la vieille tante embarrassante

Lorsque l'on vit à l'étranger on entretient une relation particulière, bien plus intime avec sa nationalité. On se retrouve confronté à un autre mode de vie qui fait réfléchir différemment à notre idendité. Reflexion qui permet d'identifier la part de conditionnement culturel lié à notre nationalité.

Aussi, on se retrouve dans la peau d'un micro-ambassadeur et on représente sa patrie : ça c'est un grand honneur. Honneur qui implique aussi de devoir répondre des actes de son pays. Et là on se retrouve parfois dans une situation embarrassante, un peu comme lorsque l'on reçoit des amis et que sa vieille tante impudique se donne en spectacle sans beaucoup de pudeur.

Les exemples d'attitude embarrassante et déplacée de mon pays lors de mon expatriation (1996-2004) sont innombrables :

• la reprise des essais nucléaires par Chirac en 96,
• notre critique ouverte de la démocratie en Autriche lors de l'avènement de Jorg Haider en 2000, conseils démocratiques qui feront hurler de rire des collègues Autrichiens au Printemps 2002
• notre ingérence dans les choix politiques des autres pays comme la Pologne lors de leur choix de suivre les US pour la guerre en Irak,
• notre critique ouverte des systèmes de santé des pays anglo-saxons en chantant partout l'exemplarité du nôtre, pour voir le drame national de l'été 2003
• ce chanteur, ardent défenseur des libertés et des opprimés, interpelant le libéralisme et le capital malfaisant (incarnés alors par JM Messier) lors d'une cérémonie quelconque pour lui rappeler que "nos vies valent mieux que leur profit", sous les vivas de la salle enthousiaste, dans un souffle révolutionnaire. Ce même chanteur qui battra à mort sa compagne quelques mois plus tard.
• Le rejet républicain de toute discrimination positive et l'hypocrisie sur la représentation des minorités dans la vie publique, ou plutôt ce manque ahurissant de représentation, tel que me le faisait remarquer un ami anglais d'origine Jamaïcaine en 2003
  

Cette vieille tante embarrassante est réapparue lors du festival de Cannes. Jamel (un des seuls comiques.fr à me faire régulièrement beaucoup rire) n'a pu s'abstenir de faire une lourde allusion à la politique durant son discours.

J'ai trouvé cela complètement hors-propos et inapproprié. J'ai pensé alors à toutes ces délégations, ces artistes venus des quatre coins du monde, regardant, gênés cette vieille tante sortir le linge sale devant tous ces étrangers, cela m'a un peu embarrassé et j'ai ressenti ce même sentiment confus de gêne et de colère à l'égard de mon pays.

Vas-y tatie, fais un peu preuve de dignité et apprends à te taire.

Suck the marrow out of the meatspace bone

(click to play the soundtrack of this post)

Digital Attraction

I quite fancy David Armano's blog. This is full of ideas and nice visual assets about design, user experience and web 2.0.It was strange to see this touching post though. I probably am wrong but this sounds to me like self-persuasion : "hey real life is cool : I can see, I can feel, I can touch, I can smell, I can communicate". But, then, there is digital attraction he cant resist : "OK, I think I'm ready for work now. :)" is the way this blog post ends, rather sadly.

It could well be a misinterpretation but the line between "Working" and "Being connected" becoming more and more blurry, it sounds to me as if he was saying : "Okay, I just had enough of real life to write a blog post with, now give me my electronic hit back".

Meatspace Vs Myspace

In this great post Danah Boyd reckons that "the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical". I would tend more and more to think the opposite and would swap "digital" and "physical" in that very sentence. There has been some kind of shift, here.

Most of us spend the day connected for work. But now we also are connected for about everything as Fred is putting it. The unplugged portion of our day tends to reduce drastically, so does our life in the real world, subsequently.

It's as if whatever happens in our real lives should feed the electronic ones. There is this post on 37 signals regarding Designer Jane Fulton Suri book Thoughtless Acts advocating for observing regular peope doing regular things to improve as designer (may I disgress a bit here : the casual way girls tie their hair back with a pencil is so strangely glamorous - pic from Jane Fulton book).

There is a pretty similar post from DA. Sounds to me like : suck the marrow out of the meatspace bone to make the real life a part of the digital one.

This is a bit of a concern for me. Seeing this post from David allowed me to take a step back and question myself. How do you fellow bloggers feel about that ? Do you think that your electronic and real lives are balanced ? As far as I am concerned, well I wonder.

lo tech poetry

I just love that.

Respect to the AlphaGeeks

Common + Technical

In the early 90s when I started my carreer as an IT professionnal, there was in France this very popular stand-up comedy trio called Les Inconnus (the Unknown - wish they actually were). They had this rather stupid story about software engineers (in-gé-nieur in-for-ma-ti-cieeeeen) which had the whole country laughing. People was laughing with this story because :

• IT job is very common and technical, both adjectives being abuse in France


• the IT professional character was depicted as an autistic guy looking clumsy and uncomfortable about everywhere but in front of a PC : uncool as hell.
  

I dont take any particular pride in being an IT professional. More than often I love my job. It allowed me to find interesting missions in other countries, to meet lovely people and great professionals and, not to forget : it does pay the bills. Sure, I would have preferred to be a footballer, a rock star or a novelist, but hey! you have to be grateful for what you've got.

Not so long ago when I was introducing myself and saying what I was doing, people would change subject pretty fast (unless they also are in the industry). My feeling is that the way software engineers are perceived today, in my country at least, has completely changed. And this is another consequence of the second coming of the web.

Golfers and Programmers

There is this good definition on Martin Fowler's blog of what AlphaGeeks are. This is a concept coming from (yet another) thorough online talk by Tim O'Reilly. It also is used on Martin's thoughts about Ruby and Microsoft. And this is where it gets interesting : "At RailsConf, Tim Bray contended that the key decisions on technology are made by the programming community. " Further, Fowler remind us that "The open-source community does much of its communication through source code." So if you're not a coder, too bad mate.

This avant-garde of IT geeks has seen his power considerably leveraged by the social web. There has been a dramatic shift in the way big decisions are taken regarding software architecture and strategy. A great example in the Java world is Spring Vs J2EE and Hibernate Vs JDO : in both cases, emergent open source solutions became de facto standards when competing against industry commitee solutions. REST Vs RPC/SOAP is going the same way with the former edging slowly but surely past the latter.

Next stop is Ruby On Rails : there is a massive open source community around this new Framework to build full scale web applications. Despite what Cedric Beutch clever thoughts are on the subject, I still believe RoR will also become the new standard. The pressure of the open source community led by the alphageeks will make political decisions less and less sustainable for technical solutions.

The New Plane of existence

Most connected people has a second life, be it the game , Myspace new plane of existence as Kathy Sierra daughter's would put it , a blog or whathaveyou2.0. As David Armano is putting it in his Geek 2.0 definition they need us more than we need them. AlphaGeeks are now priceless assets of the global economy thanks to their ability to envision the way to build our digital world. Web 2.0 media democratization has allowed sub cultures to emerge and voice different opinions. This culture is now accepted and respected : having a digital (video games, technologies, internet) column in french culture magazines would have been unthinkable last century : it's now compulsory.

End result is : this stand-up comedy band joke isn't funny anymore (it has never been as I far as I am concerned) and golfers shall no longer rule the technical IT world. So respect where it's due : to the AlphaGeeks indeed.