The Culture of Technology

I’ve been studying the culture of technology companies the last few days. I’m sitting in St. Louis on business and have nothing better to do than study the people around me. In my years of associating with scientists and engineers I’ve discovered several things.

The biggest epiphany I’ve had is that technology is still a bunch of voodoo, black magic. When problems develop (and they always do), the “experts” do a lot of hand-waving and “tah dah!” it finally works. In the end no one really understands why. There’s no such thing as science as the public understands it. This subject is fascinating to me, and I may expand on it in a later post.

Other things I’ve noticed are the shared stories. For instance, one person brought up the scene in the movie Apollo 13 where the engineers threw the boxes of parts on the table and had to assemble it into something workable. Our conference room today became that kind of a chaotic mess in less than an hour. Every one of us at the table related to that scene, and we had a good laugh. And surprisingly enough, that’s often the way it is, although the stakes aren’t usually so high. You are given a difficult problem with an impossible timeline and limited resources and budget and the bosses expect you to give them results.

An unfortunate part of this technology culture is that it’s still the males’ territory. In a room full of 30 or so men, there was only one other woman working on this particular project, and she’s on a different team. I haven’t noticed it so much in government work, but in the small tech businesses I see it as a big problem. Tech entrepreneurs that I’ve seen tend to be male. I’m not claiming a solution or a reason, just stating an observation. Are women just not interested in the business side of technology?

The style of clothing is also shared. The assumption here is that there is no written dress code, what you see is the unwritten/unspoken dress code. If you know the style, you can tell the status of the person by the way they dress. The rule of thumb is jeans or khakis with a casual dress shirt. Only the vendors or the managers wear slacks or suits. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this, I’ve noticed this in government science agencies, like NASA, as well.

Technology companies truly are their own unique subculture. I’ve just scratched to surface with my observations above. Feel free to comment with your own observations on this subject.