Survival Guide for a Western IT Company

Greetings reader! My previous post , I am sure, gave enough information, but many questions about the relocation and visa remained unanswered, and I want to fix it. I will tell you about the process of settling and cultural conflicts with local ones.

A small remark: the comments on vKontakte are quite ... contradictory. In order not to burden you with useless information, I want to warn you that this is just my experience, and yours will differ.

After accepting the offer, I was contacted by the personnel department of the company and a representative of RHS - a commercial company providing visa support.
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To obtain an MVV visa (a 3 month visa required for entry into the country) I needed to submit the following documents:

1. Original birth certificate with apostil.
2. Original certificate of registration of marriage with an apostille.
3. Scan of contract
4. Passport scan
5. Translation of the original n1 and n2 with an apostille, with an apostille (yes, I put the apostille over the apostille)

Additionally, after it was necessary to provide a lease agreement signed by both parties, but after the entry to obtain BSN (local social security number).

This was done for my money, but I can tell you that it is much cheaper to make an apostil of a translation or document than to make a translation in the Netherlands (the translation of one document is 100 euros, the apostille is 3,500 rubles). This is a long time, but I had nowhere to hurry.

Correspondence with the RHS was rather unpleasant. They responded for a long time (at best in a day, at worst - in a week), which made the process much more complicated. It got to the point of absurdity - a letter from the RHS falls, I ask a question in a reply letter in a minute, the answer to the question comes the next day. Whether the employees had a limit on the number of letters per day or “you are many, I am alone” - I do not know.

What is also important, the initial date of validity of the visa is equal to the start day in the contract according to the law, so I had an “official” start date 3 weeks earlier than the actual one.

In parallel with this, I was looking for housing, and, reader, do not stop to use the services of local realtors. Their services will cost you less than flying to the country on their own to watch the apartments. The apartment was found, I moved in, settled in and together with the RHS I registered at the place of residence in Gemeente (local municipality), issued a bank account and went to work.

But still this post is about culture shock, laziness, reprehensibility, slowness and my struggle with it.

First time.

I have a character trait that I don’t reveal to a person until I recognize him well, but then it became a problem.

From the wall the company slogan looked at me: “Friends. Openness, Honesty, Directness. ”
Yes, you can add legends about the Dutch "honesty". In particular, if someone has something to say, he will tell you about it right now, or on a beautiful day at a meeting called Feedback Loop - a meeting where team members give each other ratings on different criteria, together they discuss, and " there is nothing left for the victim, just ask with a smile on his face how to improve himself and what software to develop.

My first feedback came after 2 months from the beginning of work. I have already learned enough about the infrastructure, studied how Puppet works, gave some Linux lessons to our guys from the first and second line of support (they are responsible for diagnosing the servers during an alert from monitoring). What was my surprise when I saw 2 and 3 points out of 5 opposite all criteria (for example, "how technically this person is developed technically" and "how much this person brings to the team and company"). I barely restrained myself to ask “What the fuck ?!” instead of “how can I get better?” I completed the tasks on 20 story points out of 40 for the last 2 sprints, what more do you need ?! ”. It turned out that everything is fine, but I need time to accelerate, and then everything will be quite super.

On the next feedback, I had 4-5 points for each item, which caused even more questions, since my “contribution” to the company and the team ... did not change.

Practical advice : no matter how proactive and executive you are, your colleagues will, in any case, at first, rate you less than you think.

Not always open. Not always honest.

Monthly demonstration. I present the changes in the new version of JIRA Software. I know that there are people in the room who mistakenly closed the sprints before they were laid and were forced to re-create them. I know that there are people in the room who love paper sprint boards. New JIRA solved their wishes and tasks. I ask you to raise the hands of those who mistakenly closed the sprints. Silence.

I could ignore this, but from my open and honest colleagues I expected ... openness. Maybe they were ashamed to admit this to other teams, maybe there were other reasons - but I didn’t spoil the demo because of this! I pointed a finger at everyone who made this annoying mistake and spoiled the beautiful reports and graphs of their Product Owners. "Lucky you!" - I said solemnly and closed, and then rediscovered my team's sprint.

People were more willing to answer the question about paper cards, but I had a reputation for being too direct.

Practical advice : people do not like being told of their mistakes and then presenting a solution. When preparing the demo, keep in mind that everything is fine, everyone is working perfectly, but here’s another way to solve problems even better.

Emotional aspect

More than once I brought inconvenience to my colleagues with openness, speaking directly about their mistakes in a not very friendly manner. During lunch, one colleague admitted that openness is good, but you can be more friendly. And then there was an additional nuance - the presence of a smile.

I am not a very smiling person, and my “normal” facial expression is the absence of any emotions. This made my cheerful and optimistic colleagues think that I was always not happy and angry with something, while I was either focused on one task, or my head was filled with something unauthorized.

But over time, this problem is gone. No, I did not begin to walk with an artificial smile on my face, but I began to joke more often, make fun of my colleagues (kindly), tell Russian jokes and say hello and say goodbye to each member of the team with a handshake.

In this respect, the Dutch are aware of differences in the culture of different nationalities and are very interested in the characteristics of a particular nationality.

Practical advice : it is not necessary to assimilate under the behavioral culture of the Dutch. Any trifle, like the friendly shout “Forward, team” after the morning meeting, has a positive effect on the cohesion of the multicultural team.

Political aspect

I was not lucky to be sure that the company is ready for almost any changes. In other words, if you have a tool 1, you googled it 2, studied it and realized that it can be better and more effective - not everyone will support your zeal.

Separately, it is worth noting that the Dutch (like any other nationality) with great confidence belong to their compatriots.

There is a meeting to transfer part of the production to the AWS cloud, there is a question about configuration management. There is a sophisticated and “over engineered” Puppet, there is an Ansible easily mastered, and there is a discussion on what to use in the future.

Team A suggests that you stop investing in Puppet and use Ansible to set up the infrastructure and deploy updates. Team B offers to drag all current controls into Puppet and deploy a master server in the cloud. The difference is that team A is experienced engineers with existing AWS operating experience, all are without exception, while B is engineers (formerly web developers) who focus on their half of services (team A is responsible for backing, and team B for the front), but entirely composed of local, which, moreover, in the company for a very long time. It is not surprising that the architects group (the so-called Path Finders) reacted with great confidence to the variant of team B, although Puppet became very cumbersome, did not automate everything and forced to have an eternal, neglected master in the cloud.

Later, team leader A told me that I would not be able to “sell” Ansible if I went ahead.


Since then, I have learned to work with people, but terribly disliked this business - moreover, I could not bear to negotiate.

Instead, I had two approaches. If the person was initially set up positively, then I had to prepare in advance to answer all the clarifying questions (mostly they concerned security and monitoring). But if he was not optimistic, then I had to break a person, periodically referring to the administrative resource. I am not proud of this method, but I had to use it, especially when people did not want to learn something new.
However, I was sure that it would not work here and for a successful demo it is necessary to prepare MVP (Minimal Viable Product) and PoC (Proof of Concept). To convince people to gradually change to Ansible, I quickly raised the control machine, enabled the dynamic inventory script and showed that the configuration of the Nginx web server with acl_whitelist and TLS certificate for Ansible can be 2, or even 3 times shorter, simpler and more flexible than the similar roles in Hiera.

Practical advice : no matter how clean your intentions are, they should be a great practical confirmation if you want to compete with the opinion of the local majority.

Life out of office

But enough about work. Regarding entertainment, the Netherlands is quite expensive (compared to Russia), but no less interesting. A movie ticket to the local Pathe network for another blockbuster in 3D will cost 15 euros per person, a cafe / restaurant costs from 10 to 50 euros (depending on the appetites). The Dutch drink a lot (so much that my colleagues and I have 10% in a bar next to the office) and absolutely do not follow the rules of the road while riding a bicycle. I often see how a cyclist rides "on an opposite line" and sidewalks (although it is prohibited), does not give way to pedestrians on a zebra.

Public transport allows you to get to any city. Just for example: the city of Zoutermeer can be reached by TRAM from The Hague from the central station. Public transportation is expensive, but there are several ways to optimize costs. I will not go into all the details (I still did not have enough travel blog), so let's talk about IT entertainment.

Conferences

The company pays for visits to conferences both in the Netherlands and abroad (but the budget is not infinite, so you can count on a maximum of 2-3 conferences per year). I had the pleasure of visiting the O'Reilly Velocity in Amsterdam, and my colleagues (Powershell's live tehnobogi) attended Powershell Asia in Singapore. In the Netherlands, large-scale IT meetings are held on average several times a year and it’s quite realistic to get even for their hard-earned ones.

Mitapy

Those who are not ready to spend their personal funds on expensive exhibitions can find their group at meetup.com . So relatively often organized meetings of fans to write on Powershell , Big Data , Java , DevOps, and many many others.

findings

As I said, to quickly integrate into the new team, to become “your own” for everyone quickly and quickly will not work. And I am more than sure that you, dear reader, will have your fascinating experience, which I will be glad to hear from you.

PS This is the second and final part of my story about the move. For the sake of personal development and assistance to you, my colleagues, I would prefer to concentrate my opportunities on technical issues. However, happy to answer any questions.