Back in 2001, at the close of the .com bubble burst, I started a new life for myself by moving to Germany. I had been granted a significant amount of founder stock at the company I had been at and, while it wasn't the projected amount of value before the burst, it was still pretty reasonable after paying the option price.
Germany had aways been my place of vacation, starting in the early 1990's. When I was in college a friend in the next dorm room challenged me to get more in touch with my roots, so I did but first taking classes in German both at the college and at the Goethe Institute in Chicago. However in all of my visits, none of this really helped me communicate.
So as the visits accumulated through the 1990's more people "suggested" that I move there and learn the language and discover the country. This became more serious when Chancellor Schroeder created a Green Card for IT people. So following the bust, I figured I would embark on a new adventure.
Before leaving however, I had dinner with an old German couple who had immigrated via Canada in the early 1950's. He was a Pipe Organ builder by trade. They warned me that after staying there a period of time that I should not come back. They related their story of going back to Germany in the 1960's and finding it totally foreign to them and ended up coming back to the USA. They only visited after that. I took it on advisement.
So some of the changes that I experienced was more of a communal atmosphere where people collaborated on things. The negative side of this was that meetings that should have taken 20-30 minutes now took hours because they would discuss it to death!
I found the experience very rewarding and met a lot of new friends though being in outside of work events. However in most of the places I worked at we would organize a movie night at my place. It was a nice way to blow off steam.
Eventually I started my own company after being laid off a second time in as much a three years due to companies change of requirements. It was suggested to me by the labor agency to start my own company and work as a freelancer. This was also a new program, targeting the high unemployment numbers of the time (~2004). Generally it was successful for most people doing it and very successful for the labor agency as they don't track freelancers on the unemployment.
However after eight years of doing this (and fourteen years abroad) I decided to return home. I remembered what those people had told me and I have to admit there was some culture shock items when I did come home.
However the biggest one kind of snuck up on me. Back in the 1990's when I worked for Hyatt and Walgreens (and even the company that went on the stock market for that matter) we had a loose culture of collaboration. So people would take breaks together and discuss the item at hand and even sometimes sports. It was at this last company that I was told very directly after I turned away a more junior engineer when I was focused on a project, that my first focus is on my co-workers because we succeed as a team! This would later be refined in Germany as they don't really like the idea of "diva's" but rather an all more or less equal team. This seems to have disappeared nearly altogether in the modern workforce. I am not sure what to attribute this to, whether it be the younger workforce that grew up on social media leading to real relationship challenges, a more focused (lean) business strategy or what. I have only recently looked back to notice the pattern. I still know and am in contact with my earliest co-workers both from before I left for Germany (2001) and during my time there (until 2015). However which two exceptions, I am not in contact with any other co-worker from any other company since. I know a lot has changed in my time away. It's hard to get into any discussion without politics somehow creeping in. What used to be Godwin's law requiring about 40 or so back-and-forth's before the inevitability of Hitler being brought up, now takes substantially less. Now I think they are going to have to make a new one for what comes up today in discussion. The other thing is just how caustic communications have become. I think this mainly has to do with the rise of electronic communications and the decrease in direct discussions, face to face. Is this all for the better? I wonder.
