Thread by @s_r_constantin

I think people underestimate the importance of "culture clash" between *professional* cultures. People expect to make allowances for people of different ages, nationalities, or genders to have different perspectives, but less so for professional backgrounds.

Some examples I've observed:
1. In academic math and physics, overt self-promotion is taboo. Mathematicians have a *very* sensitive threshold for what they think sounds "arrogant", and give *very* understated praise.

What a technologist would see as just "sharing the impact of their work", a mathematician might see as "boasting", and read as a sign of selfishness or narcissism. Meanwhile, industry people might see the mathematician's modesty as "low self-esteem". Neither is necessarily true.

2. I have met an accomplished businesswoman (with a background in marketing and design) who flatly did not believe me when I told her that in math, sometimes you can prove counterintuitive things are true.

She said "no, my intuition is very good, and I can visualize anything." I told her about Banach-Tarski; she said "no, that's impossible, I can visualize it and it doesn't work." She did not believe her intuition could be false, since it had always served her so well.

3. If they don't keep themselves in check, sometimes engineers think they're the only ones who do "real" work (because they make all the things), and sometimes sales people think they're the only ones who do "real" work (because they're the one who put money in the bank).

4. @paulg's maker-manager divide around time is super important. Makers need uninterrupted blocks of time to work, and find meetings and responding to emails a distraction; managers' work *is* having meetings, and consider prompt replies a sign of professionalism.

5. True creative work -- the kind where you start the day with a blank page, and your job is to put something on it, and you might not have made any progress by the end of the day -- sounds frivolous and easy to people who have never had to do it.

6. For engineers, it's very natural to think "let's improve our performance by tracking our metrics!" For some bench biologists, tracking is seen as a sign of disrespect, or taking away their autonomy to make scientific judgments.

Peter Drucker noted that each profession has a "professional ethic" -- there is something it means to be a good nurse, a good lawyer, a good engineer, a good pilot, and the values each profession holds sacred are different.

When people identify with their profession's ethic, they need to uphold that ethic in order to do work they're proud of -- in other words, to be fulfilled and motivated. Good management, says Drucker, encourages this.

However, in an interdisciplinary organization, if any *one* professional ethic dominates, the organization might fail. This is why Drucker says decisions should be made by people whose "profession" is management itself -- i.e., MBAs.

I'm not sure this works either; it can all too easily mean "the professional culture of managers/MBAs is the best and deserves to dominate all the others" or even "organizations should be run by those with loose moral standards". See the book Moral Mazes for a negative view.

I'm more inclined to think that interdisciplinary work requires people to do "cultural exchange" and learn about different perspectives and learn to get over the initial frustration of clashing styles.

I'm in favor of having strong moral boundaries -- stuff like "I will not knowingly harm a patient, I will quit or be fired first" -- but learn to tell the difference between those absolute commitments and professional conventions you could drop if necessary.