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Sunday, August 25, 2002

By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

When Erozan Kurtas wants to have a meeting with a colleague who doesn't know where he works, he just says, "Go to North America, and my office is right there."

	Erozan Kurtas, 33, who is from Turkey, has lived here three years. "Actually, it's not like the U.N. at all. At the U.N. they bicker a lot. We're more harmonious." (Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette)

GivenSeagate Technology's dizzyingly international environment, where employees hail from 21 countries, it seemed only fitting to name the company's seven main work areas in its new Strip District research facility after the seven continents, said Mark Kryder, Seagate's senior vice president of research.

Kurtas, a research director, works on the company's third floor, in an office with lots of curvy furniture, modern cabinetry.

"We even have maps on the walls of each 'continent' with little red flags pinpointed at every employee's place of birth," said Kryder, a lanky, soft-spoken man in shirtsleeves, who, besides running Seagate's Pittsburgh facility, is an on-leave professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University.

	Related Coverage Seagate technology research center opens in Strip District Seagate research chief chose Pittsburgh to be near CMU

There are plenty of companies in Pittsburgh that employ foreigners. Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh's academic and medical centers have long attracted students from all over the world. But Seagate, the world's largest maker of computer disk drives, seems to stand out in Pittsburgh -- and in the Strip District, in particular -- as a workplace unusually rich in multiculturalism.

Consider the numbers: Out of 122 technical staffers (the company employs 140 people overall), 50 are from the United States. Everyone else is from somewhere else: Cyprus, Ukraine, China, Wales. Indeed, down along the company's cool, sleek corridors, the names on the doors jump out, one after the other: Konstantin Guslienko, Lei Li, Mihaela Tanase. One woman glided by wearing a shalwar-kameez, an outfit frequently worn on the Indian subcontinent, although most of the dress is Silicon Valley Casual -- Dockers, sport shirts, and absolutely not a tie in sight.

They all speak English, a prerequisite, but they come from very different traditions.

"You are always getting another viewpoint, another way of solving problems, a much wider breadth of ways of doing things," said Erik Svedberg, 37, a native of Sweden who works as a research scientist. It's not as though problem-solving methods can specifically be identified as Indian, Chinese or Scottish, "although you can be sure that they didn't learn their way of thinking at some school they went to or company they worked at," Kryder said. "It's something that goes back much, much farther and deeper than that."

Actually, Svedberg can identify some very specific Swedish work habits, which were hard to let go when he came here. "That's a place where a lot of people don't really want to spend more than 40 hours a week getting something done." Swedes, he said, also fiercely treasure their one-month annual summer leave. "My biggest concern coming here was, do I really want to move to a country that doesn't think a 30-day vacation is important?"

As in every high-tech company, workdays can be long and grueling, but the hours are flexible. And Seagate's employees, mostly young and single (although more and more babies are popping up at company picnics), relish the building's proximity to the Strip, where they take full advantage of happy hour at Valhalla Microbrewery and Restaurant, or, across the Allegheny River at Penn Brewery.

"One of the main attractions for me was that we're not in the middle of nowhere. I can pop over and get a cappuccino if I want to," said Kurtas, a native of Turkey who, with his dark, tousled hair and tiny, square glasses, looks like someone in an advertisement for Apple Computers or Benneton.

But for all the conviviality, many like to approach their colleagues gingerly, given the cultural differences.

"You have to adjust your pace for getting to know people," said Inci Ozgunes, 37, a native of Cyprus who came to Pittsburgh in 1990 to get her doctorate at Carnegie Mellon. "With so many cultures, and so many different expectations, people don't always respond to the same cues. You don't want to cross a boundary too soon."

There is an annual Christmas party and a company picnic, but religious and culinary needs aren't really an issue at these gatherings, although when the human resources director saw the picnic menu, he had to ask what couscous was, said Dee Frazzini, assistant to the director of research. (It's a small grain used in Middle Eastern cooking.)

"Actually, we'd be more likely to celebrate some big breakthrough in hard drive technology," Frazzini said. Indeed, the main subject at Seagate, which works on data storage solutions, is math, with equations hastily scribbled on white "smart boards" scattered in various "interaction zones," casual places where employees meet to kick around ideas.

Down in the spectacular cafeteria, with its wall of glass overlooking the tree-fringed Allegheny River, though, internationalism hasn't quite caught on. There's basic Pittsburgh fare on the menu, like macaroni and cheese and hot Italian sausage hoagies, which seem popular with the construction workers still present throughout the building. (The menu also is displayed on plasma television screens on each floor.)

With time, though, food selections will become more reflective of the work force's tastes, said Kryder, who notes that Seagate's Minneapolis quarters, with employees from 60 countries, has much more diverse cafeteria food. There's a prayer room in Minneapolis, too, to serve Muslim employees, who are actually fewer in number in Pittsburgh.

"Actually, it's not like the U.N. here at all," Kurtas said. "At the U.N., they bicker a lot. We're more like the U.S. We're more harmonious."

While some employees have opted to remain in the city, others, especially those with young families, have fully embraced life in Pittsburgh's suburbs and marvel at the low cost of living.

"I have colleagues in the [San Francisco] Bay Area who can't believe I bought my first house after working only one year as a scientist," said Ganping Ju, 30, a native of China and currently a resident of Pine with his wife and young son.

Ju also has become a fierce Steelers fan, although he laughs nervously when asked how he feels about the Pirates.

If there's a dark side to all this cozy internationalism, it's this: Why are so few Americans working in high-tech companies like Seagate, not to mention American women? Not a single American woman is on Seagate's staff as a research scientist.

"Frankly, I think a lot of young American people don't want to go through the kind of Ph.D. program that this requires. It's a lot of hard work," said Kryder, shaking his head. "We draw from a much larger pool of applicants from around the world who are incredibly dedicated and can do the job."

Among the 80 Ph.D.s among the staff, many are graduates from American universities (Kurtas went to Northeastern University; Ju received his at Brown University), many of them former employees of other high-tech firms. By the time they've come to Seagate, they probably have assimilated American culture fairly well, Kurtas said.

"We try hard to understand each other, and it's not actually that hard, since what we produce here is ideas. I guess you could say there are a lot of people here who speak different languages, but at the end of the day, we all speak the same language -- of math and science," Kurtas said.