What it's like working for American companies as an Australian
seangoedecke.com118 points by gfysfm a day ago
118 points by gfysfm a day ago
I am Brazilian-Australian, worked for a few years in Australia and then moved to Sweden and worked for an American company here.
The company was Swedish, but was eventually acquired by an American corporation.
One of the projects we were working on started getting delayed due to endless discussions about which tech to use and how to architect things (the companies used completely different stacks) so we could integrate everything. One day, we had a video call with one big Manager from Florida. The guy just started shouting like a maniac and treated everyone, including us and his American team, like crap.
That was so incredibly surreal to everyone on our side, as even the tiniest raising of your voice in our office would've been extremely unusual, and Swedes are one of the most conflict-avoiding people you can find anywhere. After the call was over, everyone was all thinking like "what the fuck just happened" but no one said much at all... we just kind of pretended that did not happen and slowly went back to playing some ping pong and calmly sitting at our desks and doing some work with headphones on.
After a few months, only I was left on the team as everyone just found elsewhere to work.... I followed a couple of months after.
There's an additional issue with timezones I'm surprised he didn't mention - you're off by a day. This means nobody is around on your Monday because it's US Sunday and conversely US Friday is your Saturday morning. This means you either need to adapt to having 4 days a week of overlap, or you need to shift your life to accomodate 7am meetings on a Saturday morning.
There's also regular chaos with the mis-matched DST windows meaning meetings will swing about by 1-2 hours multiple times as the seasons change depending on whose calendar created them, it's manageable but inevitably there's misses and confusion or someone's 8am suddenly becomes a 6am without rescheduling.
The bigger issue however is if you're the AU leg of a global firm with a US plurality: If there are teams in the UK or EU for example there's simply no way of operating with overlap that doesn't involve someone regularly having meetings in the deeply inhospitable early hours of the morning.
I worked in NZ for SV companies for the past 20 years (until I retired) - I essentially worked US time but NZ days - so I got up early (5am winter, 7am summer and worked US core hours 10am-6pm) but didn't work US Fridays and got a lot done on my Monday. After 5 years I switched jobs and they agreed that I'd never have to start work at 5am (so 11am-7pm CA time) - that worked really well
I worked for an Australian company from Germany and did similarly (I worked German work days but would start early ~5:30-6am to have some overlap with the Australians - they never expected me to work "core hours", just to have some overlap).
It wasn't too bad! Much easier than working with west coast US (where their 9am is my 6pm - I don't want to work late but I don't mind working early).
9am in Pacific time is probably more like your 3-4am (depends on where in Aus you live) - certainly you could create 'core hours' 1-5pm Pacific time which would at worse be your morning (early morning in your winter)
The Northern/Southern Hemisphere DST issue affects all kinds of places. I had the same issue between the US & Brazil, for example, where east coast US time difference between Sao Paulo is either 2hr (yay) or 4hr (boo), or three hours during the "swing shifts" between the dates each country observes the DST change.
Similarly, the "three continent" meeting scheduling problem exists with many combos, too, especially if you have teams in both Western Europe / Middle East / Africa and anywhere in ASEAN.
Reminds me of the Carmageddon postmortem. They had administration and HR in London, and all the devs in Sydney.
In the postmortem they noted that this worked very well because they would all be working at the same time...
I currently work for a YC company based in New York, with myself in Australia after moving back to be closer to family and have switched my work schedule to be from Tuesday to Saturday to align with EST as you mentioned. Not exactly the most pleasant working hours but my coworkers have been pretty accommodating to make the essential meetings as early as possible.
One slight benefit that makes the Friday to Saturday shift more tolerable is that I won’t start the following work week until Monday night/Tuesday morning, so my weekend nights are Saturday and Sunday, so losing out on Friday night isn’t too bad. Definitely not a schedule for the faint of heart though.
Yeah, timezones (and different days) are an issue for regular meetings. At my last job, US east coast to Europe worked pretty well. We'd be reasonable morning time on the east coast and Europe would be reasonable mid to late afternoon time. But the (for me occasional) call to Singapore was always a pain for someone.
I found being in the US east coast in teams spread across Europe and the US to have the advantage of being able to touch base with anyone fairly easily but the disadvantage of never getting that natural quiet period.
I don’t see how us east cost <-> apac is really feasible on any kind of regular basis.
It depends if you're a morning person or not. I used to manage teams in India & China from the east coast and it was usually a-ok having 2-3 hours of overlap each morning. It's FAR harder from the west coast and there's really no way around having evening (US) meetings since the alternative is asking the remote team to be in the office quite late.
That said, this is also why many Asian teams get accustomed to working US hours -- essentially "2nd shift" -- to accommodate west coast overlap.
I think daily/weekly you'd shift work hours (that what I do when I have a meeting like that). Global meetings are always a pain, though I'd say the worst meetings are when US-based folks plan a meeting based on their local timezone, as opposed to UTC, because it always ends up at 3am in Australia (so I bow out of those).
We have US/UK/Shanghai teams that for years we tried to combine into one big distributed team, which never worked well. Usually big meetings happened twice, once for US/UK and once for UK/Shanghai, and on the rare occasions they wanted one big meeting it was centered on UK time, so US people had to get up really early and Shanghai people were on really late.
Then there was one time when both of us in the US happened to have taken the next day off, and we're both naturally night owls, so I suggested just for that one time moving the meeting 6-7 hours earlier on a different day - we'd both still be awake, it would be just before the start of the UK workday, and just before 5pm for Shanghai, so for once they didn't have to get online late.
We didn't do it because the UK group didn't want to get up an hour earlier.
We had occasional interlock meetings, briefings, and webinars but it pretty much meant that from the east coast you were doing them at 10 or 11pm. I'm sure senior execs did more frequently. We didn't really have people on the west coast, especially latterly when I was there.
Up to 5 or 6 hours is a reasonable range for routine interactions.
I did US East Coast / Shanghai for one project. We got really good at asynchronous messaging, and that went a long way.
Still didn't fix the 1-workday latency for discussions, though.
A lot of companies have definitely gotten better at asynchronous communications over the past few years. Not perfect for everything but if you can keep the weird hour calls to a dull roar it's probably more manageable than even 10 years ago.
> Americans tend to be enthusiastic about their company mission - in the extreme, believing that they’re saving the world
I would explain this as commitment signaling. I don’t know if they really believe it, but they want to show they are part of the team and the talking points.
Adults use language in a less literal way than introverted engineers may be comfortable with.
This also seems generational to me. I’m an American younger than 30 and the only people at my company who embody this are the senior people over the age of 40.
Maybe that's just because the stakes of losing your job are higher once you move up the ladder, have kids etc.
As a Gen Xer, I figured this was a millennial thing. Given the age ranges you cite that may still be the case. I don't work with enough Gen Zers to paint them with a broad brush.
But most of the people I've worked with who wanted feel "part of something" had been 10+ years younger than me.
There is no quicker way to get yourself put on the back burner than failing to pick up the pom poms. If you are valued by management you will get a few warnings but other than that you go one a silent list for the next restructuring or making an example of.
>the only people at my company
So your sample size is 1 company? That's very anecdotal. And you're younger than 30, so you probably haven't worked at many companies. There are plenty of people in plenty of other companies that you've never met.
> Americans tend to be enthusiastic about their company mission - in the extreme, believing that they’re saving the world
As a european working in a US company, my experience is a lot of this is just hypocritical corporate bullshit.
The difference can be incredible between the public communication which usually sounds like a huge parody and the opinion people really share behind the curtain in more private meetings.
Also being european you are usually used to be able to swear quite easily at work. What we perceive from the US culture that comes to us through movies/series would make us think it would be the same in the USA. However it is the opposite. People swear a lot less at work in the USA in my experience. At least online.
I will say there are specifically some things my fellow Australians do have do in the USA that we would not in our home country.
To my fellow Australians; when you go for the big tech job interview you often have to memorize the company mission statement and values. Yes it's a complete wank. You'll never use it internally. But i have seriously been asked about the companies mission statement for Meta, Google, Amazon in those respective interviews.
Utterly insane from an Australian point of view - you'd get pass and a mark for directness for saying "i don't bloody well know".
I have heard of mission statements being asked by international companies operating in Australia but again you'd pass if the interviewer themselves was Australian since it's 100% seen as bullshit by every level of Australians from management to employees on the ground.
eg. Wtf is a mission statement and why am i being asked thread on the Australia subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/australian/comments/1f7srnw/what_is...
Reading this thread I’m realizing maybe Americans better understand organizational politics, and this social technology is an unappreciated contributor to productivity.
I agree this kind of thing is performative, but let’s steel man the other side. You are looking for a place to spend 8 hours a day doing your most skillful craft, and you don’t want to know what the organization is trying to achieve?
Yes I understand it’s performative, but why wouldn’t you take 10 minutes to indicate you are doing that kind of serious thinking?
It’s like asking a boss for guidance without doing groundwork to make a recommendation.
‘Adult’ and ‘serious thinking’ are not the words I’d use to describe this behaviour.
It’s extremely bizarre and cult-like when viewed from other cultures and comes across as insincere (which it is) and the very opposite of serious thinking - it is performative loyalty of the type that kings used to ask of their subjects.
American mission statements often have very little to do with what the company does, or even the values they actually hold (as opposed to profess to hold). They do not usually describe the work to be done.
> it is performative loyalty of the type that kings used to ask of their subjects.
Master/servant is a relationship as old as time. You can acknowledge and navigate it or pretend it doesn't exist.
In Australia, nobody sees themself as servant, and you will be torn down if you see yourself as a master.
Managers are just people like everybody else and have a job with different tasks.
The Manhattan project, which by some accounts was a fairly large and complicated project, had no mission statement known to most people doing their daily work to who knows what end. Sure, you could go with "stick it to the nazis", and they did have some advertising spam to that effect, but that's down in the "like, duh?" (or less polite forms) as far as mission statements go.
Put another way, how does reciting the mission statement differ from a loyalty dance for chairman Mao? I get that many have an economic (or life) imperative to go along with what the clownsuite orders, but these same people make fun of island savages in the Pacific for "cargo culting".
I don't see how this comment relates. I'm telling you how to get hired and succeed at a corporation.
Company level mission statements tend to be too vague to be relevant or helpful and they really don't actually apply anyway. They may as well all say "we do good things" when the actual underlying goal is "make money".
I do believe in the "When in Rome do as the Romans do" mindset though so i'll happily memorize it 2 mins before the interview. It's just that i 100% openly refuse to accept they are anything other than virtue signalling.
All that might be true, and it’s still a bad political move to show up without preparation that indicates you did more than upload a resume.
You’re basically saying “i don’t know how to present myself and I’m going to cause problems for your organization”.
It’s like “why can’t I show up at 2 PM and work until 11. I get my work done”. You just have no awareness and are a liability for your boss.
Those manifestos are designed to sound good. They are not designed to express what the company is trying to achieve or rewards.
There is zero serious thinking involved in learning them. It is all pretensions, you know it, management knows it, employees know it.
OP understands organizational politics well - they learned them and they understand it was for passing the interview.
Must be an SV thing? I've never been asked to recite a mission statement for a company where I was interviewing (or even working at, for that matter). Most assume I don't know much about the company and a good part of the introductory chit-chat in an interview is them telling me about their history and what it is that they do.
I live in the bay area and have worked for several of the big tech companies and startups. The only time I can remember anyone discussing mission statements was when I interviewed at AirBnB. They had a full interview (30 mins IIRC) just about the company mission. The explained that it was very important to the CEO. I apparently failed that interview and they made me do another with a different person about the same topic. It was very awkward.
Meta, Google, and Amazon are outliers, though. Part of their schtick originally was that they're trying to build a cult, although my sense is that may have relaxed a bit as they've grown. IBM used to do a similar thing back in the day.
I've worked in tech in the US as an immigrant for over 40 years, and never been quizzed on a mission statement.
One of the US company’s I work for asks the questions about 'our' mission statement. It's used as a way to see if someone has checked out the website, page 1, bold, and in capitals.
I'd call this a California thing — or, more broadly, a behavior by people who want to align themselves culturally with Silicon Valley.
Work with some Chicagoans (or Midwesterners in general) and you'll get a lot less BS.
Obviously this is painting with broad strokes, as different types of people live everywhere.
This does not align with my experience. Midwest middle aged folks at boring corporations are pros.
> Americans tend to be enthusiastic about their company mission - in the extreme, believing that they’re saving the world
This is more of a Silicon Valley thing, isn't it? I've worked for or interacted with plenty of non-tech large enterprises where that's certainly not true.
It's certainly more of a thing in SV, but it's not just a SV thing. The US in general is about as far removed from the rest of the world on this axis as SV is from the rest of the US. Experiences vary, of course.
> If I lived in San Francisco, I’d have ~100x more available jobs to apply to if I lost my current one.
In some sense this also fits under culture. The Australian government has historically been fairly technophobic (they really have a thing against privacy - the ban on effective encryption springs to mind, they've tried to ban Monero too but that doesn't work because crypto is too slippery). I also vaguely recall from years ago that we make it hard to use equity as a significant part of employee compensation. Overall Australia lacks the free-wheeling spirit of letting people do things that works so well in tech so I assume there are a lot of other small barriers I don't know about (eg, I'd bet companies like Uber would have been killed in the crib if it started in Australia). We also have a subtly anti-cheap-energy policy that must make life hard for data centres.
We've produced some big tech success stories like Atlassian but when you combine dubious regulation with the larger US capital markets there isn't really much to recommend about Australia. I wouldn't suggest putting money into the Australian tech scene and the market has probably sniffed that out.
> Australians typically play down their achievements, while Americans like to talk themselves up
Although this is obviously a generalization, it is broadly accurate in my experience. And it can be a real problem, for example at performance review time when employees are expected to write self reviews, which obviously involve putting their work in the best possible light. Also just general regular status reports that are widely distributed and so highly visible.
As background, I am a US based manager, originally from the UK, with US, Europe and Australia based reports. I regularly get told by the Australians, and most but not all Europeans, that they really struggle with the expectation that they need to present their achievements for performance review or general status updates in ways that feel uncomfortably boastful to them. Most US reports on the other hand (but definitely not all) have less problem with this.
This means it is often down to the manager to make sure their employees are rated fairly by upper management. Since I struggle with the self-promotion myself (being from the UK!) I can empathise and try to work with reports to apply the appropriate correction factors, but it is definitely a real issue.
Self-reviews are absolutely the stupidest thing. It's a way for the manager to foist off the work of writing the review onto the person being reviewed, and a way to guarantee that the reviews are glowing piles of bullshit because of course the sensible thing to do if you are writing your own review is to oversell your achievements and not discuss any deficiencies.
You're the manager -- it's your job to evaluate and review the performance of your reports. Not theirs.
self-reviw can be good if it is about a honest conversation "what do you think how well you are doing" and then get an honest outside view for comparison. Often one feels and about something which somebody else didn't notice and lack somewhere else.
However most reviews I have seen are about paying the system, not honest evaluation of problems and praise of what's good.
Apparently NPS scoring done on big international corporations does take this into account.
As an American who worked for an Australian company, the time change was actually great. I had my whole morning to do as I pleased, since Australia is several hours behind the USA... although it's tomorrow.
I never thought of Australians under- or over-touting their professional achievements. I did find my coworkers very respectful and supportive.
Worked for American companies for 25 years. Generally Americans come across as more confident, and yet conform to hierarchy in a way I've never seen en-masse in Australian culture. It always seemed to be that only the most weirdo Americans are blind to relative status, whereas for many Australians it's the norm?
Employment-at-will takes some cultural adjustment, too. But for tech folks tends to be a net win. You just need to set your expectations accordingly!
> It always seemed to be that only the most weirdo Americans are blind to relative status, whereas for many Australians it's the norm?
As an Irish person, I have the impression that Australia is very similar to Ireland in this regard. I came across a survey years ago that asked a question along the lines of "in the workplace, is the manager/boss higher status or equal to the staff they manage?" (paraphrasing because it was years ago). Ireland scored amongst the highest that said the boss and other staff are equals. I imagine Australia would too, while the US would score lower on that scale (as did some other EU countries).
I now live in Vietnam, and somehow I've ended up being the boss, with a team of around 20 Vietnamese people. While they are diligent and skilled workers, the level of deference they show to me makes me deeply uncomfortable and I have to keep reminding them to talk to me like a human being - call me by my name instead of "sir", for example. But it's a losing battle.
Could it be kinder, at times, to play to the cultural norm? If people have been raised to say "sir" to their boss, could asking them to do otherwise cause them discomfort without benefit?
I have struggled with this myself, as I don't believe work hierarchy should convey any fundamental difference between people, and we are best off treating each other as equals.
I'd say thats due to:
(a) Australian culture being quite egalitarian, ie people there see other people just as people rather how much money or power they have, etc and
(b) American management being more of the power tripping variety, so they're more likely to wield their power in a threatening and retaliatory fashion, and so underlings tend to be more deferential, including the at-will employment, as you say.
> American management being more of the power tripping variety
That’s not an explanation. That’s just restating it. Why would Australians be less tempted by power?
Could it be that Americans are more exposed to management and hierarchy in their youth?
Power tripping isn't really about being "tempted by power", rather it's when you become self-righteous because you got granted (some) power.
If you want some sweeping generalisation for why Americans are more prone to this sin, how about the various old cultural patterns of thought that fit under the header "manifest destiny"?
Citing an 19th century political movement is not an explanation for why Americans would be “power tripping”.
What practice or ethos has descended from that time which is currently reinforced?
When the UK startup I worked for was bought by a US company, that meant the support functions were consolidated and the IT guys had to join the US centralised IT dept. They visited the US, and the culture shock started to bite when the head of IT got a standing ovation just for walking into the room. (And this was an engineering company, so the head of IT wasn't the CTO).
Employment security has a lot to do with it. Obviously you can’t completely ignore leaders, and if you refuse reasonable instructions you can be fired. But you have a lot more freedom to rock the boat and share your opinion.
You can not be fired just because you hurt a managers feelings by disagreeing with them.
And you don't lose all (long term) healthcare coverage if you're fired in Aus.
Regarding the culture bit: I feel that Erin Meyer's "The Culture Map" [1] should be high on any reading list around how to work in a remote environment, especially as a manager. Of course, every individual is different and not everything needs to be taken at face value, but it provides a nice framework to think about how/why other teammates may approach situations in a specific way.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22085568-the-culture-map
I had a, kind of, opposite experience. I worked for an Australian company as an American in the US.
My experience with the culture was the opposite. The Oz folks tended to be boastful with a chip on their shoulder. This was annoying as an employee but caused real problems when dealing with regulators and other companies. A big successful aus company just can’t throw its weight around in the US like at home.
That said, they eventually figured it out and have become quite successful.
I made some great friends at that company and picked up some Aussie slang that I still use today.
What sector was the company in? I’m an Australian that has worked a lot with US companies.
The most boastful Australian companies I have worked with have also been the least effective.
Consultancies tend to be very boastful, but they have to be constantly selling themselves.
The other boastful culture I worked in was a big bank.
They had some of the worst over-complicated software, and a horrible culture, it seemed like the only way to rise in the company was salesmanship.
It was Computershare. Now dominant in their industry. But when I worked for them they had just entered the US market.
I don’t know if that’s an argument for or against the culture then or if it has any relation to their culture now.
And frankly I doubt that this national attribution of corporate culture is likely real. I’ve only worked for the one Australian company, I’ve worked for many American ones and the culture around self promotion has been widely different across them.
Hey! So did I! Macquarie Capital was my first employer out of college. Loved working for Aussies. Hilarious bunch.
Wow you mean it’s not accurate to generalise to an entire culture from a few personal experiences? Color me shocked
> Australians typically play down their achievements, while Americans like to talk themselves up. Americans naturally read to Australians as boastful, while Australians naturally read to Americans as meek
American culture is not a monolith. This can vary greatly in different regions or different subcultures.
Suppose you very crudely modelled the spectrum of American attitudes on this topic using some kind of bell curve. I don't think many people across the pond realise just how far apart the American and Australian bell curve means would be. These kind of "the truth is unknowable" truisms may sound wise but don't really teach us very much about reality.
On average, Australian culture views anyone, who even passively demonstrates any significant level of achievement, with a high degree of suspicion. Australians make a national sport of cutting down people who excel in any way. Sure, there are sub-cultures there which can vary considerably from this general trend, but even they feel the influence of this prevailing attitude. The end outcome is that Australians tend to go to considerable effort to hide the things that may single them out as excelling among their peers, and emphasise those things which make them similar. (A few months ago the CEO of the most powerful retail company in Australia gave an interview attempting to reduce public ire at their price gouging tactics, dressed in the uniform of a shelf stacker from their supermarket chain. I'm not saying this could not have happened in America, but there it would have probably been seen as a stunt or a statement... in Australia dressing any other way would have raised eyebrows, and in fact most people initially failed to even notice it for the PR manipulation that it was.)
Geographic proximity will always play a role in bringing cultural norms together, and while the US is a big place, the US population throughout the 20th century had incredible mobility, going where the jobs were, which helped to tighten up that bell curve.
I think we (Australians) have a real lack of effort=success stories to draw from; if someone has wealth it was probably inherited.
In the US if you have wealth it's plausible that you had a great idea that got acquired, or a great skill.
In the US, the most likely cause of someone being wealthy is that their parents were wealthy.
But almost every wealthy American tells a story about how they did it by themselves, ignoring the schools that they attended, the services which were available to them, the people their parents associated with, and the ability to make high-risk investments because they had a built-in security net.
80% of US millionaires are first generation
Yet economic mobility, measured in terms of the likelihood that you die in a different income decile than you were born into, is lower in the USA than almost anywhere else in the developed world.
How to reconcile? It's fairly easy ... there aren't that many millionaires. The US has a society, culture and economy that allows for their occurence perhaps "better" than most other places. But this doesn't reflect the likely economic pathway that most of the population experiences in life.
There are many examples of Australians that have started middle class or even poorer and become wealthy (multi millionaires, a few billionaires) through their own business efforts.
What's lacking is a general habit of boasting about this, being wealthy, letting others in the country (ie. yourself) know about it.
You can find first generation pretty wealthy Australians in trucking, factory ownership, real estate, mining, warehouse volume sales, etc. Of those the ones most likely to be flash about their cash would be the real estate crowd, success in house sales is hard to come by without prominent self promotion.
Sure, I don't disagree that they exist as people, but as prominent stories in the culture they generally don't; outside of Lindsey fox I can't think of any...
Real estate wealth is a bit prominent, bit doesn't really have the same tone as designing or building something, more a reflection of our current dirt obsession.
You used a shit example with the Woolies CEO - he was immediately absolutely reamed on every medium because of the sheer transparency of the stunt - him in his shirt with name tag in an empty shop and then chucking a wobbly when he didn’t like the questions. He blew it and he looked like a tool.
I find the obsession we have with saying we have a problem with success absolutely does not translate to my lived experience here. I see it on the national stage where the moment someone fucks up everyone piles on, but usually they’ve been on a path to being a flog for a long time anyway and they need, at the very least, a reality check.
Think how much better Elon musk’s headspace could be if one person in his circle had told him ‘you are mortal’ regularly along his journey of multiple triumphs
It's definitely a generalisation, but in my experience - and others who I've spoken to - this is broadly correct.
Matches my experience working with SF based companies.
But that's kind of my point. That might be the culture in SF, but that doesn't mean it is the culture everywhere in America. SF has its own distinct culture. And that is very different from the culture in, say, West Virginia.
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I think in the tech sector, as an engineer (what I am) I do not feel tied to my company for healthcare. I can snap my fingers and have another job with full coverage in a month, earlier if I’m willing to take a mid tier job rather than top tier. I’ve never thought about being without healthcare.
I also served in the Marines and grew up in Massachusetts, two places that really embrace sarcasm and gallows humor. Merging into the California tech sector, the enthusiasm, sunny demeanor and inability to take being picked on as a demonstration of affection… it was a difficult adjustment.
> Maybe I'm just a cynical aussie, but how can you possibly be enthusiastic for (eg.) putting ads infront of as many eyeballs as possible?
You can be enthusiastic about a job done well, even if it’s not necessarily one you believe worth doing.
This looks like an assertion with spotty applicability
Please believe me when I tell you that I am not enthusiastic about insurance and/or callcenter operations.
What I’m enthusiastic about is serving those applications to country sized populations.
I’m fairly certain I’m not the only one.
I am enthusiastic about using quality call centres and I value the service. I give the respondent respect. A niece who worked in one told me some firms give staff a daily discretionary spend to make small problems go away and I believe it's worth it, and it's worth being respectful to the person trying to help you, if they have this ability then it reflects their autonomy, your value as a customer and how nice you are.
She said dealing with the live shark lost in the mail was a highspot (a lot of strange delivery issues in the modern shop from home world)
I’m not saying we don’t need them. Obviously they provide a valuable service and I wish the best for our agents and customers.
But the problem is about as boring as they come. There’s nothing exciting about making a callcenter operate well, even though it’s often done wrong. Probably why we can (apparently) eat the market.
> When your access to healthcare is directly tied to your enthusiasm for the company mission, it seems to me that you _must_ display that enthusiasm even if it's a facade.
I get what you're implying, but I want to point out that healthcare is not "directly tied to your enthusiasm." I'm sure somebody can post their anecdote about being fired for not having enough pep in their step at work, but enthusiasm for the company mission is not a typical requirement for employment. Furthermore, despite the pervasive online meme to the contrary, the US does have a substantial social safety net — we devote more of our GDP to public social spending¹ than Canada or Australia. It's completely fair to say that the outcomes can vary, but it's not fair to say that Americans are by and large left rudderless without help from the state if they lose their job.
¹ https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
think you're grossly misunderstanding what social safety net means - public spending is not the same thing as a safety net. the public healthcare system that countries like Gemrnay have is an example of a social safety net.
I'm not misunderstanding it. In fact, I think it's a misunderstanding of the current zeitgeist that "public safety net" must necessarily include a public healthcare system. If that were true, then a country like Switzerland wouldn't qualify as having a public safety net.
In the US, our public safety net consists of Medicaid, Medicare, unemployment benefits and SNAP, among other things. Like I said in my previous comment, the outcomes/efficacy of our safety net versus Germany's safety net are totally different, and it's fair to criticize that. But the spending reflects our country's intent to provide a safety net, even if it's far from perfect.
>your access to healthcare is directly tied to your enthusiasm for the company mission
No, it's not. First, they're legally required to provide it so long as you work there, whether you're enthusiastic or not. Even if you got fired for not being enthusiastic enough, by law you can stay on the same health insurance plan for 18 months. If you still haven't found a job after 18-36 months, or just don't like the company's plan, you can get your own individual plan, or look for a plan for low-income people like medicaid.
The US healthcare system has its problems for sure, but you seem confused about what they are.
You are technically correct--the best kind of correct! However, if you step back and look at the big picture, the US's tethering of health care to employment is probably a big driver of lots of critical decisions around employment. It's definitely one of the big reasons guys like me with a family will never voluntarily quit my job and go try a startup. Or just semi-retire when I turn 55 (unless I find health care). And COBRA tends to be massively expensive, so while your health care is technically available, it's not even remotely the same as being employed.
>And COBRA tends to be massively expensive
It's pretty similar to a comparable marketplace plan and even to Medicare for the first couple of years (which is tied to what your recent W-2 income is/was). The issue is that your employer is presumably chipping in a lot of your current insurance costs as part of your benefits. But, yes, if you're paying for insurance on your own, it's expensive because you're covering the whole thing.
I joke with my friends that one day I am going to get a job with Lockheed, Raytheon, etc. and be uncomfortably enthusiastic about the mission. Some sort of workplace live art project.
However, I have luckily only worked at companies in my career that I could really get behind the mission and have in my view a reasonably positive work output. Letting people save money for retirement, or start a business is pretty good. I don't know how my view would change if I worked for something more morally gray.
In my experience (outside of bigtech but in the B-tier of VC-funded startups), "change the world" hyperbole is rare, but most founders and founding devs are pretty confident they can improve some specific topic for some specific niche of people. And it's sometimes even true for the ones that provide real services.
The missing word is competitive. People want to win. So much of the rest of the world just wants to survive till the next day.
I can assure you, your US colleagues are as cynical as you are, but in America you fake a positive attitude because what the hell else are you supposed to do but make the best of it?
Generally, the West Coast of the US is the most fake positive and the East Coast is the most blunt and outwardly cynical. Middle America tends to be friendly yet direct.
At the end of the day, I don't think many people would be doing this if they really had a choice (e.g. a few million in the bank, house paid off, etc), but it is what it is. You still need to play the game of life and make the most out of it.
The circle jerk enthusiasm and camraderie really does help to keep a lot of people motivated and focused on providing for the company. While it might feel over the top, it serves a purpose, and gives people a sense of community and belonging which is often hard to find in the modern world. Plus it stops them from being depressed thinking about how mundane their life is, spending 60+ hours a week fixing the CI pipeline.
Trust me, nobody gives a flying shit about their companies dogshit useless mission or downright useless and laughable company values.
They just pretend to in order to get brownie points with upper management. It's just playing the game.
And I'm convinced the ones making the values themselves do so to see who will fall in line.
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The morally negligent corporate poster is my favourite stereotype on this website
The irony of your attitude is that it's very likely to result is a really quite mediocre team, though you might not perceive it that way.
> If you were on my team I’d manage you out. People like you are a cancer in organizations, always bringing everyone down.
If you have this absolutist attitude why would you expect anyone to ever be honest with you? Of course people are going to pretend that they believe in the company mission. Not doing so puts their livelihood at risk because of people like you.
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You, on the other hand, are obviously the epitome of positivity and not bringing others down.
This is literally the best example of toxic workplace positivity and why it's bad I've seen on here.
Nah. Just don’t want to work with negative Nancy. You bring everyone down.
Are you aware that your attitude also affects everyone in a negative way (and you just don't care?), or are you oblivious to the damage you do to people?
Or maybe for you it's all about the output and how good your numbers look, and damaging people is just a price to pay?
I sense a ticked off Ads product manager.
Google perhaps?
You can look at your own court case documents for your own estimated % of people that have ublock origin installed. Hint: it's large.
Perhaps there's a message in that number :-)
Not like the ads industry pretending they're creating value when in fact it's purely value extraction is anything new.
And of course, those same documents showed all sorts of lying and cheating.
All this is helping people, obviously :-)
Helping you, perhaps. What's the saying? Understand, salary, etc etc.
You sound like a dream to work for. Do you go around asking people who aren't beaming with an idiotic smile if they have a case of the Mondays too?
Uh huh honey. Newsflash: Most people are doing their jobs because they have to to get by, and don’t have the choice to work on socially-useful-but-not-lucrative stuff.
A lot of people are deeply cynical about the front they have to put on at work, and a lot of people are also self-selecting into roles and workplaces requiring less of a front.
> I’ve also grown to love the rhythm of busy mornings and deep-work afternoons.
I live on the west coast, and 95% of the people I work with are either east coast or in central timezone. I find that I too enjoy the rhythm of communication during the mornings and deep-work in the afternoons, although it's a lot less extreme than the author's situation.
> Australians typically play down their achievements, while Americans like to talk themselves up
You can boast, as an Australian, even using dirty double entendres in reference to your sexual prowess. The rules are that you have to be using an American accent, and it has to be your turn fronting AC/DC.
You can also just refer to AC/DC as the second greatest band in history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wJzzspiwK0
I worked for a California based American tech company while living in Perth, Australia for the last two years. All of what the OP says rings true, but I can tell that he is living on the East Coast of Australia because living in Perth we have literally no common business hours with the US West Coast which is brutal. I had to start work at midnight and work through the night for Zoom meetings and customer interactions and work on Saturday morning.
They job pays well and the people are lovely, and Australian culture has become a LOT more like the US over the past decade. Now we even have Black Friday sales but no conception that was invented because of the US Thanksgiving holiday.
> and Australian culture has become a LOT more like the US over the past decade
How? What little changes have you noticed?
Good to hear from another Australian.
The tech industry is completed dead in Australia atm. I have been job hunting overseas in the EU as a result after the layoffs of 2022 but its damn hard.
As an American from a region with an atypically dry and reserved culture, the Australia attitude sounds nice.
Also the Americans don’t work barefoot
Canadian here- worked for Salesforce in Sydney for 4 years and can say working for a big US tech company in Australia definitely has it's pros and cons. APAC business units are an after thought for companies with U.S HQs which can be good because as long as targets are getting hit no one really pays close attention to anything else going on. Biggest downside imo is career mobility/progression.
Downside is they also seem more retrenchment happy.
As an American employer I am surprised by some of the assumptions about how Americans view Australian culture.
I don't view Australian culture as unusually meek. And I also don't view Americans as boastful as a generalization either. Most Americans, in my experience, are perfectly happy sitting at the bottom of a company, being underpaid, and doing nothing to stir up any change, for better or for worse, just like everywhere else.
People with a combination of talent, vision, and confidence enough to warrant support for their stirring of the proverbial pot are rare. And I'm sure that's true everywhere.
Hi to all fellow Australian mates!
These days, you need to fake optimism in order to get or keep a job.
Reality of this industry is that if you hit any hurdle at all during your career... Whether it is your own fault or someone else's, it may trigger a kind of avalanche effect because you won't display quite the same level of extreme optimism that they want to see...
Successful people in tech tend to conflate naivety with optimism and see it as a signal of capability.
Many of them have lived in a very fortunate environment where the environment rarely worked against them so they don't understand the feeling of being thrown successive curveballs, one after another while barely trying to stay afloat.
Their idea of adversity is of a hurdle that, if you can clear it, you end up further ahead, closer to your goal. They don't see it that the hurdles many people face are set up such that if you clear it, you are still behind... The prize for clearing nearly impossible hurdles is just survival.
There are things I did in my career where all the pieces in my plan fell together, amazingly, after 2 years of work and careful strategy, with full support of team members, but it all fell apart at the end because someone with power behaved in a way which was completely counter-intuitive and not aligned with their stated goals.
I think the parent's experience has as much to do with being remote and at a satellite office as anything else. You're not going to hear a lot of bitch/moan on conference calls or even on Slack (which everyone knows in monitored).
Granted I work in Silivalley, but I'd say that above a certain level/age, if you don't show a certain base of cynicism in private you're not taken seriously. I mean, if you've seen the dotcom bust, and the 2008 collapse, you're looking at current conditions and asking whether it's worth it right now. The tension on the bubble appears to have exceeded safe parameters.
What does “whether it’s worth it right now” mean? As in, whether companies are really worth as much as they’re valued?
If you're getting paid (or have historically been like at FAANG) a significant amount in stock, you've been willing to put up with 50+ hour work weeks and crazy management schedules. If there are layoffs, management reorgs, and very high PE ratios for slow growing companies, maybe it's a good time to take a break.
> The tension on the bubble appears to have exceeded safe parameters.
Mit dem Angriff AI wird das alles in Ordnung kommen.
I played the game for a while at one of my past jobs. I knew what I was doing and that I didn't really care, but I wanted to get more money and that required playing office politics.
It did work for quite a while, that is until I had some hard times in my personal life that made keeping up the facade unbearable. Within a short period of time I had people worried about me, even though I still did all job duties completely fine.
Next thing you know I'm not a team player by HR, and I need to be more positive, etc.
Left that job shortly after. I hate this bs culture shit and refuse to play it anymore. Luckily where I'm at now doesn't care.
I can relate. I chose my current job with a pay cut because I needed something remote WFH and low-stress to allow me to process WTF happened to my career.
After being highly ambitious for almost 10 years and literally moving across the world, changing countries several times with a month's notice to find top opportunities, I found that my contributions were often neglected in the end. I would get plenty of pats on the back, but never any reward. I never once got a bonus, not once in 10 years.
One time when I asked for a raise from my boss, of a highly successful crypto project in Germany with hundreds of millions in the bank, he acknowledged that I was one of their best developers and offered a 2% salary increase... This is in crypto sector so we both understood that this doesn't even cover CPI inflation! When I suggested that I might leave if I didn't get a higher raise, he said that I was putting the entire project in jeopardy (using even harsher terms) and yet didn't offer anything more than 2%. I was told by an insider that he was paying himself at least 30k EUR per months! They had millions of cash sitting in the bank and I was on a modest senior dev salary by US standard. I had been there 2 years and was instrumental to securing their 300 million market cap blockchain and had just led a very successful refactoring of a complex sub-project in just 6 months. I still can't understand what happened. I quit. I was demoralized after that.
100000%.
I envy those who seem to keep the facade up after their own career hardships.