14 ms·

What it's like working for American companies as an Australian

138 points by gfysfm 2y ago

denkmoon 2y ago
I'm an Australian working for a US big tech company, the culture thing is interesting to me. What I see from corp and the US side very much matches the "Americans tend to be enthusiastic about their company mission - in the extreme, believing that they’re saving the world" statement, but I always wonder how genuine it is? 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. 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?
- Jcampuzano2 2y ago
  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.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- Aeolun 2y ago
  > 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.
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  - jjtheblunt 2y ago
    This looks like an assertion with spotty applicability
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      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.
      - ggm 2y ago
        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)
        Aeolun 2y ago
        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.
        ggm 2y ago
        I'm not an entrepreneur, or want to be one but I think There’s nothing exciting about making a callcenter operate well, even though it’s often done wrong is a bit of a call-to-action signal. Somebody should feel passionate bout this, it has high value (social) outcomes. I would think that giving staff some agency to intercede, plus improved scripting support and process-flow improvements could be huge here. The stories I hear about helpdesk who can only add file notes and not actually fix things like gas-meter address/ID mismatches (and the consequent debt collector problems for people who genuinely are NOT the user of the phantom gas meter) is just huge. There's a process-improvement opportunity here. "computer says no" is about the worst possible outcome. Measuring helpdesk effectiveness on time to close call feels like the problem (in part)
- eli_gottlieb 2y ago
  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.
- mmmBacon 2y ago
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  - OhioMan2943 2y ago
    The morally negligent corporate poster is my favourite stereotype on this website
  - sahila 2y ago
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    - mmmBacon 2y ago
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      - OhioMan2943 2y ago
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      - porridgeraisin 2y ago
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      - EliRivers 2y ago
        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?
    - dang 2y ago
      Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of what anyone else has done. Responding to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - ImaCake 2y ago
- fy20 2y ago
  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.
- goalieca 2y ago
  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.
  - madmask 2y ago
    My take is that many games are not worth even playing, let alone winning
- MarkMarine 2y ago
  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.
- imoreno 2y ago
  >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.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      >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.
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  > 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-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
  - thealig 2y ago
    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.
    - nozzlegear 2y ago
      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.
- ecshafer 2y ago
  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.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  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.
- etempleton 2y ago
  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.
Havoc 2y ago
Downside is they also seem more retrenchment happy.
jongjong 2y ago
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.
- Jcampuzano2 2y ago
  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.
  - jongjong 2y ago
    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.
roenxi 2y ago
> 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.
- a_bonobo 2y ago
  IME: There's also a weirdly un-technical career path at most places. I haven't seen many mid-sized to larger local companies that have technical career pathways. Most people have to switch to managerial pathways once they hit ~mid-career because compensation for technical roles stop growing. That means that there's just not much technical experience that accrues, and most people in leadership positions have either outdated or little technical expertise. Some outliers exist - Canva? Atlassian? - but the norm seem to be a managerial work structure, not a tech-heavy.
danielhanchen 2y ago
Hi to all fellow Australian mates!
kazinator 2y ago
> 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.
- defrost 2y ago
  You can also just refer to AC/DC as the second greatest band in history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wJzzspiwK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wJzzspiwK0
pech0rin 2y ago
Also the Americans don’t work barefoot
- FabHK 2y ago
  The side effects of going for a swim in the ocean every morning, mate.
kasey_junk 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
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- WatchDog 2y ago
  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.
  - kasey_junk 2y ago
    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.
- nunez 2y ago
  Hey! So did I! Macquarie Capital was my first employer out of college. Loved working for Aussies. Hilarious bunch.
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
bigtones 2y ago
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.
- bigthymer 2y ago
  > and Australian culture has become a LOT more like the US over the past decade How? What little changes have you noticed?
YeOldSalt 2y ago
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.
msy 2y ago
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.
- btheunissen 2y ago
  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.
  - intelVISA 2y ago
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- ghaff 2y ago
  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.
thayne 2y ago
> 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.
- averageRoyalty 2y ago
  It's definitely a generalisation, but in my experience - and others who I've spoken to - this is broadly correct.
- hetman 2y ago
  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.
  - typewithrhythm 2y ago
trimethylpurine 2y ago
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.
29athrowaway 2y ago
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- rex_gallorum2 2y ago
  Best comment of them all.
- dang 2y ago
  Please keep nationalistic flamebait off this site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
RustyRussell 2y ago
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!
- esperent 2y ago
  > 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.
  - sopooneo 2y ago
    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.
    - esperent 2y ago
      No I don't think so. Vietnamese culture is quite flexible, especially young people, and changing fast. Also, it's not like I'm making a big deal out of it. I'm not forcing anyone to call me by my name, just an occasional reminder. And I have been successful with a couple of the staff who are now relaxed and chatty with me. There's another aspect which is that age is extremely important in Vietnamese society. As a slightly older male than my staff, I get referred to as "anh" which kind of translates to "older brother", although does have some level of a respectful connotation as well. If I was considerably older I'd be referred to as "chu" (uncle) which has even more respect conferred. A close (but actually not accurate) English translation to both of these is "sir". I suspect, but haven't been able to confirm, that part of my being called sir comes from this bad translation, and when I can explain that the meaning of sir in English actually comes from the class system rather than the familial respect system, it does get through. But unfortunately there's too much of a language barrier to explain something nuanced like this.
martinpw 2y ago
> 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.
- seb1204 2y ago
  Apparently NPS scoring done on big international corporations does take this into account.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  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.
  - johannes1234321 2y ago
    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.
liontwist 2y 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.
- antonvs 2y ago
  > 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.
  - snackbroken 2y ago
    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.
- AnotherGoodName 2y ago
  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_the_logic_behind_company_mission/ https://old.reddit.com/r/australian/comments/1f7srnw/what_is...
brabel 2y 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.
- draw_down 2y ago
  [dead]
tpaschalis 2y ago
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 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22085568-the-culture-map
hx8 2y ago
> 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.
sopooneo 2y ago
As an American from a region with an atypically dry and reserved culture, the Australia attitude sounds nice.
christopher8827 2y ago
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.
- astrange 2y ago
  We hired some people from CSIRO who did that seL4 thing that was quite impressive. The lack of productization was also impressive, to the point I don't know why they did it in the first place. Maybe I should ask them.
  - christopher8827 2y ago
    Who's we? I'm mostly frontend dev + done some machine learning analysis for academic institutions.
    - astrange 2y ago
      We is my employer.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
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.
EdwardDiego 2y ago
Kiwi working for US company, I identify with this 100%.
nitwit005 2y ago
> Americans tend to be enthusiastic about their company mission - in the extreme, believing that they’re saving the world - while Australians are more liable to think “it’s just a job, mate”. There are some people who "drink the kool-aid" and believe that messaging, but it seems largely self serving. Say you want to be a yes man (or woman) to get ahead. Why limit yourself to agreeing with your boss, when you can agree and also imply they are a hero?
Rachel22 2y ago
[dead]

138 points by gfysfm 2y ago

I'm an Australian working for a US big tech company, the culture thing is interesting to me. What I see from corp and the US side very much matches the "Americans tend to be enthusiastic about their company mission - in the extreme, believing that they’re saving the world" statement, but I always wonder how genuine it is? 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. 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?

Jcampuzano2 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
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Aeolun 2y ago
> 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.
- deleted 2y ago
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- jjtheblunt 2y ago
  This looks like an assertion with spotty applicability
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    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.
    - ggm 2y ago
      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)
      - Aeolun 2y ago
        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.
        ggm 2y ago
        I'm not an entrepreneur, or want to be one but I think There’s nothing exciting about making a callcenter operate well, even though it’s often done wrong is a bit of a call-to-action signal. Somebody should feel passionate bout this, it has high value (social) outcomes. I would think that giving staff some agency to intercede, plus improved scripting support and process-flow improvements could be huge here. The stories I hear about helpdesk who can only add file notes and not actually fix things like gas-meter address/ID mismatches (and the consequent debt collector problems for people who genuinely are NOT the user of the phantom gas meter) is just huge. There's a process-improvement opportunity here. "computer says no" is about the worst possible outcome. Measuring helpdesk effectiveness on time to close call feels like the problem (in part)
eli_gottlieb 2y ago
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.
mmmBacon 2y ago
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- OhioMan2943 2y ago
  The morally negligent corporate poster is my favourite stereotype on this website
- sahila 2y ago
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  - mmmBacon 2y ago
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    - OhioMan2943 2y ago
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    - porridgeraisin 2y ago
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    - EliRivers 2y ago
      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?
  - dang 2y ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of what anyone else has done. Responding to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ImaCake 2y ago
fy20 2y ago
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.
goalieca 2y ago
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.
- madmask 2y ago
  My take is that many games are not worth even playing, let alone winning
MarkMarine 2y ago
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.
imoreno 2y ago
>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.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    >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.
nozzlegear 2y ago
> 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-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
- thealig 2y ago
  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.
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    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.
ecshafer 2y ago
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.
crooked-v 2y ago
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.
etempleton 2y ago
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.

Havoc 2y ago

Downside is they also seem more retrenchment happy.

jongjong 2y ago

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.

Jcampuzano2 2y ago
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.
- jongjong 2y ago
  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.

roenxi 2y ago

> 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.

a_bonobo 2y ago
IME: There's also a weirdly un-technical career path at most places. I haven't seen many mid-sized to larger local companies that have technical career pathways. Most people have to switch to managerial pathways once they hit ~mid-career because compensation for technical roles stop growing. That means that there's just not much technical experience that accrues, and most people in leadership positions have either outdated or little technical expertise. Some outliers exist - Canva? Atlassian? - but the norm seem to be a managerial work structure, not a tech-heavy.

danielhanchen 2y ago

Hi to all fellow Australian mates!

kazinator 2y ago

> 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.

defrost 2y ago
You can also just refer to AC/DC as the second greatest band in history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wJzzspiwK0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wJzzspiwK0

pech0rin 2y ago

Also the Americans don’t work barefoot

FabHK 2y ago
The side effects of going for a swim in the ocean every morning, mate.

kasey_junk 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
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WatchDog 2y ago
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.
- kasey_junk 2y ago
  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.
nunez 2y ago
Hey! So did I! Macquarie Capital was my first employer out of college. Loved working for Aussies. Hilarious bunch.
zeroonetwothree 2y ago

bigtones 2y ago

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.

bigthymer 2y ago
> and Australian culture has become a LOT more like the US over the past decade How? What little changes have you noticed?

YeOldSalt 2y ago

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.

msy 2y ago

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.

btheunissen 2y ago
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.
- intelVISA 2y ago
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ghaff 2y ago
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.

thayne 2y ago

> 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.

averageRoyalty 2y ago
It's definitely a generalisation, but in my experience - and others who I've spoken to - this is broadly correct.
hetman 2y ago
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.
- typewithrhythm 2y ago

trimethylpurine 2y ago

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.

29athrowaway 2y ago

[flagged]

rex_gallorum2 2y ago
Best comment of them all.
dang 2y ago
Please keep nationalistic flamebait off this site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

RustyRussell 2y ago

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!

esperent 2y ago
> 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.
- sopooneo 2y ago
  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.
  - esperent 2y ago
    No I don't think so. Vietnamese culture is quite flexible, especially young people, and changing fast. Also, it's not like I'm making a big deal out of it. I'm not forcing anyone to call me by my name, just an occasional reminder. And I have been successful with a couple of the staff who are now relaxed and chatty with me. There's another aspect which is that age is extremely important in Vietnamese society. As a slightly older male than my staff, I get referred to as "anh" which kind of translates to "older brother", although does have some level of a respectful connotation as well. If I was considerably older I'd be referred to as "chu" (uncle) which has even more respect conferred. A close (but actually not accurate) English translation to both of these is "sir". I suspect, but haven't been able to confirm, that part of my being called sir comes from this bad translation, and when I can explain that the meaning of sir in English actually comes from the class system rather than the familial respect system, it does get through. But unfortunately there's too much of a language barrier to explain something nuanced like this.

martinpw 2y ago

> 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.

seb1204 2y ago
Apparently NPS scoring done on big international corporations does take this into account.
SoftTalker 2y ago
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.
- johannes1234321 2y ago
  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.

liontwist 2y 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.

antonvs 2y ago
> 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.
- snackbroken 2y ago
  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.
AnotherGoodName 2y ago
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_the_logic_behind_company_mission/ https://old.reddit.com/r/australian/comments/1f7srnw/what_is...

brabel 2y 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.

draw_down 2y ago
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tpaschalis 2y ago

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 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22085568-the-culture-map

hx8 2y ago

> 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.

sopooneo 2y ago

As an American from a region with an atypically dry and reserved culture, the Australia attitude sounds nice.

christopher8827 2y ago

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.

astrange 2y ago
We hired some people from CSIRO who did that seL4 thing that was quite impressive. The lack of productization was also impressive, to the point I don't know why they did it in the first place. Maybe I should ask them.
- christopher8827 2y ago
  Who's we? I'm mostly frontend dev + done some machine learning analysis for academic institutions.
  - astrange 2y ago
    We is my employer.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

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.

EdwardDiego 2y ago

Kiwi working for US company, I identify with this 100%.

nitwit005 2y ago

> Americans tend to be enthusiastic about their company mission - in the extreme, believing that they’re saving the world - while Australians are more liable to think “it’s just a job, mate”. There are some people who "drink the kool-aid" and believe that messaging, but it seems largely self serving. Say you want to be a yes man (or woman) to get ahead. Why limit yourself to agreeing with your boss, when you can agree and also imply they are a hero?

Rachel22 2y ago

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