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

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While working for an Australian company recently acquired by an American company, one of the first post-merger meetings was about cross-cultural awareness. The invitation was from New York and scheduled for a Saturday at 01:00am Sydney time.

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

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...

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.

I work from New Zealand, for a quite geographically distributed team. For our team, the solution is partly:

    1. "Write everything down" culture.
    2. Rotate the regular meetings. For example, a meeting around 1000 UTC for Europe / Asia folks on Monday. Repeat the same meeting at 2000 UTC for US / Asia folks.
    3. Write good notes for each meeting, so people who could not attend can review asynchronously.

DST changes do happen every six months, or so. We mostly roll with it, and adjust the meeting times as necessary.

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.

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.

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.

Apparently NPS scoring done on big international corporations does take this into account.

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.

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...

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.

> Adults use language in a less literal way than introverted engineers may be comfortable with.

How condescending. "Adults" in other regions often do not have the facade of overenthusiasm that America/SV specifically has. It is a cultural quirk, not something specific to if someone's an introverted engineer or not.

I've worked for SV companies as an outsider as well, and it was immediately noticeable. It was like everyone had a gun to their back and were being asked to say "I love the company!". It reminded me of a Japanese company, except without the deeper authenticity granted by older social protocols.

> 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.

> 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 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

100000%.

I envy those who seem to keep the facade up after their own career hardships.

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.

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.

> and Australian culture has become a LOT more like the US over the past decade

How? What little changes have you noticed?

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