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

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?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Hi to all fellow Australian mates!