141–150 of 189 posts
I never thought of Australians under- or over-touting their professional achievements. I did find my coworkers very respectful and supportive.
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‘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…
> 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.
Managers are just people like everybody else and have a job with different tasks.
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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).
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‘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…
> 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.
You can refuse to enable such a system.
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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 mi…
I don't see how this comment relates. I'm telling you how to get hired and succeed at a corporation.
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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.
>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.
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‘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…
> 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.
Other non-feudal relationships are possible based on mutual respect and honesty.
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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 like…
1 in 12 Americans are millionaires.
America is good at generating millionaires (which ain't what it used to be)! News at 11!
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> 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…
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.
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.
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…