Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

seangoedecke.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 189 posts

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

#151

Post by kuahyeow »

msy wrote: post #20

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…

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.
2x meetings may not work for a truly distributed team where you have people all over the world. In which you will need to have 3x rotating meetings which becomes a bit harder to manage.

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

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

#152

Post by liontwist »

grey-area wrote: post #147
liontwist wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Strange journey you’ve gone on here in this thread from adults doing serious thinking about the company mission to admitting you see yourself as a sycophantic servant to your master. Other non-feudal relationships are possible based on mutual respect and honesty.

You interact with executives as if they are your coworker?

> sycophantic servant

The misunderstanding is that you believe a servant is someone held in chains and beaten with a whip. A master is someone with power and authority, and servant is someone who works for them.

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

#153

Post by [deleted] »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #142
liontwist wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is performative loyalty of the type that kings used to ask of their subjects. Master/servant is a relationship as old as time. You can acknowledge and navigate it or pretend it doesn't exist.

In Australia, nobody sees themself as servant, and you will be torn down if you see yourself as a master. Managers are just people like everybody else and have a job with different tasks.

[deleted]

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

#154

Post by liontwist »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #145
liontwist wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this comment relates. I'm telling you how to get hired and succeed at a corporation.

You need to listen more and talk less.

I’m sorry, did you have something to contribute?

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

#156

Post by dang »

mmmBacon wrote: post #27
denkmoon wrote: post #2

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 s…

[flagged]

Yikes, please don't cross into personal attack. We have to ban accounts that do that, and it looks like you've posted this kind of thing before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41880411.

Fortunately when I skimmed through your comment history I saw many more good comments, so this should be easy to fix. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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

#157

Post by dang »

sahila wrote: post #29
mmmBacon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

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

#158

Post by com2kid »

pythonguython wrote: post #104
liontwist wrote: post #94

> Americans tend to be enthusiastic about their company mission - in the extreme, believing that they’re saving the world I would explain this as commitment signaling. I don’t know if they really believe it, but they want to show they are part of the team and the talking points. Adults use language in a less literal way than introverted engineers may be comfortable with.

This also seems generational to me. I’m an American younger than 30 and the only people at my company who embody this are the senior people over the age of 40.

It's because us millennials came of age at a time when there was massive optimism that computers and the Internet would make the world a much better place. From equalizing education through online resources to bringing people around the world together through online discourse and intellectual discussion.

Most of that didn't happen of course (although Khan academy has helped tons of people), but we were raised to believe that the software we wrote was going to help people.

It is sad that Gen Z doesn't believe that, it signifies a large cultural shift in the computer geek culture.

Fwiw I have written software that saved lives, and I still believe software can do a lot of good in this world. We should aim to create things throughout our life, using the skills that we have, that make the world a better place.

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

#159

Post by com2kid »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #98
liontwist wrote: post #94

> 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.

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 the 90s Microsoft's mission statement was to get a PC in every house.

To accomplish this, and Microsoft did pull it off, they worked to commoditize every aspect of PCs, and they slowly drove the profits of PC OEMs down to almost zero. To ensure software existed on those PCs, Microsoft ran a massive training and certification program for engineers and IT.

Google used to live by its mission statement to organize all the world's information. They started up a program to scan almost every book in the world! There wasn't even a profit motive for it, it was something they did because it aligned with their mission statement.

Software company mission statements used to mean something.

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

#160

Post by ggm »

Aeolun wrote: post #85
ggm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

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.

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)

Post reply on HN