181–189 of 189 posts
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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.
Who's we? I'm mostly frontend dev + done some machine learning analysis for academic institutions.
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Must be an SV thing? I've never been asked to recite a mission statement for a company where I was interviewing (or even working at, for that matter). Most assume I don't know much about the company and a good part of the introductory chit-chat in an interview is them telling me about their history and what it is that they do.
I live in the bay area and have worked for several of the big tech companies and startups. The only time I can remember anyone discussing mission statements was when I interviewed at AirBnB. They had a full interview (30 mins IIRC) just about the company mission. The explained that it was very important to the CEO. I apparently failed that interview and they made me do another with a different person about the same t…
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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.
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 sli…
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> 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.
I find this thread so ridiculous. I've traveled all over and lived all over. I rarely find that peoples' perceived cultural distinctions are in line with reality. I think instead it's often just lip service to their own sense of identity.
Above, someone mentioned that Americans have an idea that there is a master and servant relation with your boss. As an American I find that shocking. I have never felt that way about my bosses nor have I ever treated an employee that way. As a lowly sys admin many years ago, I went to bars and lunches with CEOs of companies of hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm still friends with them. I'm not worth millions but we still go out for drinks and enjoy dinners together. I'm not just talking about one person. This is not rare.
We respond to people the way we think they want us to respond. Your own stereotypes about another culture will be self fulfilling because of that.
Additionally any assumption you can make, about American culture specifically, would miss the fact of American culture. We have none because we have all cultures. My kid probably hears more Hindi than English in the classroom.
To make any statement about culture in America you'd need to specify. Americans from where have a master/slave mentality? Americans from Australia? India? Pakistan? China? Japan?
Which of those are the "Americans" you're referring to? Surely you wouldn't assume each of those groups have just one culture.
> 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.
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…
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.
We had dev teams in US, EU and Asia. It worked well because most of the top leadership remained in EU to manage the business unit. The US company somehow managed to put their career ambitions aside and recognize that non-Americans are capable of making decisions
We could have meetings with teams on both sides of the globe, and reduce on-call duty because we would have devs available in office a large portion of the day.
If we needed to sync all teams, we often had two meetings with EU as the host. There were some occasional shared meetings where the US office had to start early, and the Asians stayed late, but they were the exception
We still managed to integrate with the US parent company and share the tech stack where appropriate.
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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 spiri…
Cynicism is widely known to be a problem in organizations as well as problematic for individuals. I’m not asserting anything that is not well documented.
See for example: https://hbr.org/podcast/2022/08/is-cynicism-ruining-your-org...
As far as the 2nd comment goes, it’s a bit of a stretch to call that a pattern and threaten to ban me.
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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 spiri…
Agree that this isn’t my best comment but respectfully disagree that this is a personal attack. I’m giving honest feedback regarding cynical attitudes. There’s a big difference between healthy skepticism and cynicism. Judging by the responses, some of which I’ve heard almost word for word in RL, it seems folks have a hard time distinguishing between the 2. Cynicism is widely known to be a problem in organizations as…
Also, "If you were on my team I'd manage you" pattern-matches (at least in my mind) with the internet forum trope of "thank god I never have to work with you", often used as a putdown after someone describes something they did at work that the replier doesn't like.
I certainly agree with you about cynicism and so on.
This may be one of those cases where your comment reads differently to you than it does to others because you have your intent in your head, but we don't have access to it. I'm writing this response hastily but here are some links to past explanations that go into these dynamics. Maybe they would be helpful (or maybe not).
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The other thing I wanted to say quickly is: I think your reply here is a good example of the 'rebound' effect where someone responds to a moderation comment with a different version of what they intended to say. Usually that second formulation is more informative and less provocative, and if it had been what was originally posted, would have been fine.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...