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I am Brazilian-Australian, worked for a few years in Australia and then moved to Sweden and worked for an American company here.

The company was Swedish, but was eventually acquired by an American corporation.

One of the projects we were working on started getting delayed due to endless discussions about which tech to use and how to architect things (the companies used completely different stacks) so we could integrate everything. One day, we had a video call with one big Manager from Florida. The guy just started shouting like a maniac and treated everyone, including us and his American team, like crap.

That was so incredibly surreal to everyone on our side, as even the tiniest raising of your voice in our office would've been extremely unusual, and Swedes are one of the most conflict-avoiding people you can find anywhere. After the call was over, everyone was all thinking like "what the fuck just happened" but no one said much at all... we just kind of pretended that did not happen and slowly went back to playing some ping pong and calmly sitting at our desks and doing some work with headphones on.

After a few months, only I was left on the team as everyone just found elsewhere to work.... I followed a couple of months after.

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 windows meaning meetings will swing about by 1-2 hours multiple times as the seasons change depending on whose calendar created them, it's manageable but inevitably there's misses and confusion or someone's 8am suddenly becomes a 6am without rescheduling.

The bigger issue however is if you're the AU leg of a global firm with a US plurality: If there are teams in the UK or EU for example there's simply no way of operating with overlap that doesn't involve someone regularly having meetings in the deeply inhospitable early hours of the morning.

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.
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.

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.
> 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.

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.

> Australians typically play down their achievements, while Americans like to talk themselves up

Although this is obviously a generalization, it is broadly accurate in my experience. And it can be a real problem, for example at performance review time when employees are expected to write self reviews, which obviously involve putting their work in the best possible light. Also just general regular status reports that are widely distributed and so highly visible.

As background, I am a US based manager, originally from the UK, with US, Europe and Australia based reports. I regularly get told by the Australians, and most but not all Europeans, that they really struggle with the expectation that they need to present their achievements for performance review or general status updates in ways that feel uncomfortably boastful to them. Most US reports on the other hand (but definitely not all) have less problem with this.

This means it is often down to the manager to make sure their employees are rated fairly by upper management. Since I struggle with the self-promotion myself (being from the UK!) I can empathise and try to work with reports to apply the appropriate correction factors, but it is definitely a real issue.

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.
> 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.
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.

Worked for American companies for 25 years. Generally Americans come across as more confident, and yet conform to hierarchy in a way I've never seen en-masse in Australian culture. It always seemed to be that only the most weirdo Americans are blind to relative status, whereas for many Australians it's the norm?

Employment-at-will takes some cultural adjustment, too. But for tech folks tends to be a net win. You just need to set your expectations accordingly!

> 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).
I had a, kind of, opposite experience. I worked for an Australian company as an American in the US.

My experience with the culture was the opposite. The Oz folks tended to be boastful with a chip on their shoulder. This was annoying as an employee but caused real problems when dealing with regulators and other companies. A big successful aus company just can’t throw its weight around in the US like at home.

That said, they eventually figured it out and have become quite successful.

I made some great friends at that company and picked up some Aussie slang that I still use today.

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.

As an American employer I am surprised by some of the assumptions about how Americans view Australian culture.

I don't view Australian culture as unusually meek. And I also don't view Americans as boastful as a generalization either. Most Americans, in my experience, are perfectly happy sitting at the bottom of a company, being underpaid, and doing nothing to stir up any change, for better or for worse, just like everywhere else.

People with a combination of talent, vision, and confidence enough to warrant support for their stirring of the proverbial pot are rare. And I'm sure that's true everywhere.

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.

> Australians typically play down their achievements, while Americans like to talk themselves up. Americans naturally read to Australians as boastful, while Australians naturally read to Americans as meek

American culture is not a monolith. This can vary greatly in different regions or different subcultures.

I worked for a California based American tech company while living in Perth, Australia for the last two years. All of what the OP says rings true, but I can tell that he is living on the East Coast of Australia because living in Perth we have literally no common business hours with the US West Coast which is brutal. I had to start work at midnight and work through the night for Zoom meetings and customer interactions and work on Saturday morning.

They job pays well and the people are lovely, and Australian culture has become a LOT more like the US over the past decade. Now we even have Black Friday sales but no conception that was invented because of the US Thanksgiving holiday.

> Australians typically play down their achievements, while Americans like to talk themselves up

You can boast, as an Australian, even using dirty double entendres in reference to your sexual prowess. The rules are that you have to be using an American accent, and it has to be your turn fronting AC/DC.

Regarding the culture bit: I feel that Erin Meyer's "The Culture Map" [1] should be high on any reading list around how to work in a remote environment, especially as a manager. Of course, every individual is different and not everything needs to be taken at face value, but it provides a nice framework to think about how/why other teammates may approach situations in a specific way.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22085568-the-culture-map

Canadian here- worked for Salesforce in Sydney for 4 years and can say working for a big US tech company in Australia definitely has it's pros and cons. APAC business units are an after thought for companies with U.S HQs which can be good because as long as targets are getting hit no one really pays close attention to anything else going on. Biggest downside imo is career mobility/progression.
Good to hear from another Australian.

The tech industry is completed dead in Australia atm. I have been job hunting overseas in the EU as a result after the layoffs of 2022 but its damn hard.

> I’ve also grown to love the rhythm of busy mornings and deep-work afternoons.

I live on the west coast, and 95% of the people I work with are either east coast or in central timezone. I find that I too enjoy the rhythm of communication during the mornings and deep-work in the afternoons, although it's a lot less extreme than the author's situation.

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?
As an American from a region with an atypically dry and reserved culture, the Australia attitude sounds nice.
Also the Americans don’t work barefoot
> Americans tend to be enthusiastic about their company mission - in the extreme, believing that they’re saving the world - while Australians are more liable to think “it’s just a job, mate”.

There are some people who "drink the kool-aid" and believe that messaging, but it seems largely self serving.

Say you want to be a yes man (or woman) to get ahead. Why limit yourself to agreeing with your boss, when you can agree and also imply they are a hero?

Hi to all fellow Australian mates!
Downside is they also seem more retrenchment happy.
As an American who worked for an Australian company, the time change was actually great. I had my whole morning to do as I pleased, since Australia is several hours behind the USA... although it's tomorrow.

I never thought of Australians under- or over-touting their professional achievements. I did find my coworkers very respectful and supportive.

Kiwi working for US company, I identify with this 100%.