[lysace]

> USA centric culture, if you are not in USA at Google and don’t have a big presence in a location it’s a bit like swimming upstream, it’s easy to feel isolated, sidelined or on the flipside overwhelmed with late meetings

It's like the fourth time I read/hear this. I understand that it's a tricky one to adress.

[lll-o-lll]

This is US companies in general! Never work for one in another country; if you can help it. All decisions will be centralized to the US head office and require face to face. Communication is generally terrible.

I’ve worked for European and Asian owned companies, and they seem to be able to handle distributed authority much better. For the “land of the free”, it sure seems like US companies run on a feudal system.

[dave333]

Sexist joke recycle:

Heaven is an American boss, Chinese cook, Russian wife and English house.

Hell is an English cook, Chinese house, Russian boss, and American wife.

[zvr]

On the other hand, it's great to work for a US company with the worker protection rights of a different country.

[cat_plus_plus]

REALLY? Japanese companies are an example of non-hierarchical culture with distributed decision making?

[p_l]

My limited exposure in practice involved a huge japanese company, the kind that survived while still being huge even the dissolution of zaibatsu, using the approach of many semi-independent divisions. Sometimes the divisions would be even created specifically in different country to provide a place to put in a team whose leader is getting extra extra independency in hopes of delivering new products from scratch.

Sometimes you'd have people delegated out of one division/subcompany to provide help elsewhere - personally experienced this when we needed a PostgreSQL expert on a project where we subcontracted/bodyshopped for one of those subcompanies, and the headquarters delegated a postgresql core team member from japan, including having him visit for a time.

But day to day the decisions were local - the most feudal thing was that we knew one team (~50% of the company that was our direct client) was the most important one and that it's lead had actually more power than CEO - the specific division was essentially a way to park his independent team so he didn't have to deal with administrative overhead.

[teractiveodular]

As a matter of fact, yes, Japanese companies operate largely on a bottom-up consensus model. Approval from the top is still required, but they rarely refuse it if everybody in the ranks is aligned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_management_culture#Ma...