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Comment by aynyc | Hacker News Reader

We saw this a few times over the last two decades. This is just another form of offshore outsourcing. It failed every time. My personal take? Culture, as in American culture. I worked with internationals people my entire career. American culture is very different than other countries. Be mindful that it’s different, not better or worse. That difference can be overwhelming to the middle management.

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I'm an expat from a Nordic country who moved to the UK, working with very mutlicultural teams. I took up managing a remote team in Poland recently. I completely agree!

It's ALL about culture. Do your employees and co-workers share your values? Do they have the same priorities as you and the company? Do they overshare or undershare when they have problems?

Different cultures have very different expectations of how you talk to your peers. Some of the SE-Asian people I've worked with will work very hard but never ask clarifying questions, so they might slave away for a week building the wrong thing unless you check in on them. The Polish people I've worked with are straight shooters and always ask really good questions. They're very blunt but great to work with. The Brits are more cautious but generally do a good job, but they're formal to a fault. The Americans are the worst for "toeing the company line". To me they come off as insincere suck-ups, but I know it's just the culture. I myself enjoy being the slightly loony "weird foreign guy" on the office. I'm quite blunt and tell jokes at inopportune times to troll the Brits :) - but ONLY if I know everyone there knows me well and understands my style of humour.

It's all fine if you know your team intimately but unless you know the culture, that new guy who joins you remote is going to be a pain to work with, and they also won't understand what's expected of them, making it difficult for them to do a good job. I've also found that a lot of people who've never left their original environment (i.e. never worked abroad) are totally deaf to this and will always interpret cultural differences as insubordination or arrogance.

If you're going to effectively manage a multi-national team you need to very quickly gauge people's style of working and communicating or you're doomed to fail.

I see that you share my sick sense of joy when trolling the Brits, especially about their football team.

In your experience, how is American culture different?

Americans tend to speak their minds more freely than others. Just in general, we tend to speak what's on our mind, and that can create some discomfort and confusion. When I run design meetings, I really have to call on engineers who are non-Americans to speak up, otherwise, they won't add their contributions. Now, it might be language barrier, or cultural upbringing, but I saw this in Europeans as well as Asians.

This cultural issue with management tends to bring up "whiteness", but most middle management in Finance/Tech are older white males, many of them are totally awesome, but majority of them lack cultural understandings and "offshoring" can create massive frictions.

I think the same culture would pervade anyone who is 2gen and greater American. Unless someone is 0-gen or 1-gen, they become Americanized (as any immigrant to a new country would become localized after 2 gens elsewhere). So unless they are recent immigrants or the children of those recent immigrants, even if they are not white, they would be culturally American.

On a side note, I think 1st gen have it the hardest of all. 0-gen know their standing and know they are newcomers with foreign customs. 1-gen often are in the middle and aren't sure where they belong culturally, here, or there. 2-gen usually don't have any such ambivalence.

A book called The Culture Map goes into this. You basically have low confrontational and high confrontational cultures.

I found that understanding the differences helped a lot when I started work in an extremely culturally diverse company.

https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/

https://www.peterfisk.com/vault-entry/xl-culture-map-erin-me...

Hmm, I found American culture a bit indirect, not saying what they mean.

The American culture may have worked in an in office environment where you have a lot of body language and non verbal cues to recognize that the "confrontational" behavior is actually supposed to lead to positive results. Besides, meeting in an office, and getting lunch with your colleagues nearly every working day and going for happy hour every week or so means that your relationship isn't defined by the confrontational experiences. How well will it work in a "remote first" environment where you rarely/never meet your colleagues outside the work environment and don't have non verbal cues, and your confrontational behavior simply make teammates uncomfortable isn't clear yet.

On the other hand, organizations are well aware of certain cultures being non confrontational, and have done a lot of work in actually helping them speak their mind without being confrontational. Pre-pandemic when I became a manager, my company provided me with a ton of training on structuring meetings and brainstorming sessions in a way that encourages everyone to participate.

There's a very good argument to be made that in a remote first environment the "confrontational" culture would lose out, whereas the "non-confrontational" culture, which can easily be worked around through a variety of management techniques, will work much better.

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