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Also Australia. From the outside (and this could well be the wrong take), it seems as though “at will employment” leads to cultural problems. People are afraid to speak their mind, and hierarchy becomes dominant.

I like that Australia is a bit more egalitarian, and people can “speak truth to power”.

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Having worked salary jobs in tech in both countries, I can tell you that hierarchies are a much bigger thing in Germany than in the U.S. In tech companies as well as in academia, FWIW. Her Professor, Herr Direktor, these are actually still a thing in Germany.

I have worked in UK/Aus and for US owned/run and French owned/run (from aus) and aus owned/run (and others, I’m getting old). There definitely seemed to be a cultural difference with US based employees being much more reluctant to say anything negative (but this may have been nothing to do with at-will). I had assumed this was because they were afraid of losing their jobs by pissing off the wrong person, but it may well be something else entirely causing that.

In Australia, you have the opposite problem of randoms going “that’ll never work” to a CEO (which is not exactly endearing).

You might want to rephrase that because the way you stated it just seems kinda silly, as if somehow titled-obsessed idiots don't exist in US companies or something...

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