I'm from cultures where we bluntly call a spade a spade and pride ourselves on disdain for hierarchy. There's far less fear in raising concerns generally to anyone, but it's quite possibly because of the far better employment laws.
I don't even feel like I'm working in the US when I'm working for any tech company these days. If I'm at ads for FB, I may as well be in Beijing. Some others, I may as well be in Mumbai.
It would be nice to work with Americans/westerners for once and actually be able to speak up about something without getting fired.
I’ve been put into the “practitioner of the dark arts” bucket twice when I predicted with detail and accuracy why certain large projects would fail.
The folks in charge were offended when I presented my analysis, and they were just afraid of me after my predictions came true.
When I had reasonable certainty of my next gig being lined up, I even put the question to leaders. "If I tell you why this project is destined to failure now in Q1 vs being quiet and playing along til end of year, will I be rewarded or punished any differently then?".
The response was 100% nervous laughter. It turned out both layers of management above me were also well aware the marching order they were passing along were going to end badly, and had already lined up their internal transfers, which happened within days of my departure as well.
If one has not read The Gervais Principle, it’s highly recommended.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I’m not just talking about public forums. Saying anything to your superior (perceived superior or otherwise) would result in disciplinary action nearly 100% of the time. It is not even about blunt vs tactful feedback. It’s about any feedback. You do exactly what you’re told and you shut the fuck up.
I don’t think H1Bism is even primarily about depressing IC wages in the west, it’s about middle managers being so burdened with pointless make-work from above that they just don’t have time to lead. They need people who don’t need to be led even if it costs in terms of quality and efficiency.
But
> 80% of your peers are Chinese and Indian H1Bs who bring that culture of deference to authority into the US.
is sadly spot on. Even when the org is very receptive to feedback, one manager in the chain who possesses a cultural belief in absolute authority is enough to break the feedback chain and lead to an organizational abscess of festering dysfunction.
It becomes even worse when your org's management has been taken over by a single cultural group and there is no one to turn to and your only option is to wait for the org to implode and be restructured from above.
Brits are even worse than Americans at all levels (hence, the largely incompetent government and the fact most businesses are poorly run - it's literally The Thick of It at all levels).
Indian/Asians are the absolute worst in terms of directness, these are all very strict hierarchies of business that only succeed if the top person is a genius, since they will never be challenged by anyone.
Europeans definitely are most direct of all, so they don't put up with wage slavery, so business leaders can't maximize their extraction of value from labour, but they tend to have better quality of life all around :).
I think there are a few significant (first-order) factors in the evolving US tech culture.
One is the often discussed age bias and growth rate, where these organizations are constantly diluting with incoming college grads and leaking their institutional knowledge and culture through low retention rates. It's not just H1B workers but all these new local hires who are "colonizing" the old tech world.
The second is the way FAANGs have focused on general consumer markets, advertising, and pop culture. To my eye, other markets used to be more influential. These other tech problems and investments remain, but the new media gold rush has seized the attention for many years. Consumer tech has been merging with media in general, and I think the culture inherently shifts in the same way.
The third factor is a bit recursive. The adoption of social media in the general population affects the way that culture evolves. This disproportionately influences young people, and a subset become the next wave of employees mentioned in the first point. But this is also why I wonder if these changes are more global, as my impression is that social media has accelerated the way regional cultural differences are eroding with more frequent and constant cross contact.
In my experience Americans layer the “we’re all friends here” on too thickly to ever be described as blunt.
The best work culture I had was in a dutch firm. People just straight up called bullshit out all the time, and it got fixed fast. So refreshing. I've never been able to find another workplace like that.
There are other factors involved - if a H1B employee, whose job security is tied to the employer risks taking a 10x salary cut or more by going back home, then a fear for job security leading to such behaviour is a given.
Inside AWS felt like hundreds (thousands?) of Indians who have terrible jobs but don't do anything about it. Now that I'm out I can't believe what I put up with.