What it's like working for American companies as an Australian
seangoedecke.com
seangoedecke.com
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 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.
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.
I don’t see how us east cost <-> apac is really feasible on any kind of regular basis.
Up to 5 or 6 hours is a reasonable range for routine interactions.
Then there was one time when both of us in the US happened to have taken the next day off, and we're both naturally night owls, so I suggested just for that one time moving the meeting 6-7 hours earlier on a different day - we'd both still be awake, it would be just before the start of the UK workday, and just before 5pm for Shanghai, so for once they didn't have to get online late.
We didn't do it because the UK group didn't want to get up an hour earlier.
Still didn't fix the 1-workday latency for discussions, though.
That said, this is also why many Asian teams get accustomed to working US hours -- essentially "2nd shift" -- to accommodate west coast overlap.
We had dev teams in US, EU and Asia. It worked well because most of the top leadership remained in EU to manage the business unit. The US company somehow managed to put their career ambitions aside and recognize that non-Americans are capable of making decisions
We could have meetings with teams on both sides of the globe, and reduce on-call duty because we would have devs available in office a large portion of the day.
If we needed to sync all teams, we often had two meetings with EU as the host. There were some occasional shared meetings where the US office had to start early, and the Asians stayed late, but they were the exception
We still managed to integrate with the US parent company and share the tech stack where appropriate.
It wasn't too bad! Much easier than working with west coast US (where their 9am is my 6pm - I don't want to work late but I don't mind working early).
In the postmortem they noted that this worked very well because they would all be working at the same time...
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.
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.
DST changes do happen every six months, or so. We mostly roll with it, and adjust the meeting times as necessary.
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.
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.
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.
You're the manager -- it's your job to evaluate and review the performance of your reports. Not theirs.
However most reviews I have seen are about paying the system, not honest evaluation of problems and praise of what's good.
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 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.
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've worked in tech in the US as an immigrant for over 40 years, and never been quizzed on a mission statement.
I agree this kind of thing is performative, but let’s steel man the other side. You are looking for a place to spend 8 hours a day doing your most skillful craft, and you don’t want to know what the organization is trying to achieve?
Yes I understand it’s performative, but why wouldn’t you take 10 minutes to indicate you are doing that kind of serious thinking?
It’s like asking a boss for guidance without doing groundwork to make a recommendation.
I do believe in the "When in Rome do as the Romans do" mindset though so i'll happily memorize it 2 mins before the interview. It's just that i 100% openly refuse to accept they are anything other than virtue signalling.
You’re basically saying “i don’t know how to present myself and I’m going to cause problems for your organization”.
It’s like “why can’t I show up at 2 PM and work until 11. I get my work done”. You just have no awareness and are a liability for your boss.
Put another way, how does reciting the mission statement differ from a loyalty dance for chairman Mao? I get that many have an economic (or life) imperative to go along with what the clownsuite orders, but these same people make fun of island savages in the Pacific for "cargo culting".
It’s extremely bizarre and cult-like when viewed from other cultures and comes across as insincere (which it is) and the very opposite of serious thinking - it is performative loyalty of the type that kings used to ask of their subjects.
American mission statements often have very little to do with what the company does, or even the values they actually hold (as opposed to profess to hold). They do not usually describe the work to be done.
Master/servant is a relationship as old as time. You can acknowledge and navigate it or pretend it doesn't exist.
Managers are just people like everybody else and have a job with different tasks.
I find this thread so ridiculous. I've traveled all over and lived all over. I rarely find that peoples' perceived cultural distinctions are in line with reality. I think instead it's often just lip service to their own sense of identity.
Above, someone mentioned that Americans have an idea that there is a master and servant relation with your boss. As an American I find that shocking. I have never felt that way about my bosses nor have I ever treated an employee that way. As a lowly sys admin many years ago, I went to bars and lunches with CEOs of companies of hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm still friends with them. I'm not worth millions but we still go out for drinks and enjoy dinners together. I'm not just talking about one person. This is not rare.
We respond to people the way we think they want us to respond. Your own stereotypes about another culture will be self fulfilling because of that.
Additionally any assumption you can make, about American culture specifically, would miss the fact of American culture. We have none because we have all cultures. My kid probably hears more Hindi than English in the classroom.
To make any statement about culture in America you'd need to specify. Americans from where have a master/slave mentality? Americans from Australia? India? Pakistan? China? Japan?
Which of those are the "Americans" you're referring to? Surely you wouldn't assume each of those groups have just one culture.
You can refuse to enable such a system.
Other non-feudal relationships are possible based on mutual respect and honesty.
> sycophantic servant
The misunderstanding is that you believe a servant is someone held in chains and beaten with a whip. A master is someone with power and authority, and servant is someone who works for them.
There is zero serious thinking involved in learning them. It is all pretensions, you know it, management knows it, employees know it.
OP understands organizational politics well - they learned them and they understand it was for passing the interview.
Genuine LOL!
> you don’t want to know what the organization is trying to achieve?
You <------> The point
A 'mission statement' is a load of wank. They have nothing whatsoever to do with what a company is trying to achieve. Indeed, they were satirised as such in the USA by Dilbert cartoons 30 years ago!
In Australia and Blighty (and no doubt many other places with a similar culture) "I haven't memorised the mission statement, because it is wank" will get you points for being honest and direct...... We don't like to play at fakery.
To accomplish this, and Microsoft did pull it off, they worked to commoditize every aspect of PCs, and they slowly drove the profits of PC OEMs down to almost zero. To ensure software existed on those PCs, Microsoft ran a massive training and certification program for engineers and IT.
Google used to live by its mission statement to organize all the world's information. They started up a program to scan almost every book in the world! There wasn't even a profit motive for it, it was something they did because it aligned with their mission statement.
Software company mission statements used to mean something.
Other things like 360 degree feedback are also borrowed from that culture.
There was a very old article in Fortune about this, it's preserved but there is no formatting.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240415121234/https://money.cnn...
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.
But most of the people I've worked with who wanted feel "part of something" had been 10+ years younger than me.
So your sample size is 1 company? That's very anecdotal. And you're younger than 30, so you probably haven't worked at many companies. There are plenty of people in plenty of other companies that you've never met.
Most of that didn't happen of course (although Khan academy has helped tons of people), but we were raised to believe that the software we wrote was going to help people.
It is sad that Gen Z doesn't believe that, it signifies a large cultural shift in the computer geek culture.
Fwiw I have written software that saved lives, and I still believe software can do a lot of good in this world. We should aim to create things throughout our life, using the skills that we have, that make the world a better place.
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.
In the US it's generally considered rude or "uncouth" to swear in the workplace, unless it's in a private conversation with another coworker who's okay with it.
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.
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!
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 have struggled with this myself, as I don't believe work hierarchy should convey any fundamental difference between people, and we are best off treating each other as equals.
Also, it's not like I'm making a big deal out of it. I'm not forcing anyone to call me by my name, just an occasional reminder. And I have been successful with a couple of the staff who are now relaxed and chatty with me.
There's another aspect which is that age is extremely important in Vietnamese society. As a slightly older male than my staff, I get referred to as "anh" which kind of translates to "older brother", although does have some level of a respectful connotation as well. If I was considerably older I'd be referred to as "chu" (uncle) which has even more respect conferred.
A close (but actually not accurate) English translation to both of these is "sir". I suspect, but haven't been able to confirm, that part of my being called sir comes from this bad translation, and when I can explain that the meaning of sir in English actually comes from the class system rather than the familial respect system, it does get through. But unfortunately there's too much of a language barrier to explain something nuanced like this.
You can not be fired just because you hurt a managers feelings by disagreeing with them.
(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.
That’s not an explanation. That’s just restating it. Why would Australians be less tempted by power?
Could it be that Americans are more exposed to management and hierarchy in their youth?
If you want some sweeping generalisation for why Americans are more prone to this sin, how about the various old cultural patterns of thought that fit under the header "manifest destiny"?
What practice or ethos has descended from that time which is currently reinforced?
(Of course both countries have indigenous nations inside them. They're actually very similar, which I think is the reason Australians tend to be culturally resentful of the US on surveys in a way almost no other country is.)
> That’s not an explanation. That’s just restating it. Why would Australians be less tempted by power
Sir would do well to compare Australian police with USA police. Unfortunately, such power tripping really is a thing in USA culture.
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.
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.
I don’t know if that’s an argument for or against the culture then or if it has any relation to their culture now.
And frankly I doubt that this national attribution of corporate culture is likely real. I’ve only worked for the one Australian company, I’ve worked for many American ones and the culture around self promotion has been widely different across them.
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.
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.
It did work for quite a while, that is until I had some hard times in my personal life that made keeping up the facade unbearable. Within a short period of time I had people worried about me, even though I still did all job duties completely fine.
Next thing you know I'm not a team player by HR, and I need to be more positive, etc.
Left that job shortly after. I hate this bs culture shit and refuse to play it anymore. Luckily where I'm at now doesn't care.
After being highly ambitious for almost 10 years and literally moving across the world, changing countries several times with a month's notice to find top opportunities, I found that my contributions were often neglected in the end. I would get plenty of pats on the back, but never any reward. I never once got a bonus, not once in 10 years.
One time when I asked for a raise from my boss, of a highly successful crypto project in Germany with hundreds of millions in the bank, he acknowledged that I was one of their best developers and offered a 2% salary increase... This is in crypto sector so we both understood that this doesn't even cover CPI inflation! When I suggested that I might leave if I didn't get a higher raise, he said that I was putting the entire project in jeopardy (using even harsher terms) and yet didn't offer anything more than 2%. I was told by an insider that he was paying himself at least 30k EUR per months! They had millions of cash sitting in the bank and I was on a modest senior dev salary by US standard. I had been there 2 years and was instrumental to securing their 300 million market cap blockchain and had just led a very successful refactoring of a complex sub-project in just 6 months. I still can't understand what happened. I quit. I was demoralized after that.
Granted I work in Silivalley, but I'd say that above a certain level/age, if you don't show a certain base of cynicism in private you're not taken seriously. I mean, if you've seen the dotcom bust, and the 2008 collapse, you're looking at current conditions and asking whether it's worth it right now. The tension on the bubble appears to have exceeded safe parameters.
Mit dem Angriff AI wird das alles in Ordnung kommen.
I envy those who seem to keep the facade up after their own career hardships.
American culture is not a monolith. This can vary greatly in different regions or different subcultures.
On average, Australian culture views anyone, who even passively demonstrates any significant level of achievement, with a high degree of suspicion. Australians make a national sport of cutting down people who excel in any way. Sure, there are sub-cultures there which can vary considerably from this general trend, but even they feel the influence of this prevailing attitude. The end outcome is that Australians tend to go to considerable effort to hide the things that may single them out as excelling among their peers, and emphasise those things which make them similar. (A few months ago the CEO of the most powerful retail company in Australia gave an interview attempting to reduce public ire at their price gouging tactics, dressed in the uniform of a shelf stacker from their supermarket chain. I'm not saying this could not have happened in America, but there it would have probably been seen as a stunt or a statement... in Australia dressing any other way would have raised eyebrows, and in fact most people initially failed to even notice it for the PR manipulation that it was.)
Geographic proximity will always play a role in bringing cultural norms together, and while the US is a big place, the US population throughout the 20th century had incredible mobility, going where the jobs were, which helped to tighten up that bell curve.
In the US if you have wealth it's plausible that you had a great idea that got acquired, or a great skill.
What's lacking is a general habit of boasting about this, being wealthy, letting others in the country (ie. yourself) know about it.
You can find first generation pretty wealthy Australians in trucking, factory ownership, real estate, mining, warehouse volume sales, etc. Of those the ones most likely to be flash about their cash would be the real estate crowd, success in house sales is hard to come by without prominent self promotion.
Real estate wealth is a bit prominent, bit doesn't really have the same tone as designing or building something, more a reflection of our current dirt obsession.
But almost every wealthy American tells a story about how they did it by themselves, ignoring the schools that they attended, the services which were available to them, the people their parents associated with, and the ability to make high-risk investments because they had a built-in security net.
How to reconcile? It's fairly easy ... there aren't that many millionaires. The US has a society, culture and economy that allows for their occurence perhaps "better" than most other places. But this doesn't reflect the likely economic pathway that most of the population experiences in life.
America is good at generating millionaires (which ain't what it used to be)! News at 11!
I find the obsession we have with saying we have a problem with success absolutely does not translate to my lived experience here. I see it on the national stage where the moment someone fucks up everyone piles on, but usually they’ve been on a path to being a flog for a long time anyway and they need, at the very least, a reality check.
Think how much better Elon musk’s headspace could be if one person in his circle had told him ‘you are mortal’ regularly along his journey of multiple triumphs
Pretty much everything else you said confirms just how ingrained the attitude under discussion is in this country. Which is hardly surprising. If it was perceived as aberrant by the majority then it wouldn't be commonplace.
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.
How? What little changes have you noticed?
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.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22085568-the-culture-map
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'm mostly frontend dev + done some machine learning analysis for academic institutions.
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.
You can be enthusiastic about a job done well, even if it’s not necessarily one you believe worth doing.
What I’m enthusiastic about is serving those applications to country sized populations.
I’m fairly certain I’m not the only one.
She said dealing with the live shark lost in the mail was a highspot (a lot of strange delivery issues in the modern shop from home world)
But the problem is about as boring as they come. There’s nothing exciting about making a callcenter operate well, even though it’s often done wrong. Probably why we can (apparently) eat the market.
I would think that giving staff some agency to intercede, plus improved scripting support and process-flow improvements could be huge here. The stories I hear about helpdesk who can only add file notes and not actually fix things like gas-meter address/ID mismatches (and the consequent debt collector problems for people who genuinely are NOT the user of the phantom gas meter) is just huge. There's a process-improvement opportunity here.
"computer says no" is about the worst possible outcome. Measuring helpdesk effectiveness on time to close call feels like the problem (in part)
They just pretend to in order to get brownie points with upper management. It's just playing the game.
And I'm convinced the ones making the values themselves do so to see who will fall in line.
The circle jerk enthusiasm and camraderie really does help to keep a lot of people motivated and focused on providing for the company. While it might feel over the top, it serves a purpose, and gives people a sense of community and belonging which is often hard to find in the modern world. Plus it stops them from being depressed thinking about how mundane their life is, spending 60+ hours a week fixing the CI pipeline.
I also served in the Marines and grew up in Massachusetts, two places that really embrace sarcasm and gallows humor. Merging into the California tech sector, the enthusiasm, sunny demeanor and inability to take being picked on as a demonstration of affection… it was a difficult adjustment.
No, it's not. First, they're legally required to provide it so long as you work there, whether you're enthusiastic or not. Even if you got fired for not being enthusiastic enough, by law you can stay on the same health insurance plan for 18 months. If you still haven't found a job after 18-36 months, or just don't like the company's plan, you can get your own individual plan, or look for a plan for low-income people like medicaid.
The US healthcare system has its problems for sure, but you seem confused about what they are.
It's pretty similar to a comparable marketplace plan and even to Medicare for the first couple of years (which is tied to what your recent W-2 income is/was). The issue is that your employer is presumably chipping in a lot of your current insurance costs as part of your benefits. But, yes, if you're paying for insurance on your own, it's expensive because you're covering the whole thing.
I get what you're implying, but I want to point out that healthcare is not "directly tied to your enthusiasm." I'm sure somebody can post their anecdote about being fired for not having enough pep in their step at work, but enthusiasm for the company mission is not a typical requirement for employment. Furthermore, despite the pervasive online meme to the contrary, the US does have a substantial social safety net — we devote more of our GDP to public social spending¹ than Canada or Australia. It's completely fair to say that the outcomes can vary, but it's not fair to say that Americans are by and large left rudderless without help from the state if they lose their job.
¹ https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
In the US, our public safety net consists of Medicaid, Medicare, unemployment benefits and SNAP, among other things. Like I said in my previous comment, the outcomes/efficacy of our safety net versus Germany's safety net are totally different, and it's fair to criticize that. But the spending reflects our country's intent to provide a safety net, even if it's far from perfect.
However, I have luckily only worked at companies in my career that I could really get behind the mission and have in my view a reasonably positive work output. Letting people save money for retirement, or start a business is pretty good. I don't know how my view would change if I worked for something more morally gray.
Generally, the West Coast of the US is the most fake positive and the East Coast is the most blunt and outwardly cynical. Middle America tends to be friendly yet direct.
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?
I never thought of Australians under- or over-touting their professional achievements. I did find my coworkers very respectful and supportive.