People who have worked abroad, how does America compare in workplace toxicity and competitiveness with other countries?

14 comments

1. >I do my work and go home. If I develop a friendship at work then I have a friend.

   This has been the case almost everywhere I have worked.

   >However, I have never felt people were actually having fun working together as a team;

   The goal isn’t always to have fun…its nice when it happens though.

   >there has usually been a feeling of someone is trying to rise up or rat you out – Game of Thrones vibes.

   That’s messed up. Those people usually don’t get far.

   >Politics and drama happens with people everywhere around the world but there seems to be an additional layer of extreme competitiveness and or toxicity in some of the places I’ve worked at. Why is that?

   How would we know?

2. Are these experiences you describe from working abroad or working in the US?

3. > Politics and drama happens with people everywhere around the world but there seems to be an additional layer of extreme competitiveness and or toxicity in some of the places I’ve worked at. Why is that?

   Maybe it’s the industry you’re in. Maybe it’s how you observe and reflect on things. I don’t understand what this has to do with American culture.

4. Sounds like a job where pay is entirely contingent; otherwise it seems unheard of. Now for country differences, in Germany, everyone would work quickly, silently, and seriously during work hours, socialize only during lunch, and start and stop working on the dot. Everyone was extremely punctual and it’s a bit comical to see the juxtaposition between being so serious for eight hours but laidback and fun loving at all other times. The US is much more lackadaisical. Socialize at any time, start and end early or late depending on the day. Way more laid back during work hours and therefore those work hours would stretch slightly longer to accommodate.

5. About the same actually.

   I’ve worked in China and in the USA (tech related fields). Dudes are dudes everywhere you go. Though the Chinese guys tend to smoke a lot more, while the young guys here are probably more into vapes or weed. I never got the feeling people were trying to rat me out here or in China.

   I’d imagine something like finance would be way more competitive but the most competitive environment I’ve been in has been college and the last two years of HS.

6. What kind of places have you worked at? Which industry?

7. That’s really interesting, most of the time we get people here asking us why we’re friends with our coworkers. (Maybe that’s just the Germans?)

8. I’ve worked in Germany… sort of.

   I mean sort of because I worked in clinics on US army bases in Germany that had a mixed workforce of active duty US service members, and civilians from the US, Germany and other EU countries. So, it was kind of a mixture of work cultures and workplace rules, since all the revelant German labor laws applied to the EU workers.

   In general, the Germans largely followed the stereotypes. A minimum of drama, but they make a distinction between “business friendly” and “personal friendly” that doesn’t always exist in US workplaces, and can come across as being unfriendly if you don’t understand the perspective.

   Even though the German work rules didn’t apply to me as an active duty US soldier, I did indirectly benefit in some areas. One of these is the requirement that everyone has access to sunlight at their work-station, which meant the clinics were constructed in such a fashion that every room had a window, either looking directly outside or into an internal courtyard.

9. It could be industry based or it could be regional, but I’ve never experienced those things personally. I’ve never worked abroad but I have worked at companies with offices abroad and worked with people at those offices.

   Nowhere I’ve worked has been particularly competitive or dramatic. I’m a software engineer in the Philadelphia metro area. When I was at a larger office, they weren’t like my best buddies or anything but they were perfectly pleasant people to chitchat with and I enjoyed when we’d occasionally go out to lunch as a group (maybe once a month). Now I work from home for a small business that’s three employees including me, and I’d say we’re a little more friendly (in that we chat more at work lunches and know more about each other’s lives) and I wouldn’t say there’s any competitiveness or toxicity even if we’re not like, wanting to hang out outside work or anything.

   I will say that for me the biggest difference I’ve noticed is more related to expectations with customer service, I guess, than competitive workplace culture? At my old job the UK office used to drive me *nuts* because they’d do things *to clients* that I thought was unspeakably rude. Like: if it hit 4pm and they were on a client call they’d just say “I’ve got to go, bye” and hang up instead of taking 5-10 minutes to finish up the call and then just leaving 5-10 minutes early a different day. If they were going on vacation for 3 weeks in the middle of a client project, they would just disappear without saying anything to the client or giving any alternative contact information or passing off their portion of the work to someone else.

   Now, I’m not someone who ever does overtime (when counting by weekly total hours) and I don’t do work on vacation, but they would not even put an auto-responder on their email saying “please contact soandso during this time period” and pass off their work to someone else. They then seemed baffled when even the EU clients were getting pissy with them/complaining about them to the account managers. And when the US office gently suggested they be a bit more client-focused they went all ‘work-life balance’ but like… none of the things we expected would involve additional time or reduced vacation at all… just 5 minutes to set up the auto-responder and make sure the work was reassigned… It got so bad that EU clients who would normally be handled by the UK office started requesting me by name to avoid the UK team lol. (Edit: this was pre-Brexit so normally EU clients would deal with the UK office since they knew more about the EU legal stuff)

   They were all very nice people just not great in a client-facing role (by American customer service expectations/standards). There also seemed to be different standards for like… what they felt like was acceptable to ask for, I guess? For example, that company made freight shipping and logistics software, and we encountered an issue where a client used a niche piece of electronic equipment for their Thailand operations that needed to do something differently than would normally be possible with the device. The UK team just said sorry can’t do it the device doesn’t support it, but the account manager came over to us and asked if we could do something about it.

   It was actually the first thing I was assigned at my first job out of college, so I was kind of gunning for it even though I didn’t normally do anything with firmware (I’m more of a back end web dev). I ended up getting some engineers from Honeywell on a call and got them to send me a special version of the device firmware (basically with a backdoor to do what the client wanted that would normally not be allowed) that is not publicly available, then rewrote part of our software to utilize that functionality for the client. When the UK office found out about it they were basically like well it never even occurred to us we could even contact engineers at Honeywell… much less ask for a non-public version of the firmware. To them it was sort of rude to ask Honeywell about it, while for us our priority was figuring out a way to make this thing work for the client. So I think in some ways that could seem more pushy or competitive in comparison?

10. Depends a lot on the company.

    I’ve worked in Taiwan, Japan, Germany, UK, Norway.

    Amazon Seattle is probably the worst company I’ve ever encountered in terms of competitiveness and toxicity. Constant gaslighting, making you completely reliant on the work of your counterpart engineers/economists, but holding each person solely responsible for their own work. Teams that weren’t really teams because we had very few projects that actually intersected with one another, so everyone just wanted everyone else to fail, managers that would give everyone a bad performance review for “motivation” and then fire the ones that ended up having panic attacks out of fear of being fired, and much much much more. Facebook in Menlo Park circa 2013 was the best outside of the fact that they expected you to respond to Groupme messages off work hours. Both of these are in USA and everything else lies between the spectrum of the two.

    I worked for an incubator in Norway and it was pretty neutral. Some petty work drama with coworkers unfriending each other, but nothing more than that.

    I worked for a Taiwanese company’s European headquarters in Germany, where almost the entire staff was European. It was one of the best. No drama, everyone was helpful with one another, but none of us were really friends either.

    Japan was weird. There wasn’t much drama but there was toxicity in terms of respecting seniority and it felt like we were being forced to be friends with each other off of work. My coworkers kept asking me out to 1 on 1 dinners after work (in a fully platonic way, they knew I had a girlfriend at the time) and I was told it was rude to always reject it. Every week or so our team would go out together drinking, and whenever our boss invited us it was always pressure to say yes.

    Taiwan was also fairly neutral. More similar to my experiences in Norway maybe where nothing really happened.

11. Think America is bad

    Try South Korea or Japan

12. The worst “boss” I ever had was in Australia. The second was in Canada. The third the US. I worked for a few years traveling and installing automation equipment globally. And I will say a large portion of the friction I experienced was because of my nationality (US) or my skin color (white).
    The Canadians HATED when the Americans would come up and work. Hell even the border crossing was a pain in the ass, when the found out why we were going. But the Canadians I directly worked with were a chill bunch of people.
    The Australians (at the time) were filled to their eyeballs with national pride (ironically what we eventually bonded over)
    And the Chinese were just flat racist.
    Basically everywhere where competition is expected, there were “alpha” buttheads.

    The absolute best place I worked was Guam. I didn’t meet a single jackass the 10-11 months I worked there.

13. Worked in Japan for 5 years, albeit only at schools so there wasn’t a culture of trying to “rise to the top”. Still, working culture in Japan is absolutely miserable. At the elementary school I worked at it wasn’t uncommon for teachers to stay until 8pm. Workers have rights and paid leave on paper, but almost no one takes it. For example, my coworker’s wife had a baby. The birth was announced when we all got in that morning, we gave a little clap, we were all happy for him… then after lunch he comes in. His baby was born and he felt he “had” to get back to work! It’s even worse in middle and high school, where teachers have to supervise club activities as well. And compared to that, corporate Japan is even worse.

14. It’s less toxic, in my experience. Many other countries bring in additional external class issues, racism or sexism that make it far less collaborative into the workplace.

    There are some people, fortunately few, who ascribe to the “don’t trust anyone you work with.” These people fall into one of two camps. They’re either pessimists who complain about everything and think the world is out to hurt them, or they’re old school bosses. I had a boss like this who thought she had to be a bitch to be respected.

    I have worked in toxic environments. Even then I found great people. And today I work for a company where my colleagues and I meet up outside of work for fun. I’ve (with my GF) even gone on a vacation with a coworker and his wife. When issues arise, it is much easier to address them when you know the person on a personal level.

    You will spend 1/3 of your life at work. You might as well enjoy the people you work with.