What it's like working for American companies as an Australian

For the last ten years I’ve worked for American tech companies as an Australian based in Australia. First I worked in a satellite office for Zendesk. My direct manager was Australian, but many other managers and teams (and of course the top executives) were America-based. Now at GitHub I work fully-remote on a mixed team for an American manager based in America.

Timezones

The biggest difference in working for an American company is the timezones. I have three or four hours overlap with folks working on the west coast, and maybe one hour overlap with the east coast. Fortunately my American managers have been based on the west coast. I think it’d be hard to manage otherwise. At Zendesk, timezone overlap only mattered when working with American teams, but at GitHub half my team (including my manager) is in America.

When I sit down to work in the morning, the first thing I do is to catch up to half a day of work that’s happened while I was asleep. That means spending around thirty minutes reading emails, notifications, and so on. Slack “remind me later” is a lifesaver - I don’t reply to anything right away unless it’s critical, but I do tag messages that need a reply so they ping me in half an hour once I’m done catching up. The morning is usually quite busy, because I have to fit in any calls or synchronous chats in that time. If I don’t have calls, I try to work as quickly as possible so I can resolve any blockers before everyone else signs off for the day.

Afternoons are almost always clear. This is one of the biggest benefits to working cross-timezones: I have a few hours of deep work available every day where I can be confident my manager isn’t going to pull everyone in for a meeting. It can also be pretty lonely. For the first nine months at GitHub I was the only APAC-timezone based engineer, so every afternoon was just me¹.

I give a lot of credit to GitHub for having excellent “writing things down” culture. At a lot of companies it would be really hard to keep up with what was going on when you’re not in the right timezone. But I rarely felt like decisions were being made in meetings I couldn’t attend.

One other big benefit to being in a different timezone is the ability to hand off work so that it never really stops. Because of the hand-off cost, we only do this for some types of work (e.g. important bugs or really critical features), but when we do it feels like a superpower. The team can literally move 2x as fast. It’s also great for customers when they report an issue and it’s fixed by the next morning - an all-American team would have to work late to get that done, but for a split-timezone team it’s just par for the course.

Instability

Working for an American company as a non-American feels more unstable. There’s always the possibility that the American company might decide to terminate the Australian experiment and shutter the entire team. I’ve seen this happen multiple times to other satellite offices or teams outside of the USA. You can try to be as valuable as possible, but ultimately there’s nothing you can do if the C-staff suddenly decide that working across timezones isn’t worth the hassle.

Australia does have a healthy tech sector, but it’s nothing compared to America’s. If I lived in San Francisco, I’d have ~100x more available jobs to apply to if I lost my current one.

For this reason, I operate a little less idealistically and a little more tactically than I would in an Australian-based company. American engineers seem happier to be disagreeable or to push back hard against company strategy. I put a lot of thought into how to align with company strategy (and when I push back, how to make sure that’s in service of the company’s current goals.)

Culture

Australians and Americans are culturally similar, but not identical². Australians typically play down their achievements, while Americans like to talk themselves up. Americans naturally read to Australians as boastful, while Australians naturally read to Americans as meek (or not very competent). American office culture is more enthusiastic and tonally positive than Australian office culture. Americans tend to be enthusiastic about their company mission - in the extreme, believing that they’re saving the world - while Australians are more liable to think “it’s just a job, mate”.

In my experience, there’s not much meeting-in-the-middle here: if you work for an American company, you’ve got to talk like an American. It’s an adjustment. I can’t speak for how it’d be to make this adjustment if you were from a less similar culture, but I bet it’d be tough.

Summary

Why do it? Why wouldn’t I work for Australian tech companies? In general, American companies tend to operate at a bigger scale, offer better comp (Australian companies don’t typically offer RSUs) and have better brand recognition. So when I’m looking to work at scale at a company I’ve heard of, American companies are more competitive.

I’ve also grown to love the rhythm of busy mornings and deep-work afternoons. And of course working fully remote is great. I think it’s a pretty good deal for the company too - follow-the-sun work and on-call is a big benefit - so I hope I get to keep doing it.