alt Hacker NewsThe entire approach is different. Especially with Taiwanese engineers, their entire focus is whatever work they are doing. Everything else (quite literally), their wives handle.
Americans typically ask for things like work life balance, non abusive working hours, etc. they also don’t (anymore) have the type of family life setup that allows them to actually focus so much - being pulled into child care duties, or taking care of family members, or whatever their next vacation should be, etc.
The general attitude is also more ‘yeah whatever’ to some extent.
The amount of singular obsessive engineering you get out of one vs the other is hard to compare.
hmmm this is interesting I was always the impression Taiwanese wives were more progressive and men had to do lot more lifting vs other regional cultures in east asia
my original thinking after reading some of the anecdotes from TSMC engineers is that they were obsessively dedicated which means extreme hours from North American culture
its also the same in places like Samsung where the company treats employers very well with perks and long career stability but its not free always requires huge sacrifice I'd imagine similar to Japanese conglomerates.
I'm not sure which is better in America its definitely transactional relationship but it also comes with stability issues relatively compared to what these East Asian giants offer but at the cost of not being able to switch if and when you find yourselves at odds.
Not sure what it was like at Nokia but also another conglomerate that ultimately folded under competition and also a country with more stringent labor/life constraints that you would find less enforced in East Asia.
Getting a bit distracted here but noting how much culture plays a role in these large companies and their management styles.