Interesting. I used to work mainly with european developers (dutch, french, germans, russians, spaniards, polish, etc.) and I always could speak my mind, and others would do so. No BS, no avoiding direct confrontation. But more recently I have been working with ex-faang american developers and I don’t like it. It’s not that they are like indians and the like, but definitely not as direct and straightforward as europeans.
I feel like Americans are all over the place. The top echelons of business in the US are very blunt and direct. The lower levels tend to be very indirect with lots of toxic positivity. I think this works out for capitalism and exactly fits the Gervais Principle.
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 :).
As a Brit, I agree with your comments. I've had to overcome a lot of my own culture to be an effective leader, and even then I don't always do a good job.
In my ~30 year career in the US, as a local, I have seen constant change. The FAANGs are even an amplified version of this. So when someone draws a comparison I always wonder if they are comparing contemporaries or rather an older experience versus a newer one, which is confounded by these temporal shifts.
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.