I used to feel impressed when someone told me they worked at Google. Now i just wonder if they're apart of the teams that make these horrendous decisions and force terrible UX on us and deprecate features that users love.
I've felt this way also, but the more you stew and understand about the industry the higher the chance of you seeing new angles. But yeah if i were competing with a hubspot level content marketer that's pretty hard.
My issue has always been, even if write good content how do you distribute it? Otherwise it's stuck on page 20 of Google
If anyone has worked in the travel industry especially around product or marketing I have a question. Why hasn't anyone built this yet?
I get emails from airlines telling me about all their deals to a continent, then seem to expect me to research all the destinations myself before I can even decide if their deal is relevant to me. In the age of personalisation this just seems so.. vague?
> Too much deference to authority is not a good thing (in my opinion the weakest part of asian culture).
Yes, the homogeneous entity of Asia and its culture.
How do you even have a productive conversation about this topic when people are this ham fisted and uninformed?
Have you actually been to Asia? Try traveling there and see if you still think there's "too much deference to authority". If anything the opposite is closer to being true, this stereotype is a western cliche.
There are strong Confucian cultures in Korea, Japan, and to a lesser extent (ironically enough) China. In those countries, you can really feel the authority deference. Samsung especially has trouble with this when opening branch R&D offices in the USA.
You really have to work in these countries to feel it though, just visiting isn’t good enough. When I was working tech in China, expats had lots of war stories about working in japan or Korea, which sounded a lot less appealing than working in China (though working for an American company, the culture was necessarily mixed). I’m sure SE Asia and South Asia/India would be fairly different in many respects.
i heard people attribute that to Mao who explicitly encouraged the younger generation to challenge established authority (which was a way to turn and use them against the rest of the state and the Party power who became critical of Mao blaming him for the failures and disasters of the Great Leap Forward) as part of the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was highly anti intellectual. Academics and artists were imprisoned, or even killed. In 1956 Mao did start the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which encouraged criticizing the government. But that was followed in 1957 by a campaign targeting people who had the wrong opinions.
I get what you mean but i think there's different types of authority. Your boss, your parents, your elders, the government. They all get treated very differently. So deference to authority isn't quite specific enough to be applicable imo.
I disagree. I’m a westerner but I have lived in South East Asia (Indonesia and Thailand), and my wife is Thai, I regularly visit her parents and relatives and we are pretty close to her family.
Obviously every individual is different and I can think of people I met there that don’t conform to that stereotype, but in general, yes I think that on average South East Asians have a tendency to avoid criticising anyone in a position of authority, or at least they do that less often than westerners. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing but it’s definitely there. When I speak of westerners I should point out that I was born in Italy and I now live in Australia and these two countries, rather than the USA, make up much of my idea of “western” (even though Australia is geographically located in the Asia-Pacific region!).
Have you considered that Thai are unlikely to criticise authority because criticising the government can fall under lese majeste and result in severe prosecution?
I think some Asian countries have this a lot more than others; Japan and Korea probably among the most. One example that springs to mind is that Korean Air had a major problem with plane crashes until nearly 20 years ago. A crucial exacerbating factor was the culture of deference from the flight attendants to the pilot:
Deference is often baked into Asian language - using different heirarchical expressions for someone based on their age, status and so on. We used to do something similar in Western countries but its nowhere near as marked.
I've had similar experiences with Airbus when we conducted technical feasibility on one of their maintenance mobility products. Couldn't get any technical documentation for the life of us, and once the product was presented, the design assumptions were so clearly flawed it was laughable. Authentication was implemented using iPad name. Yes, that name anyone can edit to be anything. No password. The assumption was just that everyone on the corporate network could be trusted.
