- Lots of talk, but little real action: Since Indeed in Singapore hires a lot more “managers who talk fancy” rather than “actual doers”, there’s very little work that actually gets accomplished on a weekly basis. Most work gets caught up in holding patterns of useless debates/micro-alignment, and eventually teams celebrate tiny A/B tests at the end of 3 months as “massive impact”. The actual amount of work that gets each quarter is a joke, really!
- The office is pretty much a satellite engineering office for the most part: Strategy/goals gets “handed down from the top” from US bosses. Or even if the teams come up with bottom-up ideas — they need “permission from the top” to even try it out. The culture is very top-down for the most part.
- The management in the US doesn’t trust the teams in Singapore, hence prepare to be micro-managed a lot. Have a problem with micro-management? Sorry, you’re not “aligned” — don’t even try pushing back as micro-management (ex: getting your simple A/B experiments approved before testing) is the expected cultural norm here.
- Culture in Singapore reminds you a lot of working in a large bank: Lots of politics, people sweet-talking on the face while they complain behind your back, lots of talk around process yet very little work actually gets done, leaders who do a lot of theoretical pseudo-intellectual debates but with little practical implementation knowledge nor experience.
- Hiring processes are broken: The quality of the people varies a lot. You might find an occasional outlier rockstar but huge variations in quality of folks. From a Singapore standpoint, the overall avg engineering quality is definitely below market, and part of it can also be attributed to the quality of product-mandates held by Singapore teams — since the work is not very challenging, you don’t tend to attract the best engineers anyways! How many engineers would just want to move around a couple of buttons everyday?
