80% of the employees here came from China, therefore, they manage the groups the China way. The employees are expected to be unconditionally obedient and take all the blame for their managers' mistakes and screw-ups. They also only ask the Asian engineers to come in on the weekends or during Christmas break.
Micromanagement is pervasive. One of my colleagues went down to the cafe to get an ice tea in the afternoon and just happened to leave his phone in his cube. After he came back from the 10-minute trip, he saw an e-mail from the manager saying "you need to let your manager know if you are going to be away from work."
Individuals are expected to dedicate themselves wholly and solely to work. Having girlfriends is strongly discouraged. Managers usually celebrate when their employees break up in a relationship.
The managers also do not care about the employees' career growth at all. "Lateral" promotion is the norm, where engineers rotate through various functions at the same level. Typically the rotation takes 10~12 years, which means an engineer would be stuck at the very bottom for 10 years before any chance to advance. However, after 10 years of pure technical engineering experience, the advancement into management usually results in disasters as the senior engineers have no management aptitude nor training.
Managers also habitually insult their employees. One director publicly announced that he can only afford to hire 'cheap' engineers in front of the 'cheap' engineers who work for him.
Employees' educational backgrounds are another popular insults. There are basically two groups of people, those who went to the school at the north east part of the SF bay, and the rest. Employees who went to even Cal Tech and Stanford were insulted because of "grade inflation."
