Even sick leave needs approval here: Indian techie shares three months' experience of moving from US to India on the same job, same company

Amazon techie Keyul Patel shared his experience of moving back to India after working for seven years in the US. For Patel, there has been no change of company, job, or title. He is doing exactly the same job in India that he was doing in the US. But it is the work culture that made all the difference. In a blog post, Patel compared the experiences in both countries and how the same company can function differently in two countries.Patel wrote that a few things are considered defaults at a job in the US and not perks. Respect, better treatment and work timings are the three things on the top of his mind. And there are smaller comforts in the US that leave applications get auto-approved and the work-life boundary gets respected without any drama."None of this felt special while I was there. It felt normal — almost invisible. You do not wake up grateful for a predictable calendar. You assume that is just how professional life works. It is only when those things disappear that you realize how much you had taken for granted," Patel wrote.As Patel started working from India -- for the same company, in the same role, those defaults disappeared like they never existed. One technical disadvantage he cited is that meetings are scheduled for US time zones which make it past evening in India."Work hours are not defined. They stretch. They bleed. They follow whoever holds the most power on the call, not whoever is sitting in the most inconvenient time zone," he said, adding that managers schedule meetings past 6pm not as an exception but as a pattern implying that the after-work evening hours should be flexible. Even a sick leave needs approval in the system, he observed."That is the part nobody warns you about when you move back. Not one big loss — a hundred small defaults you never named, suddenly missing all at once. I am not writing this to complain about India or to romanticize the US. I am writing because it is surprising — genuinely surprising — to watch how land changes your external value. The same person. The same skills. The same employer. The same job title. Mostly the same work. Different geography, different country, different rules. The respect, the treatment, the regard for your time — it did not travel with person in their suitcase," Patel wrote.