The Office is Nice

The Shanghai office is in the downtown area near People's Square. The square is a bustling metropolitan center filled with shops and diners, coffee places, street vendors, and a shit ton of people. The office itself is on the 16th floor of a fifty-story building looking over the square. There are lots of skyscrapers nearby. We have just one floor here containing about fifty engineers, a few sales people, and various administrative staff (one in particular seems to truly be the 'mom' of the Shanghai office). The layout is very similar to the Kirkland office. That is, the floor is donut-shaped, with the elevator shafts in the very center of the floor. Though lunch/dinners aren't catered, the engineers here receive a per diem of about fifty RMB (seven dollars) which is more than enough to cover food at most places around here. There are lots of snacks, ranging from dried seaweed to pork slices to snickers bars.

The engineers are very nice, and very helpful. Chinese is spoken more often than English, but everybody seems comfortable switching back and forth. I walked into a "tech talk" (short info sessions about a new technology or project) a few minutes late last week. The speaker was giving his talk in Chinese to twenty or thirty people, and as I walked in I felt like an idiot for not thinking to check the language before arriving. But when the speaker noticed that I'd arrived, he announce a "language change" and continued the talk in English. The crowd laughed, and I felt embarrassed, but was certainly glad to be accommodated. Everybody speaks English fairly well here, and there are five or six more senior-level expats in the office that
do their best to foster a silicon-valley-esque culture.