The worst "Bank of China".

Personal banking in China could easily become a nightmare for people who are not used to waiting in line for half an hour to get serviced. The problem is that, most of the trasactions are cash transactions and there is no such thing as personal checks. Efforts have been made in different bank branches to enhance the self-services, but you may not have such luck in the bank you have account with and the particular bank branch you go to.

My company requires us to have an account in Bank of China for monthly deposit of salaries. However, Bank of China has much fewer branches by comparison to other banks in China and they are unbelievably poorly equipped. Yesterday, I went to the closest branch of Bank of China to transfer some money to another account at another bank. There was a long line of people ahead of me, but only two of the windows were open, the other windows were either closed or would only serve companies. I had to wait there for 40 minutes before my number was called only to be told that they couldn't do it unless the other bank was in another city. I don't understand what kind of policy that was. When I asked them why, they told me that they would only wire the money to another city. For the banks in the same city, you woule need to get cash here and walk over there to deposit it. Moreover, they added, there were more than 5,000 bank branches in Shanghai, the desitination bank had a branch ONLY two blocks away, why would I fuss about transfering the money? So here I was, carrying a paper bag full of cash in my hand like holding a takeout lunch, and walked all the way from this bank to the other. I wonder if people at Bank of China felt the city was so safe that this was not an issue at all.

Fortunately the branch of the other bank I was going to was well equipped. There was an automatic deposit machine to deposit cash and there was another machine I could use to transfer the money. So I did not have to wait in the long line over there. I noticed that many local people waiting to get serviced there did not seem to do anything more significant than what I did but still would rather wait in the long line to get serviced. I guess they just did not trust the machine and felt "safer" with the bank teller. There is still a long way to go for the Chinese banks to facilitate the daily services and for the Chinese to get used to interfacing with machines rather than humans.

Good boss, bad boss?

Had a chat with a friend of my wife the other day. She was complaining about her boss and said something very interesting. She said there were 4 types of bosses (maybe you could extend it to everybody).

1. Those who are incapable and lazy
2. Those who are incapable but diligent
3. Those who are capable but lazy
4. Those who are capable and diligent.

Now she is a capable person herself and her boss unfortuantely belongs to the incapable but diligent type. Here comes the worse-case combination. Everything she does, her boss wants to know about it and has different opinions. The sad truth is that my friend wouldn't have complained about her boss if those opinions were of any value.

Now I am facing a problem of the same nature. I deem myself a capable developer and my boss is both capable and diligent. Because of this, he trys to follow the very details of my development work and we have different opinions on technical issues pretty often. Now I cannot say whose opinions were better because that is the nature of software development - you have choices. Sometimes you could say one choice is better than the other, other times it's more about personal preference. There exist multiple express ways to Rome, either way is fine.

So my question is, as a capable boss, how should you manage your people? I think if you doubt his ability or if he needs guidance or help, you should be diligent. You should check on his work all the time so that every deviation could be corrected at the earliest time. If you trust his ability, then be tolerant and stay away from his work. Give enough space to him so he does not have to convince you why he has to do things this way or that all the time. All you need to do is to set up the milestones and check the deliverables.

Well, it's easy to say than do here as most things are in the world. Personally I don't really care if my boss is smart or not as long as he gives me all the room I need.

Shanghai Site of my company.

The company I work for (name skipped on purpose) is located at a pretty convenient location in Shanghai, near ZhongShan Park. It's the starting point of subway line 2 and it also has a light rail station for light rail line 3 and 4.



The company occupies 4 floors in a tall building named Zhaofeng Plaza, sometimes also referred to as "multimedia plaza".



On the other side of the street, there is a newly-opened Carrefour, which is very similar to Wal-mart. You won't believe the crowd inside the Carrefour. I found that lunch time was generally a good time for shopping. Because of this, I have recently developed a new habit - buying groceries inside Carrefour during lunchtime.



Carrefour only occupies the bottom two floors of the building, the rest is a shopping mall. This is what you see when you look up from the ground floor. I thought it looked similar to the inside of Hogwarts, if you know what I mean :)



The layout of each floor inside the company is similar to the Sunnyvale site, a mixture of cubes and offices. The only difference is that, the height of the cube is so small that it was not possible to hang a whiteboard inside a cube. And there is no window office (well at least not on my floor).



The breakroom is pretty spacious, except there is just one for each floor. People have their lunch and dinner here. There are 3 microwaves and 1 coffee maker. Being a regular coffee drinker myself, I couldn't help complaining about the way people make coffee here. Way too much water is added to the coffeemaker to make the resulting liquid taste more like water than coffee. Fortunately, there is a starbucks on the first floor.



Finally, a picture of the building models near Zhongshan park. This picture was taken inside Shanghai city planning museum. A very interesting place to visit. You can easiy see the light rail and Carrefour, you would need some careful correlation to find Zhaofeng Plaza.

First month in Shanghai.

It's been a month since my wife and I relocated to Shanghai. Though I have visited Shanghai a few time before, it definitely feels different being a resident here.

After being in U.S. for about 10 years, I had lots of concern about the air pollution in Shanghai before coming back. Well, I was happily surprised. Accordingto a local newspaper, Shanghai has enjoyed the longest period of "clean air" for the past two months. On a sunny day, you could see a sky as clear as in U.S. I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that Shanghai is close to sea and there is a lot of wind that flows through the city which may have helped drive the smog away.





Living in a big city also gives one lots of other perks. The food in Shanghai is unparallel. I knew the food in Shanghai was good, but after staying here for a month, I could only marvel at the variety of the great food of all different styles and flavors. We never run out of good restaraunts. My favourite Sichuan restaurant right now is called "Yu Xin" on North Chengdu Road. It reminded me of the food I used to have when I grew up in Chengdu. It's also pretty easy to spot American fastfood restaurants, sometimes next to each other.




There are also lots of activities in the city. For example, Broadway has brought one of its best shows "The Lion King" to the city. They plan to give more than 100 performances here in Shanghai alone. I am a little bit suspicious about the attendance rate. I could see they have made some efforts to bring down the cost. They have an international cast (which may imply they don't have to pay the actors all that much), and their tickets start from RMB 100, Which is about $12.5. I don't think you could get a ticket in NYC for that money, even if you get the worst seat and the deepest discount. My wife and I went to a "Black-eyed peas" performance recently, it was a lot fun even though I am not much of hip-hop fan. There was a big computer game expo recently as well, similar to E3, sponsored by Nvidia.

Now the only thing that I did not prepare myself for was the weather. It was hot and humid when we first got here in early July. The air was just suffocating. It was the "Plum rain" season then. When that was over, the humidity dropped a bit, but the heat remained as much and temperature might even have risen a little. When I played tennis outside, I would not be able to hold my racket after half an hour because of the sweat. when I played soccer outside, my T-shirt would be wet like it was soaked in water. Thank god the taxi drivers did not complain about me wetting their backseat right after my soccer game :)