Nov 16
2009The Commute Gets Longer and Longer…
Filed Under: Google, Living in China, Shanghai & China, Working in China
1752 visits, 1 today
My first job in Shanghai was teaching at a bilingual school across the street from where I lived. My commute was a 5 minutes walk to school. When I worked at National Instruments China R&D, my commute was either a 5 minutes taxi ride or a 10 minutes bike ride to work. I biked to work almost every day, except on rainy days or days when I had other plans after work.
When I started working at Google, I started at the Mountain View headquarters. I was staying at the corporate apartment and had a rental car, so that was a 10 minutes drive to the office. Then I moved to the San Francisco office and stayed at a nearby hotel. That was a 15 minutes walk to the office. After that, I moved to the New York office and stayed with my sister in Brooklyn. The subway commute was about 35 minutes. Now I’m at the Shanghai office and my commute is nearly an hour from home.
Google Shanghai office is located at People Square inside the Raffles City office building. It’s a 10 minutes taxi/car ride to Zhang Jiang Hi-Tech subway station, then 25 minutes subway ride to People Square, then another 10-15 minutes walk through pure madness before I get to the office. Fortunately, Zhang Jiang Hi-Tech subway station is terminal stop, so I’m usually able to get a seat at 7am in the morning. And yes, I opted to leave home/get to work super early so I can avoid madness on both end. By the time I get to the office, it’s about 8am. There’s practically no one in the office except for the ahyis stocking up the mini kitchen and the poor souls (that’ll be me) who have 8am conference calls with NY. Even at 9am, the office is still mostly empty. People start trickling in sometime between 9:30-noon. And they work super late hours too. As for me, I’m the first to leave the office to go home. 
Next month, I’ll be at the Taipei office and that’ll be 60-70 minutes from where I’ll be staying!!
(Image source: http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20031211_sleep_on_airplane.htm)
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You and your blog return to Shanghai. Nice to see that.
tbh, that’s pretty short.
I used to work in Sacramento and worked in SFO. 4 hrs every day. When it rained, it could be 6 hrs.
Nice part of Shanghai to be in, though.
You can pop over to the museum anytime.
Ivan
Hi, I’ve just found your blog by searching “Shanghai Technical Writing”.
I was trying to find a company that provide professional technical writing service in Shanghai, but it seems no such companies at all.
Anyway, your blog is fun to read.
As some of my clients in Japan now shifting their document teams to China, I must find some partners there.
Otherwise our company have to found a company by ourselves.
If you know any company that can handle technical writing projects (manual, help file, UI, CMS, etc.) for Japanese electronics manufactures, please give me any information.
If you don’t want to receive this kind of comment, please ignore this one.
But I am so desperate to find somebody who knows current tech writing/localization situation in China well.
Wow, it must be so cool to work in Google.
Kazuhisa, as far as I know in Shenzhen, there are still few companies that mainly provide technical communication services. Many translation service providers provide technical writing services, though I don’t think they are very professional yet.
I think technical writing is prospectful as more and more foreign companies move their R&D to China and many Chinese companies pay much attention to independent R&D.
How is the situation in Shanghai or Beijing? Maybe better?
I’d like to make friends with technical writing buddies. You can get me via yuxinyuan#msn.com or yuxinyuan#gmail.com.
@Kazuhisa
This company might help you. http://www.sigmakudos.com
To Kazuhisa,
There do have technical writing services in China. Two of the biggest are Sigma Kudos and Semcon, both headquartered in Sweden.
If you are searching for individual writers for electronics manuals, definitely you can find qualified applicants since Taiwan companies have taken the lead to build the tech writing profession in such areas.
Icy and Lucy
Thank you for the comments.
Both information sound good to me as I hardly hear those Swedish companies in Japan.
As the trend of R&D shift to China is unavoidable for most of major manufactures in Japan, I will explore some companies for partnership next year.
I hope we can find good ones.
Sigmas Kudos has been expanding by leap and bound in recent years since I have just known they are hiring more people in Shenzhen.