Lately because there’s been a bit too much overtime,
two-person world time gets interrupted often,
which made my girlfriend a bit unhappy.
(One)
A few months ago, the weekly routine was going out to forage for food,
the place we went had Hong Kong-style decoration.
Mia was happily discussing the sasa shopfront on the wallpaper with me,
when my eye caught a QR code on the table.
“Wow look, they also have WeChat ordering.
I’ve been working overtime these months on exactly this!
Wait a sec, let me take a photo and send it to the group,
to see how their experience compares to ours…”
In an instant, Mia lost all interest in chatting with me.
Last weekend,
in the middle of eating I picked up a voice call again,
then I told Mia,
after finishing the meal I’d have to go to the company in the afternoon.
Mia very curiously asked me:
“Are you the one who fixes all the bugs at your company?”
I consoled Mia saying:
“There are also some other coworkers who fix bugs on weekends, you know.”
(Two)
The next evening after eating with Mia we went out for a walk to digest,
and unwittingly the conversation turned to overtime again.
On the principle of “when you love someone you want to share everything with them,”
I couldn’t help but chatter on about my work again with Mia.
“Let me tell you, I really feel each person has different attributes.”
Mia played along: “Hm?”
“Take our company for example.
Because the work system is 965 + flex time,
the variance between people is actually huge.
Some coworkers come to work on time, leave on time, and do their work well,
others like me work overtime while slacking off.”
“Oh, so that means some of you really don’t work overtime?”
“Yeah of course.
Look, this overtime attribute,
is actually bound to me, not to the company.
Back at QAD didn’t I also go back to work after showering at night…”
“Oh…”
(Three)
Speaking of which,
I remembered a really fun saying I saw last time:
“resignation blast radius.”
So I tried to demo it to Mia in plain language:
“Although everyone is equal,
the differences between people are actually quite big.”
“How so?”
“Like take our few dozen people right now,
losing a few seems like no big deal.
But actually off the top of my head I can name a few people,
the moment they all resigned at once,
our stuff would fall apart.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Because a lot of what we do isn’t actually maintained by systems,
it’s really being held up by excellent people.
And precisely because these people are so excellent,
many institutional things don’t seem necessary yet,
it’s very ‘people-centric.’”
(Four)
“Let me give you a concrete example,
which is support.”
“Mm, ok~”
“Our company makes B-end products you know,
which means merchants are really our foundation.
So personally I firmly believe in customer first,
the same as the Customer First Core Value QAD talked about.
Though phrases like that,
I never mention in front of coworkers.”
“Oh, why?”
“Because I feel this issue is very sensitive.
Like a concrete example,
we currently don’t have a technical support department,
which means any technical problem nobody can handle, R&D has to step in to solve.”
“Huh? What about your service coworkers? Aren’t they responsible for on-site installation?”
“Yes, in our division of labor that’s called Customer Success.
They’re actually pretty miserable too, responsible for service + support work.
But they don’t understand technology, so as I just said we don’t have technical support.”
“Oh oh.”
“This isn’t good or bad,
this is our current state.
But the problem is when we hire people,
or rather at the company strategy level we don’t explicitly state this:
that the engineer’s job responsibilities include support.
This is actually quite broken,
people sitting in different seats will think differently,
so a lot of this here is purely maintained by our sense of responsibility.”
“Then why doesn’t your company set up technical support?”
“Uh, that I can’t really say.
I’m guessing this is a growing pain on the company’s path to growth.”
(Five)
Mia recalled what she’d seen on a Uniqlo recruitment notice:
“We are a company that worships meritocracy”
and couldn’t help but sigh: “Then people with families probably can’t work at companies like that.”
“Yeah, and we even have coworkers who are married yet work super hard…
Really scary…”
Mia thought of something else, and asked:
“By the way, is Xu-zong still single then?”
Me: “Probably… yeah…”
By that point,
Mia and I noticed we’d unknowingly walked all the way to Sun Moon Light.
At the bus stop billboard by the entrance,
a “Da Man Zu” Yang Yang was smiling brightly at us.
“Come on, back the way we came, let’s go home.”
(End)