Valley Chai

it’s a familiar question. ‘how is it working in india?’ is probably the question i get asked most. and admittedly, what i used to ask myself before i moved. and here is the low-down.

from time-spent point of view, i do spend a lot more time working in india than when i was in the US. my job is a great reference point for this comparison, because i have the exact same job in bangalore as i had in the bay area before i moved. i wondered why i work longer, and it boils down to the urge on my part to stay ‘in the mix’ with the day-to-day happenings in our US office.

in the bay area, i typically used to work from 9 am to 7 pm (so that i can leave after the HOV lane opens up on the 237 from sunnyvale to milpitas). once the kids went to bed, may be i’d get on a call probably three times a week at night before going to bed. here in bangalore, i still do the same office hours, but i spend almost 2 hours every night on phone calls on pretty much every weekday. working on a product (rather than a service/consulting), the job requires a lot more person-person interaction in a many-to-many directions, multiplying the time i spend on the phone.

the folks in consulting can throw bodies at on-site coordination and have the delivery model nailed to avoid this kind of night-time overtime, but in a product company the whole asynchronous communication modalities haven’t been totally worked out.

and then, there is culture around the office - one thing is starkly different: people are a lot more a-political and a lot more collaborative. clearly absent is an undercurrent of zero-sum - i.e., for person A getting ahead doesn’t need him/her to be better than person B. it leads to complacency but it works. in a different way that i am yet to fathom.

in regular conversations, some people feel a weird compulsion to use american idioms to reinforce their the well-traveled credentials, but somehow, those idoms got mutated in many cases. it always sounds odd when people say ‘take a call’ rather than ‘make a call’ (to mean ‘make a decision’). it’s always flying ‘down’ to a town, even if they are going north. everything is always sent ‘across’ to someone. words like ‘jeez’ and ‘gosh’ are used, even if a person isn’t a christian, and have no particular issues with taking the god’s name in vain. profanity is a big no-no, even if used to make a strong point. i am trying my best to get my language cleaned up a bit.

and people sit in the cafeteria to sip coffee together and share a plate of chips, with no visible urgency to ‘get back to work’. in the US, this would generally be considered ‘goofing off’. i am not complaining, though. people watch the cricket matches down in the break room (called ‘breakout room’) with apparent impunity and lack of guilt. but i do know that the same guys are busting their chops till midnight to meet a deadline.

working over the weekends is quite normal, and some cases, manager could make a not-so-subtle request for an employee to work over weekends. that sort of request (made with an obligatory apologetic-yet-no-choice tone) would either be considered ‘evil bossy’ or grounds for overtime in the u.s. remember bill lumbergh the movie ‘office space‘?

even more unnatural is the propensity of people to talk openly about each other’s compensation. i thought it’s in the best interest of everybody if each of us didn’t discuss our comp with our colleagues. but somehow, the comp system has reached equilibrium here where employees know each others’ pay. managers beware. in the manager-employee relationship, neither the carrot nor the stick work particularly well. nor do lofty goals, inspirational speeches, mission statements, job satisfaction and the prospect of a major pay increase. (well in a majority of cases). more often than not, a straight-up supervisor-worker relationship tossed in with job security does just fine. overt public praise works like magic.

back to the question of ‘how is it working in india?’. most important thing is that one should get rid of the presumption that it not-so-good, and the answer to the question would somehow need only to describe how bad it is. it’s definitely is different, but it’s as satisfying as anywhere (at least at my company). you just have to get used to the differences.

here in bangalore, i get a lot done in a short period of time. i do interesting work, and i get a sense of accomplishment.