Excerpts from interviews with a Senior Software Engineer (Chinese) from another company and the Director of Product Management (Beijing).
(Director of Product Management)
"Establishing a development centre in Beijing was a dream project in many ways. For a merger or acquisition you have to work 'after the fact' with a pre-established team. In Beijing it was a clean slate, new hires, using our 'foreign' methodology."
"...one of the reasons was it [the Beijing office] added value to the company. If we think about the four of five possible strategies for a mid-tier tech company, well, having a foothold in China - high profile, high value projects - it ticks all the boxes."
"When you set up an office in China or India, there's a fear among people at the home base! You immediately create the potential for a social divide that applies when you move to an offshore site."
"Do you want a situation where you say 'designed in California, made in China'? What does that say about a social divide in the company? That's the choice you have to make."
"Our core methodologies and practices are Scrum/Agile so we decided to use Scrum from the start. The local engineers looked on it as a 'foreign' methodology, but no resistance and open to learning about it."
"My view is that Agile is a strict discipline; it's more disciplined that other methods if you do it in a highly structured way, get rid of the 'ad hoc' style that seems to be associated with it. Start your standups at 10am (not 5 past 10), finish strictly at 10:15am. The standup conversation should be structured; specific challenges approaching, specific problems you are facing, you've either run or written a test case. Programming's like that, there's 'do or don't', 'did or didn't', no ambiguity and you need these type of conversations, Agile brings this to the front. But I was worried Agile could create problems with 'face', engineer's admitting to difficulty or failing to achieve something."
(Senior Engineer)
"In China software engineering career has quite a lot of respect. In general, software engineers work long hours, often seven days a week, starting early, leaving late. International companies might have more formal policies, leave work at 7pm, come back in the morning. But not as flexible as smaller companies, usually working around a project, if an emergency comes in they might have to work all night."
"Now Agile and Scrum are well known in China. In the real implementation there are some cultural differences that might make it feel different to an implementation in the US."
"Let me put it this way; In western countries, people like to treat work like playing games. A manager here is something like the parent, not the children. People don't accept the childish approach. Engineers think 'we are not kids, we are adults'. So Agile can inspire in the West because it is playful, but in China?..."
Related Industry Data
- Agile 101 - Methodologies, Learn more about Scrum, XP, DSDM, FDD and Lean software development (www.infoq.com).
- Understanding Chinese business culture: potential starting points for developing an understanding of guanxi (relational) and mianzi (face/status/rank) on wikipedia.org or google search.
