Working at Intel

What's it like working at Intel in China?

I commute to work on company provided bus. The ride to work lasts about 23 minutes. The ride home a little longer. I am a quite popular seatmate as one gets a free English lesson by engaging in small talk with me. ;-) I try to get a bit of a free Chinese lesson in return.

Our building has a small car parking lot since most of us commute by bus. There is also a bicycle parking lot.

There a cafeteria on the first floor. It serves breakfast and lunch. Breakfast costs about 50 cents US. Lunch is about $1 US. There is a small convenience store and Starbucks-like coffee bar in the cafeteria. A latte is $1.50 US.

I sit near a west facing window on the 2nd floor in a 2 meter by 2 meter cube which is similar to any cube in the US. All Intel employees have a cube, even the CEO. My "desktop" PC is an IBM laptop (T42) running Windows XP. We use Outlook for email. [We also use Sharepoint and shared network drives.]

We have a break area on each floor (referred to as "the pantry") with a water cooler (hot and cold), several small tables with chairs, microwave, fridge, and coffee machine. Free coffee, crackers, 4 varieties of tea bags, Sprite, Orange drink, and Coca-Cola (with straw) are also available.

With the cheap local labor supply, the bathrooms are in a state of constant cleaning, complete with the yellow plastic "CAUTION WHEN WET" signs in English and Chinese.

The meetings I attend are usually 100% in English, even if I'm the only native English speaker present. Occasionally, the discussion switches to Chinese for a few minutes while some point is hashed out, but then returns to English with a brief summary provided to me.

[I will write more later about S/W engineering in China and how it is similar and different from S/W engineering in the US]

Beer

How is the beer in China? Well, it depends. There is beer. There is cold beer: an improvement from 10 years ago. There are beer girls: girls in tight fitting logo clothes that try to sell you their brand as soon as you sit down in the bar or restaurant. There is a brand of beer called "REEB" ---- that's beer spelled backwards --- how good could that be? There is Tsing Tao. There are 7 flavors of TsingTao. There is a cold quart bottle of Budweiser "to go" for $1. There are cases of beer delivered to your home. There is Heineken and Corona. There are six-packs. There are Irish pubs that have Guinness on tap. There are at least 20 brands of beer in the Carrefour (like a Walmart) supermarket where we shop. However....... There are no pale ales. There are no IPAs... Sigh... There are no micro breweries (that I know of). There is a Trappist beer, Chamay, from Belgium at Carrefour that costs about 3 US dollars for a 12 oz bottle. It is pretty darn tasty.