Shanghai Tan

One thing that is very different in the China’s IT industry versus North America is, there’s practically no gray hair in the workplace here. The average age is probably around 26-27 at the place where I work, many of them were born in the 80′s, the youngest are from the mid-80′s. Most of them started working right in the 21st Century, where high speed Internet is taken for granted, browser is their window to see the world, keyboard is a natural extension to their fingers, instant messaging (IM) is part of their work day, and laptop is their pen and paper at work.

I usually consider myself part of the generation that embraces technology and Internet, I do everything with a computer whenever it is appropriate and provides higher productivity. I no longer listen to CD, only MP3. I have no audio tape or video tape player at home, only DVD player. But laptop and IM are things that make me feel different from the 80′s generation, or I would call them the WiFi generation.

Everytime I attend a meeting at work, at least 1/3 of the people carry their laptops with them, and for the whole duration of the meeting they seem to stare only at the laptop screen, rarely looking at the speaker or the projection screen. It really irritates me when I am the presenter, sometime I tell people not to bring their laptop or don’t bother coming. When I’m not presenting, I observe their behavior, and it’s quite funny, I might have to interview them one day…

So here goes my observation. Many of them don’t seem to be involved at all in the subject that people are discussing in the meeting room, they simply read their news on the web, read their emails, half of them IM with friends intensively, some continue to do their normal work. I feel like their thought is “I’m joining this meeting because you invited me, not because I’m interested in the discussion”, or “your subject is so un-relevant to me that I’d rather continue my work or chat with friends or read gossip on the web”. Many time I wonder if they ever understand and appreciate the concept of face-to-face meeting, or they’d rather avoid it.

I also observe that those who don’t carry a laptop to meetings are either a) the contractors that were not assigned a laptop at work, and b) the older employees who have started working before laptop and WiFi were ubiquitous. I have no doubt that the first group would do the same if they were assigned a laptop with WiFi connectivity.

Not so long ago, most employees use a desktop computer at work, only sales people and senior managers use laptop. In conference room there is only a network line connection for the presenter, some rooms have none, and projector was very rare. Every attendant would go there with a pen and notepad, and the presenter usually handed out prints of the content. I think during that time people pay more attention to the discussion than today, everyone participated or listened. Now it’s hard to get everyone to listen at the presenter, let alone looking at him or her.

The decision makers of baby-boomer generation would flight for hours to meet their business partners at the other side of the world, just to have a handshake and to see them in person. The X generation people would write emails and make phone calls to their customers, and video-conference with colleagues, now the WiFi generation won’t even listen or look at their colleagues! I wonder if these youngsters will grow up appreciating direct human contact, or if the world will evolve into a more virtual contact model. Maybe our next office building won’t have meeting room at all. Hell, I must rush to buy some virtual land in Second Life, and some Linden Lab stocks too!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Scrapbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.