My first month in China

Finally I managed to find an open wireless access point and I can get on internet at home. Broadband cost about 150rbm ($12) per month but I have not yet figured out on how to get it.

After about 1.5 months in Redmond doing various presentations and meeting relevant groups I came back to Beijing one week before the start of the Chinese New Year. I had to go to Xiamen where we have an OEM manufacture the thing that I am working on. Once we make an announcement about my product I can talk about what it is but for now I can't say.

I spent 2 days in Xiamen and went to the OEMs factory. I was really impressed by everything and I will write more about that in the next post. As soon as I came back to Beijing everyone left for the Chinese new year vacation so I was left alone in Beijing. I made good use of the time to write a bunch of specification documents for the product I am working on. The city was absolutely deserted as everyone went back home to visit their family during the one week new year holiday. There was very little to do and since the few people that I know had also left I didn't have anyone to go out with or anything to so. I went out one night to the major bar district but it was very quiet. That week sucked big time.

I was very glad when the new year holiday was over and people started to come back. I headed back to Xiamen to finalize the design of the product and then sent it to manufacturing. My major at school was electrical engineering but ever since I came to MS about 7 years ago I was removed from designing and manufacturing real physical products. The process of designing this new product has been very interesting. I was very proud of myself for being able to have intense discussion (in Chinese and English) with the lead hardware designer at the OEM and being able to actually contribute to the design. At Microsoft good program managers are technical enough that can argue with the dev managers and architects about architecture and code design and they understand technical issues well enough that can make significant contribution in hard core design meetings. So I discovered that I am pretty as good at driving hardware designs as well. I worked with electrical, mechanical and industrial design people of the OEM and I could understand the tradeoffs and make decisions quickly. That was the highlight of my first month. I learned something new about myself.

A new PM joined my team this week. I am glad to have more help and excited to help him learn how to be a great PM at Microsoft. I have always loved helping people further their career and that was one the thing I enjoyed the most in my 2 years of working with Microsoft India sub.

When I came back from Redmond I moved into my own apartment which I share with my roommate, Sungmee. She works at Microsoft and she has been in Beijing for 6 years. She is an alumnus of Xinhua University. She is Korean so she went back to Korea for the new year holiday and is not back yet.

This is all the news about me so far. I have learned a lot of interesting things about china ever since I came here. I will write more soon.