Recently when interviewing a friend of mine Mario, I found that he recently had an internship in Shanghai at Microsoft headquarters. During his time there while teaching English to many of the people who he worked with, they had a discussion about what it was like to live permanently in this government when working inside of an industry that has to use the internet so much. And all of these employees were totally willing to explain to him that everyone knew the government regulating the internet was a bad thing, so they all had VPN’s and they all had good ones. Even the business overall, the Microsoft HQ, had a company wide VPN. I found this extremely fascinating because VPN is a much less necessary thing in the US unless you have information to protect from the general public.
The other thing that he told me about this business culture that brand names were literally everything to these people. Your socio-economic status is everything that you are when walking down the streets and even inside the business. So he said almost every single person there would have some kind of Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Bradbury, and etc. whatever name brand you can think of people had it one their person. Mario was telling me that one of the crazy things about this business culture was the fact that rather than celebrating a big closing or deal with a dinner in an extremely professional setting. That these people would actually go get super drunk, and go on a shopping spree at super nice name brand stores. Which is honestly hard not to giggle at a bit, but pretty different compared to what happens here.
That’s all there is to this blog, a pretty simple one, although I found it extremely fascinating.