Venting about work

I think it's about time I started venting about frustrations at work. According to the latest issue of Wired I received here Microsoft employees blog about problems at their company and people actually listen. I think the chances that anyone relavent will read this are very small, but I'm going to vent for your reading pleasure (or boredom).

The past couple of days have been especially trying. I have two engineers working for me now. They're good guys. Outside of my department is a different story. There's a serious cultural difference here that I'm going up against. Basically it is being someone’s friend at the office is really important. Instead of analyzing this for you I'll just tell you this story and vent if you don't mind. I have a couple of foreign clients now in addition to my domestic market work. I'm helping with some quality issues and require a production fixture to be built. There is another "product development" department complete with a manager, Mr. Zong, who's been here a long time, but can't use CAD and I doubt even has a degree. Very old style, though only a little older than me. I see people in his department playing games on the computer all day, and when working generally using the most primitive and inefficient methods possible. I know they're busy so we designed the production fixture ourselves that would dramatically reduce the time needed to build the parts and provide the quality required by the client. So 10 days ago I give them the drawings who Mr. Zong simply needs to pass on to the the shop guys to build. It's a simple fixture that I could build myself but I don't have the tools and it makes more since to have the guys who earn 20% of what I earn make the part. They said they'll have it done three days later. So three days later I ask him how the part's going. He says he's not sure and for me to ask the shop guys myself. I ask, they haven't even seen it. I explain it to them, they hardly even speak Mandarin so I use one of my engineers to be sure the design is clear. They want one part modified, I promptly do it and say they'll start it when Mr. Zong says so. He finally rubber stamps it and they say they'll give it to me 4 days later. The 2nd day they inform me that my design is wrong, I explain that it isn't and they just need to build it, quickly. The evening of the 3rd day, I'm out of the office, they call again about the same thing and say that it's wrong and if they don't change it I will pay for it myself. I told them to forget it and follow the drawing. So on the 4th day I get the part and it's totally wrong. They've built something that only resembles the drawing. The previous week the GM, a couple other managers including Mr. Zong and I have a meeting in which the GM states that it is the company's goal to finish this client's projects within the week. A yelling match ensues between the Mr. Zong and the GM, all in the local dialect and I never am quite sure what was said. So I try to discuss the problem with the shop guys on the 4th day and get blown off (they NEVER are of any help). So I go to my boss the GM. We immediately have a meeting and another yelling match ensues between the two which I thought would literally come to blows on a couple of occasions. It's all in the local dialect so I'm sitting there with these guys leaning over the table, just staring out the window wondering what the heck is going on. The export manager is there and later tells me a little but basically Mr. Zong says he's too busy and the GM says should've handled the whole thing in the first place (I doubt that's a complete summary of 20min of high speed debate). The shop guys then comes up with the parts and it now takes the GM and three managers to fix a part that should've taken 4 hours for the shop guy to build right. That evening I had dinner with a coworker who speaks Japanese and spent time overseas so understands my plight. He explains that the manager forgets all the time and you need to bug once a day about his projects, though not making too much of a pain out of yourself because then he'll dislike you and just try to stop you. So I need to "make friends" with Mr. Zong so my projects will go more smoothly. I can hardly stand karaoke here and taking Mr. Zong to karaoke so he will do his job just may be lower than I can stoop.

The western business practice of doing business first and secondly being friends is replaced by, "if we aren't friends then I don't understand it, therefore I'm not going to do it, even if the GM says so". The problem is it's difficult for me to explain everything I do only to have it questioned by some shop guy who can hardly even speak Mandarin. It's been especially tough since sharing my frustration with friends etc is only in Chinese. Work here is like this here, especially as a manager who has to depend on other managers, not just those above and below me to get things done. I have really good days, and days when I want to walk out. I still prefer the challenge to my constant ceiling working in the U.S. and I know that once I figure out this stuff it'll really be a huge advantage, but sometimes it's just hard.