Comment by djpr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djpr | Hacker News Reader

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I'm curious, where do you work now and who are your clients? I worked in Asia and the work culture with the Chinese (mainlanders) and those of Chinese-descent (Chinese Malaysians, Chinese Singaporean) was more challenging than working with Americans.

When I was in advertising, stories of people working and staying (as in sleeping over) during the weekends was not uncommon. Clients would call me at 11pm asking for a concall with my staff. 12 hours a day for weeks on end, including working weekends, were common place.

We were able to hire great talent just by promising that we'd never ask our staff to work weekends and hardly ever after 7pm on a workday. We had mostly US clients so that was an easy thing for us to day.

This culture shifted a bit when stories of young agency people in Hong Kong and other Asian cities dying from exhaustion became a big deal 4-5 years ago. But its still very workaholic culture.

Don't get me wrong, Americans work insane hours compared to Indonesians or the French, but parts of Asia is a whole other level of madness.

I'm in Thailand and our customers are almost all in the US. Some Thai companies have a pretty grueling culture, six days a week, little/no vacation, etc.

Our customers don't try to micromanage as long as we're getting results. I think our approach to work just comes down to me setting the tone. I was very lucky to have a teacher all the way back in elementary school who drilled the "Work smarter, not harder" mentality into my head from an early age.

And I've maintained 100% ownership of my company, therefore I exert the main influence over the culture. The way we do things works so I have no desire to change it.

They are lucky to have you, but how does "work smarter, not harder" work for competitors who aren't as smart as you?

If you can't compete with others at school, in the workplace, or as a business based on intellectual superiority the gap has to be made up somewhere. Usually that leads to hard work and then a vicious cycle.

That's an interesting question. I'm not sure this is a satisfactory answer, but I think what we do isn't really enabled by superior intellect as much as it is by a focus on good process and introspection.

In other words it comes down to good management -- this is just my pet theory, but as a ruminating introvert, when I did live and work in the US I felt that I witnessed a lot of extroverts get promoted into positions of authority because they were popular, and proceed to make poor decisions.

The point of that statement is usually doing the efficient thing instead of just working hard because the end results are what really matter. Why use a brush for broad areas when a paint roller can get the job done quicker?

I didn't know it was possible to have a 100% foreign owned business in Thailand. Is that a new development, or is the business in your SO's name?

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