Working From Home in Taiwan - 2021

Some golden tips right there!

I’ve been working from home since Monday. Three kids are here too, but the wife have being doing a great work in keeping them entertained during the day.
Luckily, we have an extra room that became my office, and I follow the same working hours I used to do when I had to go to the company.

The sweetest thing happened yesterday when we finished breakfast and I got up to go to the ‘office’ saying “I’m going to work”. Then, the oldest kid give me a hug and say “Daddy, 加油!”

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I need the wife.

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It’s much better for me than being in the office. I was basically alone in the office anyway.

Here I got a nice park to chill in if I need. And my piano.

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I thought you were a sax guy…
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I kind of only work a little bit and do whatever I want 90% of the time.

What? I thought all bears play piano where they poop.

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Sax, piano, guitar, harmonica, abyssinian nose flute.

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I gotta say. One great thing about this lockdown? All the dickhead TBAs with their dickhead sports cars? They’ve all fucked off. It’s super quiet round here.

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  1. Dress if you go to office to not break the habit. Wear a mask at all times.
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Especially the particle accelerator and stuff.

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I’ve been fully remote on and off over the last 11 years or so. But only this last year almost our entire team around the world and even some customers went remote. So it’s been like a new job as we totally rely on the online collaborative environment . Using online conferencing software and different project tools, learning to make more professional recorded presentations etc. It has definitely speeded up our ability to deliver on projects and also see the results more clearly too.

I moved house and outside Taipei so I’d have a dedicated office and some space set aside from family (first time to have a dedicated office all this time ), a wise decision in this year. My office is faulty Spartan though and I can be lazy about it using the video blur background feature . But as we use video a lot these days I need to keep myself looking half decent :grin:.

I miss my old work life quite a lot though as I travelled in the region often and enjoyed it. My colleague on the other hand told me she would be happy never to have to travel internationally for work again !

I feel a little bit aggrieved as my job has morphed into something quite different from what I was originally hired for. That doesn’t last long though because I think it’s still good to be able to work, be treated fairly well and get paid reliably these days. But yeah not really a fan of this 100% remote work !!!

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I’d pay money to see THAT!

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  1. If you’re wfh, change your outfit on a daily basis.

I am personally choosing not to turn on the AC unless absolutely necessary, so I usually sweat through a pair of clothes a day, so I really have no other choice :laughing:. However, a new outfit a day I feel like it keeps things fresh and new.

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Been working from home randomly since Februrary, but mainly me because I support the US office in the evenings. Now our entire Taiwan office is WFH since Monday 5/17, and this brought me some issues, like now I need to check-in in the system to make sure I woke up to work and people are much more active on Skype, Teams and Zoom. They all wanna show the boss they are working hard.

I am fortunate enough to have a computer room, I took the wife’s laptop to install VPN to log into my office PC since I didn’t get a chance to pick it up. My home’s gaming PC is completely free from work-related software so I can game while I wait for people to reply emails or check up on people via Skype/Teams chat.

First few meetings were a shit show since some of the old school people refused my Zoom/WebEx/GoToMeeting seminars and now they regret not learning how to properly do shit. My PC doesn’t have a mic… You can join from your phone. What app should I install? I got pissed off and asked them to contact the IT department not me! lol

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Taiwanese companies are definitely a bit behind on that. I guess they’ll catch up soon enough.

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IMHO, it’s the minority who ruin it for the majority of people who do actually work despite not having a manager breathing behind their backs all day.

I’m hearing some companies are requiring employees to keep video on at all times to make sure they’re at their computer. Seriously, if managers have time to check up on you every other minute, to ask you what you are doing, they need more shit to do.

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Terrible! I hate it.

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That’s insane. If I don’t get the same amount of work done I normally would because I was fiddling around here (like right now), I’d just work extra later on.

Agree.

That’s just ridiculous! Thankfully my manager trusts me completely (numbers speak for themselves). He called me once in the entire week for 5 minutes and mainly to explain why they haven’t replied my latest email.

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Some bosses don’t know what their employee’s “numbers” should be and if there are department managers who should they don’t or aren’t trusted to handle it.

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