All the songs about working 9-5 were almost certainly not written by anyone from Hong Kong. This city ticks to a whole different beat. As a tourist, you wouldn’t really notice, apart from maybe wondering why the MTR (underground/subway/tube) is busy at certain times. A typical working day in an office seems to start around 9-10am and end around 7pm. Not particularly short days, and in fact, there are quite a few places where you also have to work on Saturday. To the extent that in some job ads on the local job websites they actually highlighted it in the job title when it was “only” a 5-day working week.

The other quite noticeable difference is the number of holidays, at my job we get 15 days vacation a year, this is not as bad as it sounds as there are 17 public holidays (compared to 11 in NZ), but still not ideal. In any case, I should be thanking my lucky stars that I have so many, a friend from Hong Kong that I play Volleyball with said it’s very usual to get 7. Yup that is not a typo, 7 days vacation a year is what she considers normal, plus working Saturdays, plus working more like 9 or 10 hour days.

While I am being thankful for things, I have ended up in a great job where we have 8 hour days, 5 day weeks and flexible working hours so I can stick to the trusty 8am-5pm that I prefer. It is probably partly as I work in tech (i.e. the stereotypes of tech geeks being night owls seems to be somewhat true) but my office is dead until 9am, as in me and 2 others out of 90 people. A few dribble in between 9 and 9:30 then getting closer to 10 it starts to finally feel full! These sort of hours also extend to shop opening hours so if you are touristing here don’t plan to go shopping starting before 11am, but rest assured you can go well into the evening too, this part is actually quite handy. Less handy is the gym we joined which has nothing going on until 9am, neither classes nor access to the actual gym, but does offer Aerial Yoga from 10pm-11pm… just what I want to do on a Wednesday night.

Other bits and pieces about working here I don’t really know if they are specific to my company or generally to Hong Kong. Firstly there is no putting up signs to tell people “please do your dishes” or “your mother doesn’t work here”, as there is a full-time cleaner in the office who pops in and out of the kitchen keeping it sparkly so you are actually supposed to leave your stuff in the sink. It has taken some getting used to weirdly, I kept feeling like I was breaking the rules. On reflection it actually makes sense, with a 90 person team there would constantly be someone doing dishes, so if you add up all the time spent doing that instead of productive work it makes sense to employ someone (realistically on a lower wage) to spend that time instead.

Another awesome thing which is definitely a tech company thing but not sure if HK generally, is the food. There is a whole fridge of company provided food, the main idea is that you can always have breakfast at work so there is bread for toast, spreads, cereal, milk, yoghurt, bananas. There is also a big basket of snacks, mostly muesli bars or cookies, and lots of cheese in the fridge. They also provide a fruit bowl, orange juice, soda water, coconut water, and the usual tea and coffee. Pretty epic. In addition, so far at least twice a week there has been some sort of other event which has resulted in free food - trainings, lunch presentations, team celebrations etc. etc.

The last one is the air quality, there are air quality monitors all around the office and a dashboard that you can view them on. They have strict targets for their air quality and purifiers all around the office to make sure they achieve them. I am yet to really feel the effects of poor air quality, and maybe I won’t really with work so kitted out, plus we also just got an air purifier at home. That’s actually fine by me although a slightly morbid curiosity makes me wonder what it would be like without them.