At the end of February, Han Zhao, who works in Google's search department, had a high fever. He suspected that he might have been infected with a new crown pneumonia. At the time, Santa Clara County in Silicon Valley had just announced its first confirmed case. However, when he put on a mask and arrived at Stanford Hospital for his appointment, he realized that none of the doctors here were wearing masks. "We were a little worried about the spread of the outbreak, and then it did break out." Han Zhao recalled.
Today, the outbreak is changing the habits of people in California. Lorraine, a graduate student at a college in the Silicon Valley area, recently discovered that even in the average American supermarket, the proportion of people wearing masks has risen to about 40%, and in Asian supermarkets, especially Chinese supermarkets, everyone is "armed". At one time, wearing a mask on the street will attract a strange look, but now people have become accustomed to.
Beijing time on April 5, according to the U.S. Johns Hopkins University and the CDC. According to Johns Hopkins University and the CDC, as of April 4, EST, the United States has more than 300,000 cumulative diagnosed cases of new crown pneumonia, the largest number of diagnosed cases in the country.
And California, on the West Coast, has 9,191 confirmed cases, second only to New York and New Jersey on the East Coast.
Beginning in the early morning hours of March 17th, local time, the six-county city of San Francisco began to implement the "Shelter-in-place" (shelter-in-place), and on the 19th, California announced a statewide ban on footwear. And long before that, Silicon Valley technology companies have asked employees to work from home (work from home).
Under the impact of the new pneumonia outbreak, Silicon Valley, which had been booming, has been much cooler than usual. For Chinese employees working at tech companies in Silicon Valley, there are concerns about the social risks of losing their jobs as opposed to the invisible virus.
Central Park in Santa Clara County was sparsely populated.
An empty street in front of the salesforce tower, San Francisco's tallest building.
Apple
Apple Park is empty because of the SVP's approval to work there
At Stanford Hospital, Han Zhao, who had a high fever, was misdiagnosed and revisited before finally being diagnosed with mycoplasma pneumonia. After experiencing this "oolong" Han Zhao, his trust in the local medical institutions has been discounted. He told the Beijing News reporter, in the face of the new crown pneumonia virus, "their preparation is not adequate.
Bao Ming, who works in data science at Apple, told Xinjing Daily that he was not surprised by the spread of the outbreak in the United States. "One can only say it's sooner or later, so many flights come and go every day, especially places like Silicon Valley and New York, which are particularly connected to the world." Bao Ming said.
Bao works at Apple Park, the company's headquarters in Cupertino, and has seen the place go from crowded to crowded over the past three weeks. At first, the company didn't force employees to work from home, just said they could. But since last Wednesday, their department has begun to require that if they have to come to the office, they need the approval of SVP-level executives - executives who are directly under the management of CEO Cook. Now people don't go to the company unless they really need an on-site office.
Before that, Bao Ming continued to go to the company for two more weeks. A number of people had pulled out on the day they received the notification email, but essentially half of them were still working at the company. Then, because of school closures and other reasons, many colleagues need to go home with their children, a week down, Bao Ming in the office area of a dozen people, only one or two people will still come to work. After that, Bao Ming became the only "left behind".
In this special period, every day at work, the only thing that Bao Ming can see the dense flow of people, is the need to drive in line to take the temperature of the gate. Once inside the office area, "the population density immediately came down". Usually there are a lot of people walking or running on the road in the park, but now there are no more, replaced by people doing cleaning. Employees don't wander around either, and only go down to the cafeteria for meals. At first, the cafeteria also introduced some measures to avoid the gathering of employees and contact, to later simply do not open.
APPLE park in the epidemic, almost no one in and out, very cold.
Working from home
Working from home is not a clear boundary between work and life
Like Apple, Google has started to work from home.
After a period of treatment, Han Zhao's body has basically healed. During the home office period, he felt that the pace of work was no different than usual, and that meetings, progress reports, and other processes were carried out as usual. If there is a problem, it is that we could have met each other in the company's campus, but now we can only nest in the home, so the company and the team are also more concerned about the mental health of the people, will be recommended to do exercises at home, exercise, and encourage each group to organize some activities such as board games, to enhance the connection between the staff and feelings.
Han Zhao observed that for home office, each company's policy is different, and even within the same company, there are differences in different groups. Google focuses on communication, but the usual cross-group communication is through the screen, short-term rapid communication is not that important. If there's any inconvenience to working from home, it's that when local businesses are fully home-based, the likelihood of the network going down from time to time becomes higher.
Ning Zhou, who also works at Google, said that "working from home is not bad, and I'm getting used to it," and that work efficiency has improved. The downside, however, is that working hours are longer, and the boundaries between work time and life time are less clear. On the issue of layoffs, Ning Zhou said that he has not heard of any layoffs among his friends or his team.
Talking about the Silicon Valley "war epidemic" and the impact on Chinese engineers and Chinese descendants, Ning Zhou revealed that "the initial impact of the epidemic is really quite big". According to him, after the epidemic spread globally, the relationship between China and the United States has also been affected by some, basically "the domestic fight in the first half of the field, overseas fight in the second half of the field, overseas Chinese playing the whole field (the whole field beaten). Even in the very accommodating and meta-Google, Chinese engineers and ethnic Chinese have faced a little hostility, and even fear of layoffs.
At the end of February, some Chinese engineers in Silicon Valley started wearing masks to work, which would cause passersby to look at them. This was avoided until early March, when the company fully required home-based work. "You can't buy masks in the U.S.," Ning Zhou said, adding that the CDC has now officially prompted people to wear masks outside as imports increase.
"On my flight back to New York from Silicon Valley, I had six or seven masks in my bag, but I was too embarrassed to take them out and put them on because there was no one in the airports or on the planes on either side of me wearing a mask." Shen Han is an intern designer in the Silicon Valley office of a large domestic Internet company, and she flew back to school on March 7 after receiving instructions from the company that she could work from home. Shen Han remembers that when she was at the company, no one would wear a mask throughout February, "because the whole atmosphere in California was very loose." It wasn't until March that people started to change. The company issued masks to everyone, the beginning of the casual collar, to the later atmosphere is more tense, it is limited to one per person per day.
The scene in front of Google's full office under the impact of the epidemic.
Fresh food bought on the platform, finally delivered after three weeks
Technology The Internet companies are usually more flexible, so telecommuting will not be a problem. In Amazon's Silicon Valley office to work in the Chen Zhong said, Amazon usually will allow employees to work at home one day a week, which is very common in the Silicon Valley technology companies, especially large companies, one can reduce the pressure of local transportation, the second is also convenient for employees to deal with family matters. Many companies also subsidize or reimburse their employees hundreds of dollars for equipment and working conditions.
Most of the respondents said their productivity did not drop at home compared to at work. But others told the Beijing News that working at home can be less focused and distracting. Zhang Zheng, who works as a programmer at Uber, said that communication across groups or further afield is usually online, so the impact is not great, but there will be more face-to-face communication within the group, which will now have to be carried out online as well. He feels that the pace of work has slowed down.
More problems come from life. "I bought groceries on Amazon Fresh on March 7, and they were delivered to me today (March 30)!" Xiao Lei, a programmer at Silicon Valley semiconductor company Super Micro Computer, was most commonly used to buy groceries during the lockout on Amazon fresh and Chinese-targeted fresh food e-commerce company weeee! The latter is now very difficult to swipe to the state of availability, and even when it does, it is sold in packages, and the former's delivery time is something to be grabbed, as there is a severe shortage of manpower, and those who do grab it can only wait slowly for it to be delivered. "Due to the number of infected people now, many people can not go out on the road, basically online grocery shopping, really can not buy it, will venture out to buy food." Xiao Lei told the New Beijing News reporter.
In contrast, offline supermarkets will have plenty of goods, in addition to rolling paper and bottled water and other tight commodities will be limited purchase, most of the goods can be bought, and "did not take advantage of the phenomenon of price increases." "Maybe this supermarket doesn't have flour anymore, that supermarket doesn't have milk anymore, but more than 90% of the goods are still in good supply." Zhang Zheng told the New Beijing News reporter. Inconveniently, in order to guarantee enough social distance (social distance), supermarkets have limited flow, shopping efficiency is much lower than usual. "I often go to a supermarket, just queuing to enter the door took more than 40 minutes, the line out more than 500 meters long." Bao Ming said that in order to address the shopping needs of the elderly, the supermarket will be a special time slot in the morning to arrange for the elderly, but this also makes the queue very long and slow.
For Shen Han, one of the benefits of working from home is being reunited with her husband, who is studying for his doctorate in New Jersey. Yet she still gets a lot of negative energy from all the information she brushes up against every day. A soft and funny game like "Animal Senpai" has become her weapon against "depression" and "autism", and because too many people have bought it, the price of the game has gone up all the way.
People waiting in line to enter the supermarket.
Safety tips posted at Costco.
Flying more than 40 hours to get back to the US to keep his job, many companies have frozen hiring
From Chengdu to Guangzhou, from Guangzhou to Qatar, from Qatar to Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia to San Francisco - in order to make it back to the US before the ban on entering the country came into effect - Xiao Lei made an almost circuitous route during the more than 40-hour journey. more than 40-hour trip almost circled the globe. "If I hadn't come back, I might have lost my job." Xiao Lei told the New Beijing News. After returning, Xiao Lei was quarantined according to the company's requirements. The quarantine is not yet over, the U.S. epidemic broke out, and the entry ban has not been lifted so far.
The epidemic raged at the same time, the U.S. stock market has experienced a rare "stock market crash", many Silicon Valley star enterprise stock prices plummeted and even cut. With the rising number of confirmed cases, the economic impact of the epidemic is also more and more obvious. The risk of losing your job is just as real as the risk of contracting the virus.
By contrast, Silicon Valley tech giants are much more risk-averse than the average company, and their employees generally feel more secure." There's definitely pressure on the company - after all, so many brick-and-mortar stores have closed, there will be some challenges on the production side, and the company's stock price has fallen quite a bit recently. However, we haven't seen any big changes on the employee side yet, and we haven't heard about stopping hiring or layoffs or anything like that." Bao Ming said of Apple.
Uber's Zhang Zheng told Xinjing Daily that while the company's ride-hailing business has taken a hit, its takeout business has gained a lot of favor because of the foot ban. "As long as the company still has business, is still need people to do things, so we are not anxious." Zhang Zheng said.
However, people are starting to hear about people being let go, and a business in Los Angeles that provides ****enjoyment-powered scooters is losing a lot of money because of the foot ban. "Straight to an all-hands meeting, some teams can be left with just one manager, and all the rest were laid off." Bao Ming said, that friend is now desperately looking for a job, but, in this current environment, many companies have directly frozen recruitment, not recruiting new people. The dismissed employees are thus caught in the middle, in a very awkward situation.
For recent graduates looking for jobs in Silicon Valley or other tech companies, the job search is just as difficult. "We're the hardest class because a lot of companies don't recruit fresh graduates anymore." Shen Han told the New Beijing News reporter, the company issued an offer after the change of heart, the position is canceled, etc. also happened repeatedly, "everyone is now looking for a job to find very uncomfortable."
There are also industries that have brought new jobs because of the epidemic. on March 17, Amazon announced plans to recruit 100,000 new employees in warehousing and delivery to ease shipping delays due to rising business volume. Shares of zoom, which provides videoconferencing software, also bucked the trend at one point.
"The biggest hit inside the epidemic is still the service industry like restaurants, I've seen some milk tea stores sending links in various groups begging people to order takeout, even the delivery fee is free." Xiao Lei said. Overall, Silicon Valley technology companies in many industries, has been considered more fortunate - less reliance on offline activities, the drop in demand is not as large, the resistance of enterprises is generally higher.
"Purely online companies will be much less affected, companies related to entities will be more affected, and those with strong offline ties, like Airbnb, will be hit the hardest." Cao Yan is the HR for a Chinese Internet giant in Silicon Valley, and because the company does purely online business, business has instead risen when people are grounded. "It's good in the short term, but it's hard to say if the epidemic continues, because people's advertising budgets will shrink too." As for job seekers, in Silicon Valley, the big guns will always have their hands full, while others will have far fewer choices, and will have to face risky and difficult choices when outside circumstances change. This is also the cruel side of the law of survival in Silicon Valley.
At the end of the day, there are still a lot of people walking down the street, but they're subconsciously keeping a sufficient distance. In the supermarkets, more and more people are wearing masks. Beneath the calm surface of life, signs of emotional tension bubble up from time to time. "Every extra week that this epidemic drags on, there could be a lot of people whose life trajectory has changed since then." Bao Ming said.
(Interviews for this article are pseudonyms)