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When a ruthless tech ubernerd is faced with pushback right before a big launch, he must find a way to hype up the team — and himself — before going onstage.
It is almost like I'm still
awake in my dreams.
It's like I'm dreaming of, I'm still working,
but in the dream world, I'm still working.
I moved from Sweden to the Philippines in January, 2009.
One of the first things that struck me was
how people sleep at work here.
Something that is completely foreign to me, to be honest,
it really confuses me.
Why is everyone asleep? Why am I awake?
What's going on?
It's not really sleep. No sleep, huh?
Because I'm, I'm a light sleeper, so maybe go on along like
Nap.
Yeah, nap.
I think anything beyond two hours is sleep.
So yeah. Napping is different from sleeping.
I prefer to, uh, hunch up on my desk, uh, sleep,
but a little bit uncomfortable
to remind me that I'm not at home.
I'm, I'm still on the clock.
I can just imagine you being from Sweden,
it's understandably strange for you coming from the outside,
looking in and seeing how relaxed
people are every day.
Sometimes I feel like I have an obsession almost
to be effective and productive and always working.
If I oversleep in the morning, I feel bad about it,
and I spend the rest of the day trying to catch up
with the time I lost.
But here it seems like people love to sleep.
We live in the equatorial tropics
where the weather is not hot, it's humid.
If it were any thicker, you would need to cut
through the weather with a knife like butter.
It just makes you sleepy, man.
So what do you want to know? Why
Do you think people Do this?
Well, it's culture. It has always been culture.
I think it could go way back,
way back when the Spaniards, you know,
like conquered the Philippines
for 500 years and stuff like that.
Uh, we have this siesta thing.
Even before the Spaniards came, in the beginning,
Philippines was a paradise.
We had all the fish in the sea
and all the fruits in the forest,
and people don't see the reason to work.
And this has become, I think, some kind
of a collective consciousness.
We are an agricultural country, so we do not
go on an exclusive, uh, nine to five structure.
That is still a concept we need to grasp. As
I get paid 10 pays per hour,
I will work 10 paces per hour.
That means I sleep half of the 30 minutes I sleep.
We're hardworking. We just lazying.
It's uh, yeah, I know.
Uh, uh, an oxymoron kind of thing, but,
But contradictions are sometimes true in Sweden.
Everything in society works and everyone works hard.
But are we happy?
Philippines? We get colonized with the Spaniards.
We wanna speak like a Spanish crap. After that.
We got the Americans in. We wanna be like American Joe.
We eat hot dogs, we drink beers.
No, we never became a Filipino.
So you cannot undo a 300 year brainwashing
of a colonial master.
It goes back to why would I work hard
to make these people richer?
So sometimes it's not laziness,
it's the lack of opportunity.
I dunno if we want to change it.
The progress of our place is also taking very slowly,
maybe because we want it that way.
We,
We love this place so much
and this culture so much that we want to retain,
we wanna hold onto it as much as we could.
If we change it, it changes, uh, the people.
It changes who we are.
I think this whole concept of sleeping at work, for me,
it shouldn't be a big deal.
I mean, we're humans after all.
We're not robots. Yeah, yeah,
Yeah.
If, for example, Swedish people be told not
to rest, how do you think they would feel?
I just feel bad, Sammy. I just really feel bad.
Like when, let me ask you,
I know you're the one interviewing me,
When a ruthless tech ubernerd is faced with pushback right before a big launch, he must find a way to hype up the team — and himself — before going onstage.