Today started off with our visit to Glass Egg, a game developer and art outsourcing studio. You really didn’t need to be a video game fan to enjoy this visit. It was so cool to see all of the employees in their own comfy workspaces listening to music and drafting supercars, weapons, trees, and characters for various game publishers. Glass Egg spans three floors in their building. To me it looked like every employee was happy to be working, which makes sense because who wouldn’t be happy listening to music and making art all day?
Our presenter shared lots of great accomplishments Glass Egg boasts insofar as their portfolio, but the most impressive attribute of Glass Egg was their employee loyalty. They had about 170 employees out of over 400 that have been with the company for more than 10 years. Every year, one outstanding employee is chosen for the Wall of Honor award. The decision is decided by employee votes (must be employed for more than 2 years), a CEO selection, and the board of directors. This award is highly prestigious at Glass Egg and the winners are given a month’s salary, better health insurance, and invitations to company trips for life, even if they don’t work with Glass Egg anymore. The company trip perk was the biggest success indicator to me; you have to really have a fantastic employee-employer relationship to continue to invite past employees to company events. The visit made me wish I knew how to use softwares like Blender and Autodesk so I could try my hand at what they do. It genuinely seemed like such a high-achieving and happy place to work.
After Glass Egg, we went to UEF for our language and culture classes. At the end, the students taught us two classic Vietnamese games. One was a sort of betting game, so we bet candy and made as much noise as humanly possible when we won. We’re a very classy group. None of us played by the rules; we stole candy from the dealer after we lost all of winnings by going all in. Regardless of how poor our casino etiquette is, I’m sure we’ll all pass on the games to the states.
At this point we’re wrapping up our first week. Not a single day was a miss. We’ve had so much fun at our site visits, in class, and hanging out with the UEF students at night. Looking back on the past couple days, karaoke has been a huge highlight. Very few of us are decent at singing which makes it all the more entertaining. Karaoke is probably the part of Vietnamese culture I’m most excited to bring back with me. America needs more bad singing with friends.
I’m looking forward to our day trip in the Mekong Delta tomorrow and anticipating some really annoying sunburn. I’m sure it’ll be especially valuable to see Vietnamese life outside of the big city. Tạm biệt!
