About | Robin Chien

I’m Robin Chien. I live in Taipei with my family, and I’ve spent more than twenty years building and running the physical systems that let large organisations do their work.

I trained as a civil engineer and spent my first eleven years at the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, leading a department and working on building information modelling. At TSMC I ran campus corporate services in Taichung while an advanced-node campus went from bare ground to more than ten thousand people in three years. Since 2018 I’ve been at Google in Taiwan, running workplace services through a period of fast growth, with a focus on smart buildings and energy efficiency.

What this site is

The work I’m proudest of is mostly invisible. When a campus or a building runs well, nobody notices. This site is the visible half: the books I learn from, the questions I think about in AI and infrastructure, the runs that keep me sane, and the tables and bars I’d take you to if you were in town.

How I think

Bottom line first. I say the conclusion, then the reasoning.
Write the failure first. I run a pre-mortem before big decisions and keep a short list of anti-goals.
Systems over heroics. If I’m fixing the same thing twice, I ask whether a system should fix it instead.
Learn from people as well as books. I study the operating rules of leaders I admire and keep notes on what I borrowed.

Lists I keep

Books worth rereading. Bowls worth queuing for. Bars where a conversation can actually finish. Routes I’d send a jet-lagged friend on at 6 a.m. Most of them are on this site.

Education

Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from National Chiao Tung University, an executive programme at National Taiwan University, and MIT Sloan certificates in business sustainability strategy and in AI’s implications for business strategy. I also sit on doctoral dissertation committees from time to time, which keeps me honest about evidence.

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