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China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

bloomberg.com

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Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#51

Post by TheOsiris »

SEJeff wrote: post #28
raverbashing wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, because the Korean alphabet requires composition of glyphs Arabic has some marks and different start/middle/end forms but it is simpler

Bonus points that everything in Arabic is phoentic. Something is spelled like it sounds (unlike english) and there is little ambiguity.

little ambiguity? I beg to differ. no one writes with vowel marks in Arabic and the same word can be interpreted in many different ways without context. even with context but lacking vowel marks the same word can mean different things.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#52

Post by EduardoBautista »

Buetol wrote: post #23

The salaries in china are getting way higher than in silicon valley as far as I can see and that's gonna make people move. Especially with more and more layoffs in SV and the european market lacking jobs. EDIT: Looks like I'm wrong, I did the wrong conversion while on glassdoor. Salary in china are way lower than SV My point is that people move where the money is, when the salary are gonna be higher, people are gonna…

I need a source for this. China having higher salaries than the USA is something I would have never expected in my lifetime.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#53

Post by FilterSweep »

erics32 wrote: post #12

One cultural factor is the fact that developers have a low social standing in China (sometimes referred to as 马工). This leads to low pay, reduced dating pool, lack of respect from people you meet etc.

> developers have a low social standing in China

But that's almost everywhere.

As an example....I'm an ex-Silicon valley developer, but I am currently living in the Southeast USA and developers are scarcely understood or appreciated here, either.

I must always be measured when I introduce myself, only mentioning my managerial responsibilities when I can tell the person does not understand what I actually do.

The other reply seemed to mention the same thing - "management of other people" is a key determinant of social status in some places.....I wouldn't say everywhere.

Many people in the South (USA) still havent divorced themselves from the notion that the generic, ambiguous, and overused term "IT" or "IT guy" of the 90s - which ranged from "following a recipe" computer maintenance to very high-level sysadmin work - applies to everyone in that industry and your career can be reduced to the following:

1) Fixing a computer 2) Connecting a computer to an internet or printer.

A stark difference compared to my days in SV when the average person would know the distinction between a web/software developer, or a UX engineer or a frontend developer.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#54

Post by mattmcknight »

Helmet wrote: post #40
erics32 wrote: post #12

One cultural factor is the fact that developers have a low social standing in China (sometimes referred to as 马工). This leads to low pay, reduced dating pool, lack of respect from people you meet etc.

Can you comment on why this is? Speaking broadly, software development tends to attract intelligent, hardworking, and educated people - not always obviously, but I think more so than a most other "office" jobs. What is contributing to the low social standing?

If you aren't in charge of others, you are at the bottom of a hierarchy of people.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#55

Post by huherto »

Symmetry wrote: post #34
raverbashing wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct The problem would be much smaller if they used a non-tonal language with a manageable alphabet or abjad (like Cyrillic or Arabic)

Is learning tones much harder than learning all the weird vowel and consonant sounds that English has? I'd always though of English and China as examples of hard languages in terms of sounds and languages like Spanish and Japanese as easy in terms of sounds.

> I'd always though of English and China as examples of hard languages in terms of sounds

Glad you mention this. I don't think most native English speakers are aware how complex English phonetics are. There are subtleties that only native speakers can distinguish. That is why many not-native speakers mispronounce some sounds. It is not that we are dummy. Our brain is just unable to hear (and produce) the exact sound.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#56

Post by gusboo »

cnxhk wrote: post #13

I have to say that most problem is not true. Most Chinese don't prefer youtube and even for the university student knows how to pass the block by vpn and other softwares. Also in some university Google is not blocked.

The point is that quality of life (and work) in China is still not as good as the US. You might waste 20 minutes everyday working with your VPN to push to github. That affects work efficiency but also morale. Use these services outside of China and you feel like you're flying.

That being said, US reporters write these stories all the time. This journalist doesn't quote any data on Chinese emigration and seems to go off gut... seeing as his bio doesn't mention he speaks Chinese and he only lived in Shanghai, I wouldn't trust his intuition about what Chinese outside of Shanghai think

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#57

Post by ar15saveslives »

aantix wrote: post #24
lsjdfkljdfwkwdf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this supposed to be a joke? I hardly see any non-Chinese using wechat....

The point of my comment is that WeChat is better Facebook clone.. At least that was the discussion here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626090 It gets a positive response in terms of usability, technical capabilities, etc.

It's easy to be better than messy user-unfriendly facebook :-) Russian clone vkontakte is way better, for example.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#58

Post by otoburb »

billconan wrote: post #17

this is very much true. Outside censorship, the working culture of China is also quite different. It's quite common to do overtime in China. work-life balance is less respected. People accept it as the normal and are proud of it. My friend worked for an accounting company. In busy season, she had to work till 5a.m. in the morning of the next day and present her report to her supervisor at 8 a.m. she took her toothbru…

Investment banking/PE, management consulting, and especially US startup culture all seem to tout similar hours during busy seasons or impending product launches (similar to programming death marches).

Although more extreme, is this really much different from Google, Facebook, Apple or other SV/NY firms offering "perks" designed to make your extended office existence more tolerable?

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#59

Post by sidlls »

raverbashing wrote: post #7
inputcoffee wrote: post #2

I believe the author should have explored another reason: English. One of the legacies of the British Empire is that a lot of the educated people in the world use English. Even in Europe, it is the lingua franca for business and academia. (In mighty Germany, the top institutions publish in English). I think the applications and work would have to be done in English for China to effectively attract global talent.

Correct The problem would be much smaller if they used a non-tonal language with a manageable alphabet or abjad (like Cyrillic or Arabic)

What. I am a native english speaker. I don't find the tonal character of various chinese dialects to be significantly more difficult to understand than other tonal languages, like spanish.

Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon

#60

Post by divbit »

I just spent a month living there, and while I enjoy the country(food in particular is amazing), internet speed is terrible, and basic developer needs like being able to download a docker image, is like an overnight download ( because the internet will throttle down to low kb/s on such a download). Doing full time startup work from there would require working on something fairly lightweight I think.
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