China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by jimmywanger » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 5:11 PM UTC

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)

The problem would be way way smaller if the language were more phoenetic. I've gotten into arguments with Chinese language speakers, and they insist that the language has phoetic elements, with certain ideograms giving clues on how to pronounce words.

That's all well and good, but phoentic implies the other way around too. After hearing a word, you'll have to be able to write it. For instance, "kill", "sand", and the "shark" word in the phrase "shark" all have exactly the same tonal pronunciation, but with completely different ways of writing it.

And don't get me started on traditional vs. simplified.

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

#102

Post by jimmywanger » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 5:12 PM UTC

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.

In my experience, if you're sorta close in English, you can sort of get your point across, even if you mispronounce words, because the mispronounced word means no sense so you start thinking about a possible explanation.

In Chinese, a different tone actually is a valid word with its own meaning, so it's a bit harder for you to get your point across.

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

#103

Post by sauronlord » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 5:15 PM UTC

Pay better be good to reduce your life expectancy by a few years due to pollution. Maybe 500k/year would be enough

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

#104

Post by erics32 » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 5:15 PM UTC

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?

mattmcknight's comment addresses one of the reasons.

I think another part of it is a lack of understanding of what developers actually do - people perceive developers as manual laborers that just type stuff into a computer based on what a higher-up has designed/created. They attribute the actual creative/engineering output to the manager.

It's also a low-paying job in a materialistic society. There's a feedback loop of Low pay -> no respect -> low pay that's hard to break out of.

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

#105

Post by TACIXAT » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 5:15 PM UTC

ar15saveslives wrote: post #100

blacktulip wrote: post #68

As a Chinese I would say that the points in this article, though true, are not among the driving reasons. If you ask me, I would present this list: 1. Practically, there are only 4-5 cities suitable for 'tech talents' in China. The properties prices in these cities are comparable to the ones in NY and SF while the salary isn't. BTW: you have very little chance to be able to get married without a property under your n…

> Primary/secondary education in China is very, very cruel Could you elaborate? Based upon what I see here in Canada, chinese immigrants maniacally push their children to all functions that can be found around. And it's considered good when there're many chinese children in your kid's class.

By all accounts I've read, it is an incredibly intense amount of work. Far more than I would subject a child to. From a quick search [1].

1. http://hechingered.org/content/a-day-in-the-life-of-chinese-...

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

#106

Post by PeCaN » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 5:16 PM UTC

sidlls wrote: post #59

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)

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.

Spanish isn't tonal. It contrasts stress, but not pitch. Words with the same syllables but a different stressed syllable are different in Spanish, but in tonal languages the same syllable pronounced with a different pitch and pitch change is different.

That said, as a native-English-speaking Chinese learner I don't find the tones of standard Mandarin to be particularly hard (Hokkien, on the other hand…). Standard Mandarin phonology is also pretty easy (some parts are tricky for native English speakers like contrasting aspiration but not voice (English is the opposite), but overall it's not terribly complex).

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

#107

Post by raverbashing » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 5:19 PM UTC

huherto wrote: post #55

Symmetry wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really. And misunderstandings rarely happen (exclusively) due to mispronunciations (beach/bitch situations are rare)

The toughest phoneme is th (ð/θ)

Compare this with the nasal vowels in romance languages and some of them have very subtle differences https://soundcloud.com/brian-8962868/vent-vin-sans-sain-rang...

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

#108

Post by stevesun21 » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 5:19 PM UTC

divbit wrote: post #87

stevesun21 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you used the Internet provider from a different one, which is cheapist one -- whole community share one bandwidth. My friends in China all use at least 30Mbits connection, now there is a promotion for 100MB for the same price.

It's likely that I wasn't on an optimal connection - but I also tried coffee shops, various different hotels, and several different vpn / proxy strategies and all were like this (once or twice a proxy configuration would get me about the speed you are saying for a day, but then would be not working the next day), so whatever the optimal connection is, it wasn't easy to find.

I don't know where you lived, normall, in China, you can use Interenet from Starbucks or any chain coffee stores, they are all have good Internet speed. And if you try to access Google or Youtube, FB etc, you can try ShadowSocks instead VPN.

For the slow speed between US and China, Jap (and other asian countries), I think that's the nature issue for oversea Internet connection. You can use this website (http://ping.chinaz.com/, you may need google translator) to test how speed looks like as you connect to other country from China.

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

#109

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

ommunist wrote: post #73

Thank you for sharing. But tech China is not only mainland China. Taiwan is also tech.

Taiwan can be just as bad, and salaries are often less than first tier mainland cities (many Taiwanese go to the PRC to work for the money). But ya, the article is not about tech in Taiwan.

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

#110

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 5:22 PM UTC

louhike wrote: post #61

laurent123456 wrote: post #22

The article doesn't mention that but another possible factor is that life is not that great over there either. If you are not Chinese, you'll always be a foreigner there, even if you spend ten years in the same city, so that makes it difficult to integrate. You'll also have to deal with the Chinese administration for the visa, residence permit, etc. which is quite a pain. It's definitely a great place to visit or eve…

The american administration is bad too for foreigners, so I think it can be summarized by how attractive the country is.

An H1B doesn't have to reapply for a work visa every year, and they eventually get a green card, while green cards are extremely rare in China. Also, you don't have to re-register at the PSB in the states a few times a year, waiting in line just to get a little slip of paper.

It is easy to get a working visa in tech, that's for sure, and if you have a company that jumps through all the hoops for you, it can be relatively painless.