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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

#181

Post by __derek__ »

oftenwrong wrote: post #169
__derek__ wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of that, Spanish feels like a pragmatic language: it foregoes French's formality and resistance to borrowed words (e.g., computadora versus ordinateur ). It also helps that Spanish speakers tend to be forgiving of gender errors in the rare cases where the spelling misleads (mostly just masculine words that end in -a ).

This is more of a split between Latin America and Spain (and the various other places that borrow language from them) Latin America -> computadora Spain -> ordenador

Huh. I didn't know that. Thank you for the correction!

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

#182

Post by st3v3r »

otoburb wrote: post #58
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?

YES!

I've never heard of one of those shipping a whole team off, during the holidays, and telling them they can't leave until a stupid fucking app is done. Read that again. It was not a vital piece of infrastructure, or an important breakthrough for science. It was a stupid fucking chat app. For that, these people were held and denied the ability to celebrate a holiday.

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

#183

Post by beevai142 »

jasshiru wrote: post #63
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)

Having tones does not make a language inherently easier to learn, nor does having ideographs. If China would truly be better off using a non-tonal language with an alphabetic script, it's only because the language of the British Empire was non-tonal with an alphabetic script. Actually, the mess that is English orthography is hardly more "manageable" than Chinese script. There are loads of phonetic elements in Chinese…

It's unquestionable the Chinese script is more difficult to learn than alphabetic scripts. This is directly reflected in the amount of time children and language learners have to spend on it, and the resulting reading ability.

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

#185

Post by cesarbs »

blacktulip wrote: post #173
ar15saveslives wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It would be a book. There are of course extreme workloads from both the schools and the parents. But to me there is something worse - the public shaming culture. I live in the UK now. Something very odd to me at the beginning is that I can never know how good my kids are doing compare to their classmates. The teachers would politely refuse to answer such questions. And the 'parents meeting' is private to one pupil's…

Are test scores calculated relative to the top performer - so that there will always be bottom performers - or is there a bar that everyone could clear so no student would be shamed?

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

#186

Post by AJ007 »

vtange wrote: post #167
__derek__ wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's striking about this description is that a number of would-be Western leaders seem to be looking at the situation and saying, "Wow, that looks great. I want my own."

But can you blame them? For years China's mantra to the West was, "Look at how great our economy's doing! Look at how divided and problematic democracies can be, they are not even that much better than China on human rights! The 21st century is not for idealistic democracies but for China."

Same story about Japan in the 80s, and quite honestly I think they did a far better job at managing their investment driven growth boom. China looks like a total disaster in comparison, and I'm pretty sure they are close to the end of their boom.

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

#187

Post by __derek__ »

jerf wrote: post #174
__derek__ wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "management of other people" is a key determinant of social status in some places That's because control of other people is the primary status marker in much of the US.

Control over others of their species is a primary status marker in mammals. Even calling that a "human" trait is being waaaay too specific.

Given that I responded to a comment about social status among people in the US South, it would be odd if I said that. While true, it fails to be specific enough to be relevant.[1]

[1] Grice's maxims, which I find helpful for gauging my contributions to conversations: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html

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

#188

Post by rahrahrah »

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…

Yeah. I come from the academia, and I can't see a scientist not being able to do his job just because he has to take one extra hop by using a VPN.

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

#189

Post by st3v3r »

evidencepi wrote: post #168
dethswatch wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you'll always be a foreigner there This isn't true in the US, if you learn the language.

language != culture

No, but communication plays a huge deal in being able to absorb the culture, as well as share your own.
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