I agree with many of your points, but still China is the second largest country in information technology, better than EU and Japan. How do you explain this? Any thoughts?
China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon
261–270 of 372 posts
Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon
#262One 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.
One reason why the SF Bay Area attracts so much tech talent is that techies have high status here.
Boston is the second biggest location in the U.S. for startups, but as a tech worker, it was a much worse place to be status-wise. Boston is teeming with doctors, corporate lawyers, management consultants, investment bankers, etc., who generally have much higher status (and typically earn much, much more money) than a developer there.
Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question from a concerned American.. How much are you learning and more importantly, are you retaining this information? What subjects / topics are you studying? The reason that I ask, is that I work in IT. If you spent this amount of time devoted to learning a programming language, web design, etc... you would be in an excellent position to work remotely for a company like mine. If you spend 6-9 learning eve…
Whatever it is they learn/how they learn/etc it seems to be grossly inefficient. I noticed literally no difference between my Canadian students and Chinese/Korean students as a TA at a top university here, other than the international students being more likely to plagiarize/copy work. Also, the international students were way more likely to be smokers - not sure if that's a cultural thing, or if it's caused by being…
While I agree with your observations, there is also some element of selection bias. Most Chinese students that are able to make it to the US come from rich families since most internationals don't get financial aid (so maybe they're more likely to be spoiled/entitled).
Also, depending on how "top" your university, it may have been easier for these students to get into your university than the top universities in China (e.g. they have lower test scores than their peers at the top unis in China).
Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon
#264One 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.
To clarify, the word is 码农 and the literal translation is code peasant (similar to how we call programmers code monkeys in US).
碼工 is also correct.
Programmers are literally 程序員, where 程序 means program, and 員 means worker. People also call them 程序猿, where 猿 has the exact same pronunciation as 員 but means monkey. So basically programmers are also called code monkeys in China.
Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon
#265I 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)
All languages have tones. See how the 'a' sound is different in 'car' and 'can', or 'make'?
Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many have studied Herr Führer's record on German economy. The 2 major mistakes of mankind in the 20th century are fascism and communism.
> The 2 major mistakes of mankind in the 20th century are fascism and communism. That's a bit misleading cause fascism is just inherently bad while communism has had some implementation problems.
"Communism" in the sense of "stateless, classless, moneyless society" has rarely if ever been achieved in real life. "Communism" in the sense of central planning by an undemocratic bureaucracy with totalitarian power was a fucking disaster.
All totalitarianism is evil.
Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
(Shijiazhuang 3 weeks and Hainan 2 weeks) I did occasionally get good speed (I tried starbucks twice and one day it was decent, the other day was quite slow). There was a particular set of docker images that I had to repeatedly download that I found very painful to deal with, and eventually just decided to work on something else- I did in fact end up using shadowsocks, but on one day I set it up with a server in sing…
I heard rumors (just rumors) that Internet providers in China limit your connection speed to servers outside China unless you upgrade your service and pay more.
Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon
#268As 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…
Thanks for saying these! As a Chinese as well, I agrees with you with these facts, they makes China less favorable to many of us. For some of your points, I'd share some different interpretations.
1. Yes - Housing is a problem. I think it is a salary problem. As tech corps in US earns money from the whole world, most Chinese tech corps can only attract Chinese customers. So the value generated from a same piece of code, is better in US. This makes US engineers' salary and status relatively higher in the society than those in China.
2. Yes - people are working 996. But I won't blame the law. I'd blame the culture, or the competitive nature of Chinese tech industry. Union doesn't do anything in China, but labour law does. It is written in favor of workers and executed properly, ask any entrepreneur in China. The problem is, I never seen anyone sued their employer. And there are a damn lot of people that actually working 996 voluntarily without asking by their boss, making the normal ones less competitive if they don't do this.
3. No, I don't agree here. - In tech companies of both countries, I found no difference, relationship does not matter that much even Chinese employees do have a closer personal relationship than US employees. And in other industries like finance, there are no difference either, b/c both countries are 'relation-oriented' in these industries.
4. Yes - I would not say its cruel tho. India, Korea, Singapore are all like this. Its just very competitive due to the limited educational resource and the amount of people who wants to use it. But yea I wouldn't send my child there (If I have one).
5. Pollutions - Sad, Beijing is not a human-habitable place anymore... Shanghai is still okay.
Again, I think the facts you provided are main reasons that stop people going back. Those in the article are slightly wrong(Github, VPN .etc) or not important(foreign business entry barrier) for individuals like me.
Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try immigrating to China.
I'm not familiar with China's system. But let's not pretend a lottery based system, where the only thing that decides whether you can stay in the country or not, is random number generation, like H1-B is great.
China's system is basically just "No, you can't stay". As of 2010 exactly 1,448 living immigrants had managed to become citizens. In contrast, the US naturalizes 700,000 every year.
The country actually has more billionaires than non-Vietnamese refugees.
Re: China won't be luring foreign tech talent any time soon
#270this 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?
IB/management consulting are paying you $100k+ at the entry level and $200k-$1M+ at higher ranks. PE is paying you $300k to multi millions. All three professions are extremely high status professions. Lets just say we are not comparing the same things.
Goog/Face/App/Soft are offering you completely voluntary perks. You are free to not eat dinner at Google and go home. In fact, you can just eat dinner at Google and then go home immediately. Or even grab takeout at the cafeteria on the way to your car! Lets just say we are not comparing the same things.