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Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

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Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#81

Post by fraudsyndrome »

reaperducer wrote: post #67
sjroot wrote: post #11

Disclaimer: I am speaking from personal experiences and know that, despite these experiences, there are tons of Chinese engineers who work their ass off and maintain great professional integrity. That said...my experience with Chinese graduate students has been incredibly disappointing. While they made up the majority of our graduate computer science program, most had no respect for academic conduct guidelines. I exp…

>I would venture to say that there is a cultural disconnect with the Chinese when it comes to the idea of intellectual property. Back when I did business in Asia, we had a cultural training session before our group went over. We were told that in certain Asian nations, especially China but to a lesser extent South Korea and Thailand, the concept of copying someone else's work or intellectual property as a bad thing i…

> Instead, the cultural feeling is that copying someone else's work is a subtle way of honoring them and their work.

> learn to respect other people's property

Are these two not conflicting? If they feel inspired to use other's work as a way of honoring them, isn't that similar to them respecting their work?

I'm just confused because it sounds like most of the time it's a matter of perspective. If you think from the way you've been brought up that what they're doing is disrespecting other's property, but they see it as respecting - is there a right/wrong?

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#82

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

ghettoimp wrote: post #39
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny how afraid people are about tiptoeing around this issue. Cheating among chinese students is widespread and blatant, and they do not even pretend to care. They are completely shameless about it. Everyone with Chinese students knows it, but it’s politically incorrect to call it out. Which they are also aware of, and take advantage of.

FWIW. In my undergrad days, long ago now, cheating was rampant throughout the (overwhelmingly white and male) CS student body. One professor, whom I admired, got fed up with this. He handed back a particular assignment to his class, ungraded, with the code of conduct stapled to each student's submission. He then pointedly told the class that if anyone needed to come and tell him anything after class, he would be in h…

If it's an assignment many people will copy this has always happened and will always be true for probably every human being anywhere.

That's why exams exist. Make them hard. People who do the homework will succeed. Others won't.

We're too afraid of making people fail.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#83

Post by themagician »

yzmtf2008 wrote: post #58
themagician wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is a collectivist society. Their ideas of property rights and intellectual property are fundamentally different. There is “the” answer, not “your” answer. It seems weird to us but it’s worked well for them. And while our system might seem better, or at the very least “normal” it certainly has its flaws (i.e. patent trolling). There is probably some middle ground we could come to in the future but the US is comp…

I mean I don’t know where you got the idea about property and idea ownership in China, but it certainly wasn’t from the China that I grew up in. Wow.

When did you grow up in China?

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#84

Post by ShardPhoenix »

wavefunction wrote: post #12
hkmurakami wrote: post #4

I’m sad at myself for feeling “well yeah not unexpected” after having worked at DENSO HQ (Toyota group supplier) where a Chinese natiuonal engineer stole 30,000 design documents in the early 2000s (it made national headlines when it happened). Because it’s only 1/1000000 people that do this that will cause prejudice and disdain for all the good actors.

>good actors >People doing their job and not committing international espionage Those are just people, let's not lower our standards

"Good actors" isn't some term of high praise, it just means those who aren't "bad actors" (who do harmful things).

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#85

Post by throwaway955555 »

(posting from a throwaway for obvious reasons)

I currently sell to autonomous vehicle (AV) companies and spoke to a number of them. I believe that (most) chinese-money backed AV startup set up "R&D" offices in silicon valley purely for the tech/IP transfer back to China. Just to give you an example, an engineer at one of them boasted to me how his colleague, who used to work at a brand-name-AV-company-you've-heard-of, copied code & provided access to all of it internally.

Although innovation in China might seem like a wild west to many Westerners, there's plenty of it happening there. It's impressive, extremely fast paced (10xSV), and deadly cut-throat. They know they're behind the US in AV and are playing catch up, with VC certainly knowing of & backing such approach.

Circling back to this story - just check who's backing XiaoPeng Motors/xmotors.ai: $700M in funding from GGV, Alibaba, IDG, Foxconn & others. All their R&D is in China, with a very small office in Palo Alto. What do you think the office here is for? I don't believe this fellow Xiaolang Zhang acted without Xiaopeng's "encouragement".

All of this being said, there are plenty of smart and honest engineers working on both sides of the Pacific to push the humanity forward. One could think though, maybe the more know-how transfer, the better for the entire world?

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#86

Post by yzmtf2008 »

themagician wrote: post #83
yzmtf2008 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I don’t know where you got the idea about property and idea ownership in China, but it certainly wasn’t from the China that I grew up in. Wow.

When did you grow up in China?

Within the last two decades.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#87

Post by fraudsyndrome »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #18
sjroot wrote: post #11

Disclaimer: I am speaking from personal experiences and know that, despite these experiences, there are tons of Chinese engineers who work their ass off and maintain great professional integrity. That said...my experience with Chinese graduate students has been incredibly disappointing. While they made up the majority of our graduate computer science program, most had no respect for academic conduct guidelines. I exp…

It’s funny how afraid people are about tiptoeing around this issue. Cheating among chinese students is widespread and blatant, and they do not even pretend to care. They are completely shameless about it. Everyone with Chinese students knows it, but it’s politically incorrect to call it out. Which they are also aware of, and take advantage of.

No one's tiptoeing around it - it just looks like people are more open to generalizing a whole ethnicity around anecdotes. Sounds like you're calling people politically incorrect just because they don't generalize.

(Another anecdote) I just finished my CompSci bachelor (majority white) and everyone talks about copying each others work like it's casual conversation. Only friends share work with each other when they can be sure to alter it enough. Everything you said there, being widespread, blatant, not caring, shameless, were the exact same descriptions of those in my program.

If anything, it sounds like it's more politically incorrect to generalize white people as having these traits because I've only ever heard people generalize Asian/Chinese students. Why is it when one group does it it's okay, but another it's wrong?

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#88

Post by voltagex_ »

walkadder wrote: post #78
sjroot wrote: post #11

Disclaimer: I am speaking from personal experiences and know that, despite these experiences, there are tons of Chinese engineers who work their ass off and maintain great professional integrity. That said...my experience with Chinese graduate students has been incredibly disappointing. While they made up the majority of our graduate computer science program, most had no respect for academic conduct guidelines. I exp…

Where I work, we've had a problem with Chinese engineers sharing our internal interview question bank (with answers) to their friends, along with coaching for other interview types. They then refer their friends and get the referral bonus when they join. It's now roughly 50% Chinese and this has caused some issues, although it's not something that can be discussed.

If the interview questions are the only barrier to entry, then that's probably a problem with the hiring process itself.
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