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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

#91

Post by directionless »

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…

Some perspective around the different ideas in IP https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

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

#93

Post by hermitdev »

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.

My personal experience when we had a contract with (a very large consulting firm) to provide Chinese contractors that didn't speak English, so we had to go through a translator, we started to get near verbatim exact answers from every candidate we "interviewed" after say candidate number 3. We obviously caught on to this and point blank told our director that we didn't trust the interviews or the capability of the candidates. Other teams found the same. We ended up eating a multimillion dollar contract that was already signed because after the fact, no one trusted the competence of the contractors.

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

#94

Post by fraudsyndrome »

blahblahblogger wrote: post #6
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.

> I’m sad at myself for feeling “well yeah not unexpected” > Because it’s only 1/1000000 people that do this that will cause prejudice and disdain for all the good actors. Damn I came in here to say the same thing and feel sad at myself now too. So not to be racial but from an American standpoint I liken it to hiring an American who happens to be Chinese versus an engineer from China. For the first, they are American…

>So not to be racial but from an American standpoint I liken it to hiring an American who happens to be Chinese versus an engineer from China.

Well the issue is because of this stereotype, companies may not differentiate between the two, or may even pass up an amazing engineer from China because of their racial (well nationality) bias.

I remember reading about a couple incidences of American engineers(?) being falsely accused of stealing secrets which led to them being fired and shamed.

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

#95

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

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…

How do we reconcile problems raised in this comment with the idea that copyright and IP laws are too strong?

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

#96

Post by fraudsyndrome »

product50 wrote: post #13

Can China not innovate at all? Why are they so keen on stealing IP? Their other homegrown products such as WeChat and Xiaomi seem pretty competitive and very catered to the local market. This is just giving such a bad name to the country and supporting Trump's broad claims that China thrives on IP theft.

> Can China not innovate at all?

> Their other homegrown products such as WeChat and Xiaomi seem pretty competitive and very catered to the local market.

Well obviously they can based on the second sentence you wrote.

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

#97

Post by noobermin »

Seriously HN, every time these posts come up, it becomes a fest for racists to pin their one off experience with Chinese people onto the entire race of people, the definition of racism. I do want to hear an ex-Apple employee doing corporate espionage may be, but I don't want to hear about your Chinese grad students. That has nothing do do with the story other than the race of the individuals.

I'm almost at the point where I want to just flag articles like this because they have in recent months become a sordid data point pulling down the signal to noise ratio that is usually commendable on this site.

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

#98

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #82
ghettoimp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet exams can be (are?) a poor way to test knowledge.

I’m ideologically against exams. For many they are stressful, and they don’t represent any real life scenario as you will always have access to reference material on the job.

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

#99

Post by paradite »

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'm a Chinese engineer working outside US and China. A few points that I think is relevant:

The culture in universities are generally more relaxed with processes being more open as compared to high schools. This is more pronounced in China with college entrance exams being the most stressful and rigorous process that decides your future. So when students join colleges (China or US), they would no longer feel restricted by the rigorous curriculum and exams in high school. Like a spring that has been pressed for very long time, they would "bounce back" and neglect their school work, sometimes going too far into cheating.

While this issue in generally applicable anywhere, China's college entrance exam makes it worse for Chinese students entering college. On top of that, overseas colleges are farther from their families and friends so they feel even less restrictions and easily steer into wrong paths.

The other point to consider is that part of the overseas Chinese student body consists of rich kids whom their parents sent to overseas in search of better education. They might not have the same aptitude as others who studied hard and passed exams to go overseas hence resort more to cheating.

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

#100

Post by pixkpr »

hnaccy wrote: post #73
cortesoft wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, part of the problem is that humans are pretty bad at accurately assessing frequency within groups. You seem pretty certain that there is a ‘cultural predisposition’ to cheating, but I have only heard anecdotal evidence.

>A Wall Street Journal analysis of data from more than a dozen large U.S. public universities found that in the 2014-15 school year, the schools recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students. They recorded one such report per 100 domestic students. >Students from China were singled out by many faculty members interviewed. “Cheating among Chinese students, especially those with poor lan…

that doesn't mean there's no bias in reporting cheating.

and the second quote is anecdotal. it might be easier to spot the cheater who doesn't write english well if their papers are obviously better written than the student speaks.

it would simply be more difficult to catch cheaters who speak and write english fluently.

it's possible that chinese students cheat more in school, even a significant amount more, even their style of cheating may be drastically different, but I still find it somewhat strange that that gets so much focus in a system that is like what cycling used to be:

https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2017/02/cheating_i...

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