Ask HN: Those who moved careers from the West to China, what's your experience?

All of my work is European and I'm on the verge of leaving due to how bad the internet gets at night.

Throughout the day you've got ExpesssVPM and Shadowsocks but at around 7pm every night there's a huge crackdown on foreign traffic where even obscure sites fail to load.

It's probably fine if your work is 9-5 but outside of then the internet for foreign usage is pretty much unusable that I want to curl up into a ball and cry most nights.

Baidu and Chinese sites will consistently ping at around 40ms consistently but at night you're looking at something like 70% packet loss and 2sec pings outside

- product management (not engineering)

- working as an employee of a Chinese tech company (not starting something themselves)

With those caveats out of the way, below is the text of my answer to them:

"As I understand it, until maybe 2000 or 2005, there was a lack of people with specific experience in many many areas. So the median foreigner coming to China had better experience (and ability) than did Chinese people with a similar educational background and age.

As China's economy has developed:

- many more Chinese have gained that experience

- many Chinese who worked in US/Europe for many years have come back (or can be tempted to come back)

As a result, most foreigners are equivalent to a local Chinese person, except that:

- they know English very well (advantage for policy/comms/bizdev roles)

- they don't know Chinese well (e.g. hard for a Product Manager to work in a Chinese company when the working language is Chinese and most engineers and other peers don't speak Chinese well)

- they aren't in touch with local culture (e.g. don't use the new live streaming platforms that everyone else does)

- they need a work visa (only a minor issue for all but the smallest companies)

There are foreigners here [in this WeChat group] who work for Chinese companies (e.g. @[REDACTED] @[REDACTED] ) and are very good at what they do. But it's not easy.

I've interviewed at two large Chinese companies you've heard of. Both of them tested my level of Chinese early in the process. One took me by surprise because the interviewer had grown up in the US and so could obviously have interviewed me in English. In the other, I was expecting interviews in Chinese, but one of the interviews was with a data scientist and that kept me my toes as I didn't have the vocab to explain my answers fully/concisely."

Oh, and take note of the last sentence of rlglwx's earlier comment: "Maybe just starting out or if you can be hired into a c-level role." If you're just starting out, then the pace and intensity of working at an early-stage Chinese tech company could be an amazing learning experience. If you bring distinct experience that can get you a very senior role, then you will work very hard but could also be very well compensated. If you're in the middle, it's tricky due to the competitive issues I mentioned above.