Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?

#111

Post by chillacy » Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 10:37 AM UTC

abhinai wrote: post #32

I'll summarize my experiences. (1) (Too far removed) Engineers in India / China mostly work on projects meant for Western markets. They do not always understand the problems that the project is trying to solve. They rarely get to see it work in the wild. They can't feel proud of creating something they will never see in action. If the project is a huge success, the engineers who created it will almost never be reward…

Can you give some context? Around when and where did you work? I’m suspicious of vague answers that somehow apply to both China and India and don’t mention timeframe (China is very different now than 10 years ago or even 3)

Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?

#112

Post by asien » Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 10:42 AM UTC

yzh wrote: post #80

I work at Tencent. From my observation: golang is extremely popular in China. Except that we are no different from other parts on the planet. Java, C++, python, js are popular too. Usually no Chinese will be used in the code, programmers try to use English, even if some of them wrote comments with grammar mistakes. Most internet-companies in China are using Agile dev mode by default.

> golang is extremely popular in China

I'm from Europe , the only feedback I have about Chinese Software Engineers is Java.

My Feedback is based on GitHub Chinese's popular repositories , those repos are almost always written in Java.

> we are no different from other parts on the planet

Every part of the planet is different.

France is mostly PHP because it was free and it had a lot of commitment for open source.

UK is largely .NET because paying for MS tooling was never an issue.

India is more Java because offshore pushed the industry that way.

The trending page of GitHub for today contains a couple of Chinese repos[0]. They are all Java based except for one.

[0]https://github.com/trending

Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?

#113

Post by turingbook » Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 11:07 AM UTC

Native Chinese guy here.

Software Development in China is more like the United States, not India. China now has several very big software development product or platform companies like Huawei(more than 80k engineers), Alibaba and Tencent(20k to 30k engineers), even the newer companies like Meituan-Dianping (market valued 30B dollars) with nearly 10k engineers.

These teams are learning closely what the counterparts in silicon valley or Seattle did and they learned fast. They also have built massive IT infrastructure.

Java and Python are the most popular languages for server side or other things, and JavaScript is the king for front-end. Newer languages like Go, Rust, Kotlin are gaining more and more adoption. It seems China has much more Go users than US！

Everyone wrote code and comments in English. There are viable programming language projects in Chinese keywords, but very, very niche.

The hottest buzzwords? K8s, Elastic, Flink, Vue (developed by a Chinese guy), deep learning, GAN, TensorFlow...

Agile is not very hot here, although Scrum stuff is often heard in office. Lean Startup(MVP) dominates.

Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?

#114

Post by sachin18590 » Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 11:23 AM UTC

Working in software development in India after working in bay area for 5 years. I cant speak for China, but the work Indian companies get is singificantly less critical than what their US teams are working on. As a result, there is much less emphasis for best practices and good coding culture here in comparison to US. However, considering how many of my Chinese colleagues have returned back to China to code with local startups there, I would like to bet that the Chinese coding culture is far more closer to bay area than to India.

Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?

#115

Post by InGodsName » Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 11:27 AM UTC

sachin18590 wrote: post #114

Working in software development in India after working in bay area for 5 years. I cant speak for China, but the work Indian companies get is singificantly less critical than what their US teams are working on. As a result, there is much less emphasis for best practices and good coding culture here in comparison to US. However, considering how many of my Chinese colleagues have returned back to China to code with loca…

This doesn't apply to product (Flipkart/Alibaba/Zoho/Chargebee) companies in India/China, they are at par with West in their workflow/culture.

Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?

#116

Post by tluyben2 » Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 11:57 AM UTC

turingbook wrote: post #113

Native Chinese guy here. Software Development in China is more like the United States, not India. China now has several very big software development product or platform companies like Huawei(more than 80k engineers), Alibaba and Tencent(20k to 30k engineers), even the newer companies like Meituan-Dianping (market valued 30B dollars) with nearly 10k engineers. These teams are learning closely what the counterparts in…

Where is that? I work with (a bunch of) companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen and the things that I find most interesting if I had to name differences are that my colleagues almost exclusively use waterfall as a process (they need complete specs) and they count more on books and specs than internet to find answers to programming issues. They can be stuck on issues I can answer with Google (which finds SO usually) in seconds. Baidu and others there are absolutely horrendous (in their and my experience; maybe there are people who are better at this).

I also work a lot with India and I definitely do agree it's far more western working with Chinese colleagues than with Indian ones. Both have their strengths and weaknesses though. If you have a rigid process that needs to be adhered to every single time in detail (ISO processes) then I prefer India for instance.

Edit: typo

Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?

#117

Post by known » Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 11:58 AM UTC

India follows the "Sheep Herd" mentality. The whole country's economy is based on people getting into "Profitable" domains mostly following the success of a pioneer in the field. The most recent example of this ideology is the "Business Process Outsourcing" industry. New BPO units are propping up here and there at a dime a dozen leading to a quality deterioration in the final deliverable. This process will continue till a saturation level is reached and then they will wait till another "Killer" domain picks up momentum. Till then India will be in a so called "Calm Period" where nothing great and major takes place.

Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?

#118

Post by dis-sys » Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 12:25 PM UTC

asien wrote: post #112

yzh wrote: post #80

I work at Tencent. From my observation: golang is extremely popular in China. Except that we are no different from other parts on the planet. Java, C++, python, js are popular too. Usually no Chinese will be used in the code, programmers try to use English, even if some of them wrote comments with grammar mistakes. Most internet-companies in China are using Agile dev mode by default.

> golang is extremely popular in China I'm from Europe , the only feedback I have about Chinese Software Engineers is Java. My Feedback is based on GitHub Chinese's popular repositories , those repos are almost always written in Java. > we are no different from other parts on the planet Every part of the planet is different. France is mostly PHP because it was free and it had a lot of commitment for open source. UK i…

> My Feedback is based on GitHub Chinese's popular repositories , those repos are almost always written in Java.

Try TiDB, it is in Rust and Go.

Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?

#119

Post by thetechlead » Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

Worked in Google US, then Alibaba China, then a startup founder. I'm comparing not your average companies but top notch from the two worlds.

Engineering culture has a lot similarity between the two, both are doing very innovative stuff and paying great attentions to quality of their infrastructures and both suck at building social network products. Notable differences include

1. Google engineers have a stronger say in their company and Alibaba pays more attention to the economic ecosystem. As a result, Google's products really shine as engineering 'miracles' while Alibaba's have greater impact to the society. Different DNA from their founders.

2. Alibaba engineers work much longer hours than Google's, at least 20% more. This has pros and cons.

3. Shorter product development cycle in Alibaba. This has pros and cons.

4. Higher pay growth in Alibaba. Fresh grads start around $30k/year, about 1/4 of that of Google. However, into 4th/5th year the former increases to one million yuan ($150k) per year including cash and RSU, on par with Google's. More seasoned engineers get tremendous respect and insane pay. Alibaba usually double or even triple people's total package when they left Google to join the company.

5. Alibaba pay more attention to the value of data and has better data infrastructure IMHO. This can be decisive for the future.

And now I'm into the 2nd year of my startup. As contrary to popular belief, the Chinese are true entrepreneurs and the society is generally very supportive for changes. And government's stimulus is insane. For example, my company got six million yuan (almost $1 million) fund from the municipal government when it's just established, with almost no requirement and absolutely no string attached. Free money and that's all. Probably the best place in the world to start a company and I'm greatly thankful.

Re: Ask HN: How is software development different in China and India?

#120

Post by pergadad » Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 1:22 PM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #105

satej-s wrote: post #64

I worked as a Full Stack Developer with BookMyShow in Mumbai, India. We are a ticketing company somewhat like TicketMaster is in the United States. The company was around 10 years old and transitioning from what one could term as a start up mentality into a full fledged product company. Methodology: had formally adopted Agile around 2016-2017. A part of this adoption included some formal training by an experienced ag…

I find my experience similar to yours. The difference in culture between companies that developed their own products rather than doing outsourced work was night and day. Also, Java is ubiquitous. I only ever met one developer who was competent in C++. The rest think they know C++ but couldn't write a single non-trivial, idiomatic, correct program in it. (I don't know C++ either, FWIW). This leads to the bizarre situa…

I think most or all have English classes in school, but in addition to the drop-out/absenteeism even those that attend these classes often don't end up learning much of the language itself as the teachers either have little training and/or pedagogical knowledge or apply the sanskrit approach: a complex near-dead language that's taught through memorisation of grammar rules, similar to Latin.