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

bloomberg.com

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

#41

Post by nwatson »

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…

Aptly numbered podcast episode #666 of Planet Money named "Episode 666: The Hoverboard Life" explores the discovery of the "hoverboard" phenomenon from a couple of years back -- "The hottest toy this holiday season has no identifiable logo, no main distributor, and no widely agreed upon name".

The podcast (I listened to it a long time back) goes into how the Hoverboard invention was fueled in late-night drinking sessions by Chinese engineers / businesspeople trying to make a more accessible and more fun and less dorky Segway. All those people bounced ideas off each other and made incremental improvements to get to the form that was commercialized by umpteen companies. Maybe this product was developed in a prototypical "Chinese model" where ideas are cheap, widely shared or purloined, improved on, reverse-engineered, etc. -- with the obvious downsides of rushing low-quality products to market that are subject to exploding batteries with no accountability.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/27/457404184/epis...

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

#42

Post by outworlder »

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…

While this experience may give some insights on cultural biases as a whole, it is pointless if we try to apply it to any given individual.

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

#44

Post by est »

Theodores wrote: post #30

I do not wish to question the veracity of this story, however it plays into a narrative where the West is advanced and China is merely stealing I.P. from hard working folks in the West. I fear that one day we will wake up and realise that we are behind, to discover that our friends in China have been innovating. We have had this already with internet infrastructure. Whilst half of the USA and rural UK struggle along…

I think ex-employees steal previous company data all the time. It's just happens that add "china" to the title these days can grab more attention.

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

#45

Post by shanghaiaway »

kasey_junk wrote: post #38
tlear wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not know all cultures are same? To Re-education camp with you. Being a TA for undergrad courses this pattern is very common. Other group that consistently gets caught was guys from ME. East Europeans cheat but they almost always put enough effort to make it hard to catch. Thing is that universities do not prosecute this at all. I have seen people graduate who I think never submitted their own assignment at all…

When I TA’d many years ago you could graph the frat brothers by their test/assignment answers.

Oh, so Americans cheat too?

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

#46

Post by est »

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.

Do a simple math.

China should on average has 4x more people stealing tech than US, based on pure population numbers.

Even Chinese are 75% less likely to innovate, that's as many innovators as the US.

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

#47

Post by megablast »

pavlov wrote: post #25
melling wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in graduate school about 25 years ago and several Chinese students got caught cheating on the compiler project. I always thought this was a bit strange because I’m sure most software developers could transform a piece of source code so that it would not appear to be a copy.

> cheating on the compiler project ... transform a piece of source code so that it would not appear to be a copy Sounds like the cheat itself would make a decent project for the compiler class.

You mean changing variable names and rearranging bits of code. Not really.

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

#48

Post by arbie »

melling wrote: post #15
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 was in graduate school about 25 years ago and several Chinese students got caught cheating on the compiler project. I always thought this was a bit strange because I’m sure most software developers could transform a piece of source code so that it would not appear to be a copy.

Colleges now have sophisticated software to catch cheating even in computer programming courses. I believe they compile down to an AST, and then compare for similarities.

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

#49

Post by est »

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…

> Chinese graduate students has been incredibly disappointing

That's kinda selective bias. Only these students have higher chance of making it to the U.S. lol

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

#50

Post by briandear »

whooshee wrote: post #37
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.

People are not afraid to calling out cheating. Yes, there are Chinese students do that. People are just not that into overgeneralize a giant group of people.

Is it over-generalizing when there is a cultural predisposition around it? Making generalizations about a culture when an element of that culture is the target of the generalization seems fairly reasonable. As always, “it isn’t everyone,” but the exceptions prove the rule.
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