Don't lie about your experience living in China. There is already too much China-related misinformation on HN.
For 99% of the time, you go straight to click-n-buy which should get your order delivered on time, and for the 1% you prefer to talk to the seller the option is a blessing, not a curse.
Speaking truths that you find objectionable is not lying.
If you haven't encountered these issues, then I'm happy for you. For my wife and I, phantom inventory is a regular problem. Usually, we can catch the problem over WangWang, but it's not unusual for us to place the order and, just before paying, give the order number to the seller and have them confirm they've got it before paying, then pay and a few days later when the order hasn't shipped, message them again and get an apology and a sad story about one of the items being out of stock or only available in a different version.
Shopping on Amazon is like buying in Target and shopping on Taobao or Tmall (a slightly better experience w/re to seller flakiness) is akin to buying from a shabby flea market. If the nearest Target is a few hours' drive away and the flea market is ten minutes' drive from your house, you'll shop at the flea market but it's not really an enjoyable experience.
Here are two recent examples of my having to interact w/sellers on WangWang. Top half of screencap: have to confirm address or they won't ship. Bottom half of screencap: other seller waits two days to tell me that the stuff I bought was out of stock and I should apply for a refund (the items are still for sale on that shop btw).
I start to believe what US has done to Huawei actually made the brand more famous. Smart phones are becoming commodities so marketing plays a big rule for sales. The tension between US government and Huawei certainly saved them tons of marketing money. Three years ago even many Chinese don't know Huawei, but look at what Huawei accomplished today. I travelled abroad frequently and people are talking Huawei everywhere even a street vendor I randomly met in nowhere Philippines, and they want to know more about my Huawei Porsche Design and discuss why Americans feels threatened by a company making electronic gadgets. No marketing money buys you that kind of popularity. In most places I traveled to, people don't believe the American version of the story, and when a superpower utilizes all its resources to try to destroy a company but couldn't do? There must be something the company did right.
Huawei is using the standard mobile phone playbook: They have a lot of carriers pushing their phones. They spend a lot on TV marketing. They opened flagship stores in big malls. They got celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson to promote their phones.
Not saying they don't spend big money in advertising. They certainly do, like any other premium brand. However their marketing campaigns alone are nothing extraordinary either. US governments accusation certainly helped - good advertising makes people intrigued, just look at the nationalist comments under Huawei related HN posts and try to read from a non-US POV. Not hard to come to a state that you wonder what the hack is truely going on and what really makes American feel so insecure. There must be something superior in the accused that triggered the action. This is happening as a trend, not just in Huaweis case, but in many topics related to China.
Thank for the info. Though not the case where I live (China) and where I often travelled (east Asia and ASEAN countries). However Huawei indeed put their best effort in marketing in Europe.
Not just in e-commerce, the convenience living in China has far passed America, such as in mobile payment, food delivery, bike sharing, WeChat with its tremendously useful ecosystem, the subway system, high-speed rails, etc.
Having lived in both China and America, I have to say the living standard in Chinese cities has passed America's in many ways and, more importantly, the speed of China building new facilities is at least 10x of the US. Many American believe there's a competition between two countries, but IMO the competition is already won. Chinese no longer see the US as a competitor in many areas - you rarely hear Chinese Internet companies learning something new from their American counterparts today, or people envying America for their way of living. It's the opposite I found worrisome, that America is losing confidence and becomes more insecure day by day.
Food delivery and bike sharing work well in China because of the scale of the cities and lower cost of living. When you have millions of people densely packed together, dumping a ton of bikes everywhere may be feasible. Even then, there's known issues, like how currently the biggest bike vendors are struggling for profitability. Food delivery is occasionally cheaper than buying at the store, due to VC style subsidies and lower cost of human labor. Delivery logistics are incredibly cool to me though. Real time location tracking for food/package deliveries is impressive. It'd be amazing to see something similar in the US.
Advanced logistics technology is a part of the New Retail happening in China that revolutionizes the customer experience in shopping and living daily life, though integrating online, offline services and logistics. It's more than just delivering your food or automated convenience stores. There are quite a few companies utilizing AI and big data to drive New Retail to the next level. Recommend some articles on this topic：
GDP per capita can be misleading and doesn't translate well into the quality of life, certainly not how convenient and safe you feel living there. Anyone who lived in China for a while would agree.
I see no problem submitting China-related news since I live in the country and Chinese technology is my focus, and HN folks deserve to know more about the development of Chinese technologies. I should submit more often. The fact that people are 'shocked' to hear Chinese company winning western counterparts as shown in the comments under various China posts in HN proves my point.
I'm curious what you think this confidence buys the west. Like, is it actually beneficial to be overconfident? Let's say you're right and he's wrong. The consequence of overestimating China is slight. So, we were a little worried when we didn't have to be.
On the other hand, the consequences for a nation or a business of underestimating China could be catastrophic. It could mean finding your business or nation suddenly cut off by a competitor you didn't plan for. It seems to me that rational self interest alone should bias the west towards overestimating rather than underestimating China.
It almost feels like an anxious insecurity, as if admitting that China might catch up might make it so, when sticking our heads in the sand about the possible threat is way more likely to ensure we are overtaken.
That's a quite peculiar definition of "troll". Why can't somebody have a particular focus on a certain type of news/discussion? Your comments read much more like trolling.
That was in the 90s. He was rejected visa b/c he didn't speak any English. Almost all VC and Internet businesses located in the US at that time. Things are dramatically different now.
Good for him. However, the wind has already turned eastward. Given the insanity in US immigration policy and xenophobia among the public, talents are going back to their original countries in flocks. Check out top 20 most valuable startups in the world - used to be 100% American and now half[ref] are foreign owned.
Looking at the listing you provided, the wide majority of the non-American unicorn startups are from China, with some scattered startups in other eastern countries. So I think the shift in startup-location speaks more about China's success in bringing back talent (especially compared to India) versus America's lack of a grip on talent.
The trend is more important. US has only 32% of the world's unicorns. Even if you remove all the Chinese companies, US is 58% of the total, far less than the number a few years back. India and Southeast Asia are especially doing well if you put the size of their economies into consideration. In five years, these unicorns could grow into nowadays Amazon and Facebook, and the same holds true for the shift in the job market.
The reason half of them are foreign owned is because all of them are Chinese whom are later in their tech development cycle. Almost all those companies in the US have already went public.
Agreed on the master's degree bit. A lot of them are just for generating money for the uni. A bit anecdotal, but most east and south asians use it as a platform to get a job in the US.
Hm - do you have a master's degree yourself? I've seen lots of people (here and elsewhere) who suggest that a bachelor's degree also doesn't indicate skill and is also therefore useless. It seems as if everybody assumes that whatever level of education they themselves have attained is the cutoff for "usefulness" and any level beyond that is just a waste of time.
I'd agree that bachelor's are also basically useless - all it tells you is that the candidate can put up with four years of bullshit and still jump through hoops at the end.
A masters degree tells you they're willing to put up with six.
I might have just had a bad experience - at my uni the CS Masters program was a pretty blatant cash grab, taking advantage of the visa requirements to pull in Indian students. That would have been fine, but the standards were super low, the students couldn't code at all (by year 5, at least a bachelor's CS student should know how to write a for loop), and we had a major cheating scandal every year.
I'm not saying I don't want those Indian students here - I absolutely do - I just wish we weren't creating these nonsense processes and making people contort their lives to fit them.
> The mystery to me is that if my suspicion is correct, then the CEOs and upper management must think that devotion is ultimately (long-term) more important than productivity is to the bottom line.
That's actually what Jack Ma asked for in his original WeChat posts. You simply can't ask a passionate employee to work in a fixed schedule, because they prefer working MUCH LONGER than 996.
Worked at Alibaba. Not trying to defend the company, just offering my observation.
They do work much longer hour as compared to most American companies (like Google, I worked at too), even longer than the average Chinese ones. However, 9-to-9 doesn't mean people work 12 hour straight and nobody forcing anyone to stay at work until 9. Chinese work schedule includes 30 minutes to 1 hour extra napping time at noon, and Alibaba has on-campus canteens and facilities so employees go gym/game after dinner then back to work a little longer before leaving.
When I was working there I usually leave right after dinner so the actual work hour was around 8.5-9 hours a day. And our team never work on weekends (except for around 11.11 the annual shopping craze). However I do work at night and weekends at home, voluntarily.
The keyword is "voluntary". Alibaba doesn't have this problem but many other companies do. The fact anti-996 has gained tons of attention makes me doubt it's just an immature movement started by a couple of crybabies.
Definitely not immature. People have all the right to do so, and Chinese laws protect labor rights. And I do agree that the reason you are working overtime and whether it's voluntary make a big difference.
But does it matter if you work continuously 9-9?
If I stay on premise 9-9 I still regard that as work -- that still is my time that I'm selling to the company.
Can you raise a child if you are away 9-9?
You wake up at 7AM, return home at 10PM, how is that even considered a life worth living?
> But does it matter if you work continuously 9-9? If I stay on premise 9-9 I still regard that as work -- that still is my time that I'm selling to the company.
In many countries, lunch and dinner breaks are unpaid time - in theory you are free to go home and do whatever you want. In China, noon break can be two hour long including napping. And the free dinners of IT companies are actually incentives to lure you staying longer on campus. Of course you can leave earlier or even on your own schedule if raising a child, however, for young people most prefer staying overtime enjoying free facilities companies provide them, like food and gyms they have to pay off-campus otherwise.
I feel it's also worth noting that a lot of local Chinese folks don't really have many "hobbies" or many other reasons to not be at work socialising with their colleagues and doing company organised activities. It's culturally quite different to the West, where people often have things going on outside of work.
I think that Jack Ma his trying his best to reduce the Chinese population. Today Chinese population is already almost shrinking, and policies like that will make sure that having a child will be left out of the equation. Can you imagine having a child with such a work schedule? Even if one the partners stays at home, it will mean that you will barely now your child (a few hours on Sunday).
What is strange is that the communist party realized that this will be a big problem in the future, but don't link that to company policies like that...
While I agree that it's not for everyone and people should have a right to decide how they spend their time, I think it's detrimental even for those who claim it is good for themselves.
If you actually ask, "Who is this for then?" -- I think you'll be hard pressed not to answer "For the young, socially less inclined(men)", just like drugs are for certain demographics or polygamy is for certain demographics, teenage marriage can work for certain people and so on (sorry if my examples are too extreme).
And by accepting such horrendous work hours you are pressuring people who actually want a better work-life balance, that's why I think it's better for society in the long run to forbid such (predatory) practices.
996 sounds like a paradise. We startup founders work 24/7. We are either working or thinking about work related stuff when not sleeping. Not that we don't know work-life balance is good for health, but you just can't stop dwelling on it if you have a devotion.
Unless you're trying to start, say, a space flight business or a car company, working absurd hours is just stroking ourselves to feel special about the supposedly coveted "startup founder" persona. It's a really boring, old meme at this point. I'm a "startup founder" with a profitable SaaS business, but I also have unrelated hobbies and friends outside of that bubble.
Not that I don't have hobbies and friends. I routinely take week long beach vocation to make myself physically isolated from work. Just can't stop thinking about it daily and it's a hellof joy returning to my cubicle start working.
As a startup founder you're sitting on a nice pile of equity. That's why you are sacrificing more of your life for success. Chinese workers at Alibaba for example mostly do not have any equity at all.
bs. it's like telling a PhD candidate no need doing reference research. being a good startup is not only about solving customers problem well, but solving in the best way and preferably first to solve.
Some people still think China's economy is a centralized one. No it's not. It's a mix of state owned and private - the former really good at long-term planning for national strategic goals, maintaining economic stability and building infrastructures with no short term returns, AND vibrating private sectors that drive innovation and employment. How they keep the balance of the two is mythical to many. However the Chinese came to this mixed system not by design, but with some luck. It needs to be studied and whether it can be replicated elsewhere remains a question.
My understanding is that the Chinese economy is an "artificial" Free Market economy to bridge the gap between Maoism and here-to unforseen Communist Utopia. Hegelian/classical Marxist thinking requires a society to pass through a capitalist phase in order to industrialize to the point that the populace begins demanding socialist concessions.
It was my understanding that the Post-Mao creation of free-market-like conditions in China was an admission by Communist leadership that the Hegelian model of history could not be short circuited (as Lenin and Mao attempted), and capitalist style economics was required to industrialize, but that the capitalist economics was a temporary solution.
I could be mistaken though, and I'm curious why you thought they arrived there by luck.
For 99% of the time, you go straight to click-n-buy which should get your order delivered on time, and for the 1% you prefer to talk to the seller the option is a blessing, not a curse.
I used to work for Alibaba.