The last time south korea's govt wanted to fuk some shit up. they destroyed the British shipping industry and took over the global electronics industry.
Silicon Valley's VC money is nothing compared to what a nation state can achieve.
South Korea has less than 5% of the global electronics industry. Feel free to elaborate on how you think they took anything over.
Are you talking about Samsung? Because that's all the dominance South Korea has in the industry. Everything else is quite generic. Apple by itself is worth more than the entire South Korean electronics industry combined.
If nation state money were a primary determining factor, the USSR would have been a juggernaut, and Russia would be producing the best technology today. Instead, the USSR lost in nearly every possible regard to the private US technology industry. Nations keeps trying and trying to keep up with Silicon Valley by throwing money at the problem, and for half a century they have failed.
South Korea's government did not do much I think it was the private companies that did it when government let them do it? Giving credit to government is little too much.
I understand your concern but you are actually talking from a privileged position. Its not really that hard to take a bit of time out of your evening or weekend to do some online programming exercise - IF that is the only thing that companies want. Anecdotally speaking I had to do these types of things while working full time to pay the bills.
Having a broader perspective - its maybe only in programming that the hiring process is so much easier. For almost any other job you need the right technical skills, years of expensive schooling, unpaid internships and have done a lot of networking ( cough nepotism cough ) - its only in programming that raw skills can get you anywhere.
> its only in programming that raw skills can get you anywhere
Simply not true. Maybe there's a few exceptions, but in general, most companies (especially in tech - just check out our great diversity :|), filter based on arbitrary things like 'school', 'specific # years of technical experience', and other flavours of the day.
Example: I had an interview with Mozilla many years ago, where the first question was, I kid you not, "Are you a Javascript rockstar?". I said no (being truthful - I was naive back then), to which the reply was an immediate "Sorry - bye".
> its only in programming that raw skills can get you anywhere.
The skill of programming is more like carpentry, mechanic, heavy machinery operation, or machining. I'm not going to higher a carpenter that can't tell the difference between a hammer and a saw, and I won't find a machinist useful if they can't run a lathe.
We need to start thinking of programming as a journeyman tradecraft career.
Today's children's are tomorrow's voters. A state that cannot indoctrinate the young - cannot have unity and dumb nationalist people needed to sacrifice for the survival of the state.
As someone who's clients are all Chinese - there is not a better time to be in the Chinese market.
China is quickly translating into a service powerhouse, I wouldn't be surprised if china will stop needing wallstreet to finance itself within the next 5 years.
If you are in the SaaS business - china is where you need to be to make bank. Chinese millennials are rich, optimistic and are amazingly good adopters of technology.
The chinese software market is also extremely young - unlike the saturated western ones. So even building simple service-automation/web-service will make you millions.
Its almost laughable to me these days that an amazing company like netflix can only charge 5 dollars in america while in china people are spending insane amount of money online for really simple services.
"Its almost laughable to me these days that an amazing company like netflix can only charge 5 dollars in america while in china people are spending insane amount of money online for really simple services."
I'm not sure where you get this impression. Online services in China are extremely competitive. Netflix is $8 per month in the US, or $10 per month if you want HD. Tencent video in China is 20RMB (~$3) per month. Most of their content is available for free if you don't mind ads.
Incomes in China are largely equal in number to about double the number, disregarding currency conversion. For example a low end worker in the USA makes 1000 USD a month while a similar worker in China makes 1000 rmb. A fresh graduate engineer may make 5k USD a month in the USA and may make 2500 to 10k rmb depending on skill and location in China.
That said 20 rmb should not be considered 3 dollars, it should be viewed as 10 to 20 dollars.
Some more points of comparison: Average hotel 100 rmb, breakfast 10 rmb, cell phone bill (depending on data) 50 to 200 rmb.
These prices are simply not true. 1000 USD per month in the US will get you much more than a 1000 RMB in China. For 100 RMB you can only find a roach and mold infested hole in a tier 3 city, there are no hotels at this price in cities like Beijing or Shanghai. Yes, you can buy a jianbing on the street for 10 RMB or less, but it is the equivalent of buying a street hot dog in New York and calling that "breakfast". Something a sane person can call breakfast will be at least 20-30 RMB, still with no guarantees that your food isn't cooked in recycled gutter oil.
I'm not sure your post supports the premise that I was trying to refute (that "people are spending insane amount of money online").
Also, comparing the lower levels of income as a guide to affordability is tricky, because China has much greater income and wealth inequality than the US (Gini coefficient ~0.7 vs. ~0.4 for the US), so you're focusing exclusively on people with very little disposable income.
Well when you compare the average income of an American vs Chinese which haven't reached even Japan's level, I would say Japan would be a better market for SaaS considering they have the money to pay (or should according to income levels).
Also consider the non existant IP laws or any type of bad actor reducing enforcement mechanisms that exist in North America and Europe, means you are in a much more crowded and competitive market.
The median income in China is between 1/15th and 1/20th that of Japan. I don't think it makes much sense to compare any first world nation to the median income (or average either) in China.
This is an important point. Marginal income increases for the already wealthy does little to support domestic consumption. In economic parlance, the rich have a low marginal propensity to consume. In China's case specifically, the rich are more likely to see any additional income as capital they need to get out of the country (hence China's progressive tightening of capital controls).
On the upside, it means the Chinese government have an obvious demographic to target with a stimulus package: the poor. They have a very high MPC because they need to spend every additional dollar on things like... food.
EDIT: Just to give you a sense of how crafty the rich and corrupt are when it comes to capital flight from China, again from HSBC:
Meanwhile, imports from Hong Kong surged by 88% in February, but we think this was because of base effects again rather than increased over-invoicing activities compared with previous months – the level of imports from Hong Kong is actually down in Jan-Feb compared with in Nov-Dec 2015.
I am an American working in a Chinese tech company, and I was also curious to know where you get this sense of being willing to spend more. Most of the Netflix/Spotify/Dropbox/Hulu equivalents are far cheaper and have far more extensive free options than in the West. Some companies certainly make bank on online games here though!
Aside from that, I agree on the market being young and having different possibilities here than in the west, and also with people being good adopters of technology.
No one is saying you can't make money in China anymore, only that the data coming out of China is really bad considering their huge growth over the past 20 years. They have a growth target between 6.5% and 7%, in the U.S. we would kill for that...but in China that is very much subpar.
I agree with you - its irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
What I am merrily pointing out is that as china moves from a export oriented country into a service based economy, Reducing its import/export is a target . Since their own leadership wants china to transition to a "new normal".
China has a huge cannon ( in terms of controlling a vast amount of humanity's capable hands ). It seems now instead of using it to awash the world with manufactured good they are refocusing it on services.
Measuring output from services is extremely hard - since its investment in human capital, rather than physical goods.
The point I am trying to make is that this is a good thing. It means their is going to be investment in law,education,fiance,software,intellectual property,health-care ...
This will give breathing room for other developing countries to take up china's slack and allow china to innovate in the place where it really helps humanity move forward. We all want cheaper healthcare and cheaper education.
It's good news in the longer run (more than 2 years,) in the short run it can cause serious problems for global markets are they adjust to the new environment. The big time bomb from this is the debt market taken on by commodity based companies which could infect investment grade bonds.
US citizens getting worried about China's finances and growth are akin to peasants getting worried about the finances of noblemen.
Right now the US Congress is seriously considering giving corporations a "tax forgiveness" to the tune of $400 billion. When US citizens are abroad, they have to pay US taxes even if they haven't set foot on US territory for years. That rule doesn't apply to corporations. Do you find that fair?
The establishment media continually fools US citizens by giving them distractions such as: "China is crashing!!!" - "Chinese growth is going down!!!" - "Corruption in China rampant!!!" - "China preparing for WAR!!!"
Easy distractions like these have only one purpose: to distract US citizens from noticing that they are being defrauded by everyone they put in charge to run their country. It's as simple as that.
> I wouldn't be surprised if china will stop needing wallstreet to finance itself within the next 5 years.
China doesn't currently need Wall Street, they have their own powerful central bank and tons of domestically held debt thanks to their very high export surplus and savings rate.
You know how I know when to pull my money out from the stock market? When your neighbor tells you to invest money in the stock market. The idea is that there's a big lag between when the smart money have left and when ordinary people start crowding in.
Same with China. Now I'm hearing from friends somehow China is the place to be that gravity is Falun Gong and doesn't exist and China will overtake United States in 10 years, and other extreme optimism that reminds me a lot about past bubbles.
But I'm interested to know if you have any source on SaaS in China.
I am optimistic about China in the long run but not with the current communist government. Only when China is unrestricted from free trade of knowledge, information and expression, only when such basic human rights guaranteed in other developed Western nations are present, can China truly become something worthy to be taken seriously.
Who want's to live in a China even Chinese people don't like or want to stay in? If you haven't noticed all the rich chinese people are getting the fuck out of China, people are so desperate that they are willing to embezzle, corrupt, steal, kill, fuck over anything or anyone. You really expect SV companies to uproot and start a new life in China?
> Who want's to live in a China even Chinese people don't like or want to stay in
It seem's that you are naive. Rich people are leaving because the standard of living is higher at the moment, but this will change. China is still developing, having spent the last 50 years lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Meanwhile, poverty in the US has increased to 14%. China will overtake the US as the dominant global superpower this century.
Well, the "50 years" claim is simply not true, the whole lifting out of poverty thing started with the opening up and the influx of foreign investment to use cheap Chinese labour after Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978. Before that, the Chinese leadership under Mao were doing their best to drive all of China into poverty and famine.
Have you ever been to China? I've lived in China over for 10 years until 2011, and it has always baffled me how so many foreigners were saying that China will be the economic superpower of the 21st century, and all I saw was a nation of poorly educated people with a cult of money, lack of any kind of moral compass and rampant corruption deeply embedded into the fabric of society. To be fair, it also had more or less developed infrastructure and lots of cheap labor that has made manufacturing in China profitable for international companies. I was trying to be positive and kept repeating the "in China it's different, they have a special Chinese way" mantra. Well, now the Chinese economy has now been exposed as the pyramid scheme it has always been and there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
I see your claim that "the standard of living will change" as absolutely laughable, as any people who are capable of changing that are busy getting out of China, ideally forever. Whoever is left only stays to reinforce the status quo.
Whoever was saying that "China is the future" in 2006 was at best a naive optimist. Whoever is saying that in 2016 is delusional.
> Before that, the Chinese leadership under Mao were doing their best to drive all of China into poverty and famine.
Drought is widely seen as the fundamental factor the caused the great famine. Government policy was one aspect that was poorly implemented. It is easy to say in hindsight - but this was a national emergency on a scale that no other country had experienced.
Even the official stance of the Chinese government, the one being taught in schools these days, is that "the disaster was 30% due to natural causes and 70% by mismanagement". With the tendency of the CCP to invent any numbers that favour them, I'll leave it to you to guess what the actual causes were.
There's also the fact that proper communist china still lingers in the collective consciousness like IE6 does in webdesign.
There used to be the communist party doctrine that individuals with possible grudges against the party within 3 generations would not be granted party membership. Some people that have money now would still count for this rule, which is another reason they might want some cash abroad.
You'd better get used to that Chinese government, it's here to stay. Besides, what do you want? For the Communist party to devolve into US congress?
And about those supposed Chinese people who don't want to stay - just like some minority of the US population doesn't want to pay their fair share of taxes or contribute positively to their local society and have thus mastered the shell company and tax haven game, there exists an equivalent minority of the Chinese population who don't want to do their part either and who are well-off enough to be noticed by foreign media when they move in expensive neighborhoods in western countries. The Chinese population being higher, that percentage of rich people fleeing will also be higher.
And about China being taken seriously - are you really that naïve NOT to take them seriously? Do you not take the formidable number of Chinese people that have been lifted off abject poverty seriously?
Do you not take the millions of kilometers of railroad that have been built both within and outside China by Chinese companies and people seriously?
Do you not take the infrastructure that has been built, no questions asked, in Africa seriously while western nations have only taken from Africa while giving nothing in return except conflict and weapons?
Do you not take seriously the information that a Chinese company, COSCO, recently became the operator of Greece's ports?
Do you not take seriously that Chinese entrepreneurs, often being from a modest background themselves, left their country for Sub-Saharian Africa and Egypt and even Ethiopia and have become of the main providers of employment and growth and even HOPE-you-can-believe-in in those countries?
I'm not a "China thumper", I'm not Chinese or even Asian - I just see the world as it is. I've seen the corruption in US government and I know about the pentagon's revolving door. It's also obvious that the British and to a somewhat lesser extent the French governments are sellouts of the oligarchs. If you want to argue about corruption in the Chinese government know first that their officials and their families are shown what life is like in prison when they take office so that they know the consequences of temptation.
Maybe next you'd want to argue that China allegedly "stole" some islands in the South China Sea and is now threatening everyone, allegedly. Well, I'd argue that in 2011 an agreement was reached among SOVEREIGN (very important here and thus in caps) ASEAN nations and the Philippines decided to call in the oh-so-righteous United States to get things moving in their favor, thus the current clusterfuck.
And besides the US and Britain already set the precedent by stealing the Chagos Archipelago and within it, Diego Garcia. Also note that they also unceremoniously removed all the inhabitants of these islands who were only allowed to carry ONE SINGLE BRIEFCASE worth of their possessions when they were put in the bottom of boats where quite a few got ill and even died.
Then the US and Britain went on and declared the Chagos a marine protected area to obliterate any possibility that the Chagossians could return to their land.
A marine protected area where they could safely keep nuclear weapons...
What China is doing in the South China Sea, building islands and infrastructure to fight against piracy and more important, ensure safe harbor for ships in a world that will be increasingly affected by climate change, is patty cakes in comparison to what western nations have done.
I believe the world needs balance - therefore it can't all be the oh-so-righteous Western system of "governance". A balance of power, a balance of opinions, a balance of superpowers. And having seen how corrupt and destructive Western governments have been and can be, my opinion -and mine only - is that China represent a good counterpoint to that corruption and destruction. China represents progress and hope in the long run. It's more likely that universal basic income and a post-scarcity society will come,and will be sustained, from Chinese culture and system of government than anywhere else. Why? Because it's the country where even farmers are crazy enough to build helicopters, submarines and robots for a hobby and in this world, the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
> I think you are a shill paid by the Chinese government
On HN you can't accuse other users of being shills or astroturfers without evidence. An opposing view does not count as evidence. Please don't do this again.
There's nothing about it in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Anyway, this is noted and I won't do it again for the sake of civility, but the the claims made by the poster are so absurd I would have no problem saying it in a face-to-face conversation.
Yes. The links you've posted have nothing to do with China and are irrelevant to the conversation. "The US and Britain have done bad things, so China can do them too" yet again.
You said my claims were false. I say these links are relevant because the US and Britain have set a precedent with respect to the unilateral appropriation of territory and therefore have no leg to stand on when they criticize China for building islands in the South China Sea. If you can't understand that, you should seek professional help.
It is already reflected very highly. One needs only look at the stratification of classes in the bay area to see that.
Do you really think that further stratification is needed?
To be fair, this phenomenon is almost entirely restricted to the Bay Area and Manhattan. Everywhere else, developers might make a little bit more than the average blue-collar specialist, but not that much. Most developers around the world are woefully underpaid for the value they deliver to the businesses employing them.
To put this in perspective: a junior role in software in the UK will bag you 25k, which is roughly an order of magnitude lower than what you get as a senior civil servant.
25k is a decent civil servant salary well above the minimum starting pay. The only "senior civil servants" earning anything like that are the 2 or 3 at the very very top of the civil service on first name terms with the prime minister who have 40 years experience essentially running the country.
If you think a junior developer fresh out of college knowing a bit of javascript is in any way comparable in terms of the value they deliver then you're wrong. Simple as that.
Wat? There are plenty of civil servants on 40k, 60k, even 100k. People running large cities like Manchester are well into 200k and they are definitely not on first-name terms with the PM (although they do hang around in ministerial circles). MPs get less because they are lightning rods, which is a paradox but there you go. They are the exception, not the rule.
If you think programmers doing actual work in all sorts of businesses bring less value than bureaucrats hiding in quangos, I don't think we'll ever be on the same page.
A lot of code would be more economically impactful without a business community "managing" it.
There's certainly a point to be made about code being channelled in good directions by excellent management. Unfortunately the median for tech management is nowhere close to excellence.
It's telling there's a lot of industry sweat expended on how to avoid hiring 1X or 0.1X developers. But you'll hardly ever see an SV blog post explaining how to avoid hiring/promoting a 0.1x CEO or VP - even though they certainly exist, and their ability to destroy value is so much greater than that of a single inept developer.
As for Java - Oracle isn't a very interesting company. It seems to have made most of its money running a collection of corporate patterns that work well to create profit - until they don't.
It's possible the OP's post is another sign the "don't" phase is getting closer.
I think that's demonstrably untrue -- open source and free software has had a massive economic and cultural impact with precious little of that originating from the involvement of business people or community leaders. (For instance, the GNU project or the linux kernel -- not to mention how many commercial products must use zlib). Business support almost always comes after the value has been created.
I would argue that free and open-source software tools have far more of an economic impact when they're used by companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc, or otherwise packaged from consumer use.
I hope we are all aware that this is not a black and white issue, that there are many ways to approach it and that there many ways to bring balance to an unbalanced situation.
After recently reading of a whole company's IT staff being forced to train their H1B replacements under the threat of not receiving severance pay, and then fired as soon as the training was completed, the thought of unions does cross my mind.
> After recently reading of a whole company's IT staff being forced to train their H1B replacements under the threat of not receiving severance pay, and then fired as soon as the training was completed, the thought of unions does cross my mind.
You think unions would fix this? Has it stopped auto jobs from leaving the US? It sounds like we need to fix H1B laws, and giving tax breaks to companies moving overseas. Throwing in a union sounds good in theory, but I don't think it would actually work.
Does the best technology come out of these European union IT orgs? My understanding is Americans in IT make much much better pay compared to Europeans in IT.
I have seen what a union environment is like. Your pay is fixed based on the number of years you worked at a company, nothing else matters. It is a race to the bottom.
True, but is the German law and trade agreements the same as the American law and trade agreements? Something working well in 1 environment does not mean it will work well in a totally different environment.
And excellently in the sphere of teaching. I would be woeful to see devs operate with the same level of impunity with the toxicity that exists within our community...
Smartphones are incredibly cheap these days compared to the price of content. They've gone on sale for as little as $10, and you can easily pay that for just one month's subscription to one website.
That is a classic example people repeat a lot. But think about it, if you had literally no money, no skills, no job, and a mental illness, how would you spend $100? A phone that provides you internet access and unlimited information and resources, or $100 for 2 nights in a hotel?
What people seem to not value are the channels that produce information. Information has become ubiquitous, ephemeral and most often freely available through any other arbitrary channel. For pay walls to work, it's an all-or-nothing system.
I would rather pay 10 dollars for Netflix then torrent.
But guess why I do not pay 10 dollars for Netflix ?
Because Netflix is shit for me. Since I do not live in the US.
The hassle of going to a torrent site and deal with porn ads is cheaper and better then streaming from Netflix.
Since 10 dollar is 45 minutes of working as a programmer - I spend less then 10 minutes a month having to deal with porn ads. Its basic economics. Unless it takes me 45 minutes of porn ad watching I am not going to switch to Netflix - as simple as that.
And guess why I get paid 10 dollars ?
Due to the broken immigration Laws which gives employers an upper hand as I get deported as soon as I lose my job.
Some of the basic needs of life - housing,food - costs me 1/4 of my salary.
And I am at the upper end of the scale - most of my peers are working in coffee shops in shitty service jobs.
Unless this basic calculus change - good luck monetizing selling articles on the web.
There are very good reasons given but I would like to add a simpler model - from the infamous book Germs, Guns and Steel.
In poorer countries, the biggest problem is related to physical disadvantages.
European and American Cities face physical disadvantages but nothing compared to Beijing, Delhi or Cairo. The biggest cities in the anglo-euro sphere are nothing compared to the mega cities in Asia.
Scaling the living standard of a typical western to the entire continent of asia requires overcoming real limitations imposed by physics and the natural world.
This is why engineering and STEM is so strongly focused in many asian societies.
I am pretty sure Germs, Guns and Steel, never implied anything remotely like that.
If you look at size as a main driver here, that does not match up with reality. South Korea, Japan, Singapore etc, neither of these countries are bigger than your typical mid sized to large european nation.
I think people are reading a bit too much into this. In the stage of development many asians nations are today, western nations also had a similar reverence for engineers.
What strikes me most when people from developing countries talk about unique cultural traits of their country, is that it merely represent a development stage. I can point to similar traits among earlier generations in my own country.
the UK has 65 million people and Japan 120, so there is quite a big difference. Many places in Europe are also densely populated, more so than Japan even like Belgium and Netherlands.
I didn't mean to imply that engineers are not needed. But rather that I don't think the reverence for engineering is linked directly to population density and scale of a country.
Germany is a good counter example since you bring it up. The strong position of engineering in Germany vs Britain as nothing to do with population size issues but rather to historical context. Each country has very different traditions and histories.
For Germany e.g. it could be mentioned that the medieval guilds lasted far into relative modern times. They preserved the status of crafts. Other factors is that in Britain finance and trade came to dominate due to the huge colonial empire, something Germany didn't have and instead had to rely on domestic production to build their nation.
One could go on for any time about all the myriads of different experiences and traditions.
It surprises me how often people just quickly explains any sort of issue with population size. Frequently differences between Europe and the US is also explained away as a function of population size, as if the vastly different historical developments isn't of significant importance.
Could you please provide references? Genuine question. I'm interested to know if American or British society was as obsessed with engineering and medicine at some point as we see today in India and China.
I am not commenting this as some sort of social scientist who has all the statistics and research on this.
I can only really speak about the experiences of my own country Norway. When I listen to people of my grandparents and parents generation it is evident that engineers and scientists were held in high esteem in their days. This is what boys often dreamed of being. Fathers of my parents generation would push talented kids to become engineers, architects etc.
In my parents generation these perceptions took a major change. E.g. my mother was a journalists which was not regarded very highly at all but which became very sought after in my generation.
If you look at media both in Norway and other western countries you see a clear utopian perspective where technology solves all sorts of problems for society. Think of the view on rocket engineers and atomic engineers in the 50s and 60s. Scientists and engineers come across as the heroes in the 50s and 60s.
As one gets into the 70s, there is a drastic shift and science and engineering seems to suddenly turn into the source of societies problems rather than the source of its solutions. You see the beginnings of an anti-technology political movement. All the pollution and urban problems that developed in the 60s and onwards is blamed on technology and science. With the hippies you get this sort of back to nature ideas.
Think about the Jetsons, and American cars which looked like they had rocket boosters. All the illustrated science magazines that popped up. Surely there was a technology optimism in earlier days you can trace in adds, TV shows and what not that simply does not exist today.
To me China looks like the 1960s west. You can even see the faint beginnings of the counter culture, where people are increasingly alarmed about all the pollution and environmental destruction.
There was that period known as industrial revolution. A lot of the great inventors were either born nobility or knighted. So Britain valued their best engineering minds.
The thing to understand is just because you are an immigrant doesn't mean you are hardworking or innovation.
The fundamental argument is much more simpler - labor moves wherever they see the most opportunity for their work.
And for a long time that has been the United States.
Its the same argument that I would apply in reverse. I see a lot of college educated liberal arts major working at coffee shop - these people would be extremely productive in lets say china - where there is shortage of people who are good at liberal arts - just like there is a shortage of software engineers in silicon valley.
Freedom of labor is what you really want - it would make the world a much better place.
I have been looking at ways to manage some private npm packages while also having the freedom and ease to publish npm packages to github.
jspm is good - but it covers your code with ugly systemJS.
is there a workaround ? is it possible for me to use code kept in bitbucket, github, private github repos, etc.
best wishes - I tried sinopia - but its not maintained well :( I would love to make my own npm but not sure where to start !