[cleric]

Hello.

Im a Swedish Sofware engineer and I have been working in Beijing for the last ~4 years. As others have pointed out, China is huge, and I have no experience from working in Hongkong or Shanghai where the vibe is more international, or so they say.

So what to expect? Smooth sailing, as long as you can deliver. There is a lot of companies that value English speakers in general, so dont be surprised if you get pampered.

There is no xenophobia to speak of, just cute curiosity. Its easy to find work if you have the skills (coughwe are hiring: [e-mail]). Visas are a hassle, and rules change regularly. But if you are working here for a serious company and have the proper age/education/pazazz its usually just a bunch of paper work.

Culturally, its all up to where you are. But for the big cities its a very modern, interesting living.

I would never recommend going for the big 3(Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu) unless you love going to a place with 15k employees. There is a lot of options.

Its a very hungry tech scene in general, for everything from classic websites to apps. Almost nothing works here made by Google and Facebook, and boy its easy to take that for granted, so alternatives needs to be build and localized versions of everything is spawned.

For me personally I choose to work in China rather than to seek higher education back in Sweden and I have been in on a startup that now have more users that Scandinavia combined. Some crazy things I feel would never have been possible outside of China. We are still considered a small startup in China.

I could elaborate on this, but I think my best tip is just: Go, its easy to fly home.

[Fej]

What's the deal with the pollution? Are you worried about your long-term health?

China sounds great and all (well, except for that whole "totalitarian government" thing) but I'd never trade my well-being for money.

[cleric]

Well, simply put. Its bad. But it was muuuuch worse before. This goes for Beijing specifically due to historic and geographic reasons.

When I came here the PM 2.5 (particle density yadayada) was 400 on normal days and 200 was a "good" day. Something that would cause riots back home in EU. After that it just got worse and worse until we peaked 1k, which we nicknamed the Airpocalyps.

After that the gov started to do a lot of things and magically around the time Beijing hosted the APAC 2014 meeting, the skies cleared and we remembered the smell of nature, I also could not stop looking at the moon at night, since I didn't realize that I hadn't been able to see if for a long time.

After that the 75 year military parade to celebrate the Victory over Japan came along and made the sky magically blue again, and we have not really gone back after that.

Its still bad (~150 PM 2.5) at the moment, but its not stable bad. When the humidity is high particles stick around longer, when it rains it clears up the pollution too. (Where does it go? I dont want to know.)

But, we have 20+ expensive air cleaners at work, I have one at home and I always put on a M3 mask on days when its above 200.

We also awesome people here who tackels these problems in great ways. http://smartairfilters.com/ I bought their products for my home.

If you want to eat healthy there is alternatives but might require some research and a little knowhow.

As for the totalitarian thing, don't rock the boat.

[Fej]

I think if I had to live there I would wear a hazmat suit daily.

[cttet]

The pollution situation is also different in different parts of China as well. http://aqicn.org/map/#@g/27.2404/110.7692/4z

If you around Shenzhen/Guangzhou area the air quality is quite OK

[GordonS]

I've never experienced any real xenophobic in the biggest cities in China, such as Beijing or Shanghai, but it has happened to me and my family in smaller cities such as Nanjing

[are595]

Not OP, but I am also very interested in CS jobs in China (might apply too :3). (BTW, your site's job page seems to be down: http://jobs.p1.com/tech).

How do you find the cost of living is, given that Beijing is such a large city. Are you able to save money for retirement, etc?

[rahimnathwani]

Some figures to help you budget:

Rent: US$800/month for a room in a shared apartment; $1600/month for an OK 2-bedroom apartment

Food: $4 for a McDonald's meal. $10-$15 for an American breakfast. $5-$7 for a beef ramen dish. $2.50 for a Subway sandwich. Western foodstuffs (like cheese) can be expensive compared with the same brand in the US. Meat and vegetables (if you cook yourself) are decently priced. Obviously expensive for things that are imported (an avocado is ~$2), but locally-grown stuff is cheap.

Transport: less than US$1 per subway ride. US$7 for a typical taxi ride within central-ish parts of Shanghai or Beijing.

Entertainment: Eating/drinking in Western restaurants and bars/pubs is cheaper than in London or San Francisco. A beer and a nice burger in a western pub in Shanghai or Beijing will run about US$16.

The above prices include sales taxes, which are included in quoted prices. There is no tipping.

[cleric]

Yeah, that page might be a bit out of date. I think we are mostly using some big recruitment agency these days.

Our current app that is developed is Tantan http://tantanapp.com/jobs No big support for that page in English but its a fun Google Translate moment.

Emails sent to my previously mentioned email will be reviewed by our hr dept.

For the cost of living. Its really nice. You have the full spectrum of super mega fancy stuff down to a bed in a concrete room for 100 CNY a night. The beauty is that a beer costs around 3 CNY (1 U.S. dollar = 6.6712921 Chinese yuan), you can have a feast with your friend and pay 30 CNY each including drinks. Dont buy the vodka drinks for 10 CNY each if you value your brain. Bus is 1 CNY and Subway is 2 CNY. Taxi almost anywhere is 30 CNY.

Living can also be cheap if you only want a normal apartment in a tall apartment building suburb, ~10-20min subway from downtown. Ranging from modern 4-6k/m apartments down to 2k/m old-styled-no-elevator prefab Chinese apartment blocks. Floor space in some places are very cheap too so living with 3 other roomates could also make it very cheap.

For salary, I get paid almost what I would in Sweden, but the tax in China is very low compared to Sweden, around 10-15% in China, so I get a lot more disposable cash. But since there is a lot of fun stuff to do, I don't really hold on to it long. But my friends who don't really party a lot and don't mind eating street food for less than 10CNY save a lot of money.

[are595]

That's awesome, thanks for the reply.

So I'm assuming you guys do custom app development? Do you also handle the backend server stuff too?

[cleric]

Yepp, its all in house.

I left home when the whole "just toss it into AWS push the scale button and go for IPO" started in the West, and got behind the gfw when if you want it to be good it needs to be inside the gfw even if the server outside are reachable.

There is alternatives now like the aliyun from alibaba, but for us that was not an alternative since they have not really reached the same level as AWS.

So its kinda fun to do the basic stuff since its usually easier for us to build everything ourself than to outsource.

[msvan]

I had beers with the P1 team in Beijing about 3-4 years ago, so I probably met you too :) Seemed like a cool little company at the time. I'm surprised that you were able to get a Z visa (?) as I thought that required a degree?

OP: I can recommend living in China for the experience alone. You'll be treated differently, but xenophobia is not the word I'd use. I'm white and my experience was pretty great, though I'm not sure what it would be like for a non-white person.

I imagine a software engineer would make less than in some Western markets, but the cost of living is also substantially lower. Learning basic Chinese is helpful, but in the biggest cities you can typically get by with English and gestures.

[rahimnathwani]

"Learning basic Chinese is helpful, but in the biggest cities you can typically get by with English and gestures."

Sure, you can 'get by' in the sense that you'll be able to buy food and get around. But if you plan to spend more than 6 months in China, studying Chinese will pay off in a better overall experience.

[cleric]

Nice to meet again :). 3-4 years ago in our company history was a fun time for sure.

For the Z visa, I brought the Pazazz. Or rather I could rattle together 5 years of work experience combined with my age. In my opinion, as long as you are serious to work, and not do the old classic Student/English teacher gig, and the company has good people handling it, there is always a way. For me there was a lot of going to South Korea for one week and get a new Visa there to be able to come back in etc.

For the Chinese language part, yes, learn it, its awesome and opens 5000 doors for you. But I have not mastered it to any degree but have survived very well. Nothing Im proud of, but a lack of it does not mean isolation, usually Chinese people are good at picking my vocabulary and find key words we can combine with gestures.

Pijiu? Dui Bing da ma Dui. Hao!

Done :)

[bogomipz]

I don't agree. English in Beijing is not so common, but Hong Kong its very common.

[matttheatheist]

Not common at all in Hong Kong either... except in hotels and written on restaurant menus and official documents. It's supposed to be a bilingual city... but not in practice. You want English? Go to Singapore or Malaysia.

[Guyag]

That wasn't my experience when I was there. While it's true that the average citizen may/will not speak English, it's more common than just in the high end areas that you mentioned.

[matttheatheist]

I was in HK in 2013 for Chinese New Year. Lots of foreigners working there, especially Indians and Australians, but the local population struggled with English. I was in Singapore in 2010. Everyone there spoke fluent English.

[msvan]

My point is not that you will have enlightening discussions in English with the average Beijinger, but that there are lots of people who live in expat areas and mostly hang out with expats and Chinese people who speak decent English. Some spend years in China without knowing a lick of Chinese.

[seanmcdirmid]

True. You aren't going to be talking about deep politics with a Beijing taxi driver without a good command of Chinese, but you'll totally be able to order a mocha frapiccino in English at Starbucks.

[lgieron]

> You aren't going to be talking about deep politics with a Beijing taxi driver without a good command of Chinese

Do people talk politics there? Accidentally let slip the wrong sentence when the wrong pair of ears is around and bam , your life as you know it is over.

[seanmcdirmid]

Yes, and no, China is not that totalitarian. Chinese will complain about the government all the time, just they don't appreciate foreigners, even residents, doing the same. That would be like a Chinese complaining about the USA while living there....

[fao_]

Hm, I'm curious: How much has the Chinese web blocking impacted on your usage of the web compared to Sweden?

[cleric]

A lot.

When the company proxy is down, development grinds to halt.

Google Twitter, Facebook Dropbox Github Every site that uses Google Fonts will not load without fiddling etc etc etc. VPN or a good proxy is a must. Or you just space out and stop reading the news, use a simple ssh tunnel for Git and live in happy non social media bliss.

But over the years I learned a lot of corner cases with proxy settings in almost everything. Like if you set a http proxy in Ubuntu, apt-get dont give a fuck, you have to set that separately, but if you want to use a password or different port you end up in config hell. Or if you want to use http proxy on your phone, there is settings for it in Android for both Wifi and 3g, but if you put a password into the password field, your phone goes "well thats nice, lets not use it".

You can pre cache google maps on your phone. But if you use a app that displays a google map, that app will not use the google maps cache.

But since almost everything is blocked or slow, there is Chinese alternatives to everything. And we mostly use Wechat here for everything so there there is not that many convenience missing for me.

The hardest part for me was playing Ingress since the GPS location is shifted in China, and the login requires Google servers, and running a VPN drains batteries. But I would not really see that as a major concern :)

[raihansaputra]

I guess if you are working professionally in the tech space, you'd just spring for the 5-15 bucks a month to have a vpn.

[johansch]

There was some noise about the GFW doing clever stuff(tm) to identify VPN traffic and punish the local IP for that. Was that real or hype?

[univerio]

That's definitely real. Normal, unobfuscated VPN will result in packet drops after a couple of minutes. Even obfuscated VPN will trigger packet drops if you send too much traffic.

[rahimnathwani]

It depends on the protocol. Unobfuscated OpenVPN definitely behaves in the way you describe. But I very rarely have problems with PPTP, which is unobfuscated.

[johansch]

Thanks for that - it's great to have a confirmation. Obfuscated/unobfuscated VPN traffic, what is the actual difference at protocol level?

[univerio]

Put simply, AFAIU, it's the pattern of TCP packet sizes. OpenVPN, for example, has a very recognizable handshake that makes it prone to detection. This post goes into some of the network-level details (not OpenVPN-specific): http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...

[stevesun21]

Try shadowsocks it designed and made by China :-)

https://shadowsocks.org/en/index.html

[slayercat]

I agree, shadowsocks is much more powerful open source solution in crossing the GFW. But I’m hardly find a quick reliable service provider. And the primary developer (a young woman) quitted under the stress of administration. So the future of this project is unclear.

[bogomipz]

But its a game of cat and mouse with which VPN providers are currently blocked.

[bogomipz]

How does this work with the language? Do you speak Mandarin or Cantonese? My experience was that English didn't go very far in Beijing.

Contrast that with Sweden where the office language at a tech start up in Stockholm is most likely English.

[johansch]

Do you speak e.g. Mandarin? If not, how does cooperation with a team that is probably 90-98% Chinese work?