[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Yeah, that page might be a bit out of date.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.