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by akfanta 2725 days ago
Disclaimer: Although I come from China, I never worked for a Chinese company. All of my opinions were gathered from internet and friends. And definitely not all companies are like this.

One of the reason that they need to work long hours is because they need to constantly change requirements to cater to market demand. The competition is always fierce in a country with 1.4 billion population. If your competitor come out with a good feature that you can't duplicate in a few days, you bleed out user base really fast. IP laws are hard to enforce here, companies copying each other all the time. Tech giants like Baidu/Tencent have extremely low bar of integrity. If you can't grow you user base to the extent that it's cheaper to just buy you out. Those big boys will just copy your product and promote the shit out of it in a few months. You won't stand a chance against them with the uneven playground. On top of that, poor planning and the fact that PM often come from non-technical background definitely doesn't help either.

Because of the demanding hours, developers are expected to change career path when they pass 30. It's really hard to keep up with the pressure when you have a family. As a result, coding is not seen as a craft but rather a mere part of a feature development process. Quality is generally considered less important than feature completion. Copy pasta code is prevalant among smaller startups because they would rather spend money on marketing rather than on good developers. Users are to be blamed for this as well. Regular Joe's care more about features and who's advertising for your product(hiring celebrities to promote apps/websites are a common thing in China) rather than how polished and well thought your product is. These are definitely not issues unique to Chinese companies, but it's just much worse.

Saying all this, just like in western countries, if you know your stuff, you will be paid very well. Big companies like Alibaba/Tencent/Baidu can usually pay 50k USD or more per year for new grads. Not Silicon Valley good, but will definitely put you in middle class in China.

1 comments

Interesting. You are right not new to China but the IP laws make it harsh.

At the end of the day, it's all code. Not sure I would ever work for a company that makes you work like a sick man just to get even the with the uneven level field.

How hard is it to get into Tencent/Baidu?