[baybal2]

Been though that once on my last job in Canada.

After 1.5 years on the job I was quite elated to promoted to "work directly under a C-level" in a quite sizeable company when I was just 25 years old.

That was in a sourcing company that works for BestBuy, Target, LondonDrugs, WM, Amazon, and other top tier retailers, delivering OEM stuff on demand for their captive brands.

The man... happened to be a totally textbook case of "pro-manager:" net worth of few millions, few cousins and brothers in similar corporate positions, black lambo, and a mistress secretary.

I quickly understood that I became the only "general" in the business that keep things going on the technology side, and that the business will not be able to keep going unless they can customise products beyond the paint job and silkscreens.

We came to an eventual animosity, and few months after the "promotion" we had an argument in his office where he tried his cheap pressure tactic, and he made me to slam the door. As I was going through the parking lot, I saw the guy running shouting "how much you want!?"

I returned to the building and had him talk it over with me not in his office, but in the middle of cubicles of the team, to everybody's amused looks.

In the end, it was the LMIA rules update that made me leave Canada and that company. Been working with in an engineering consulting company in China for nearly 3 years now, and I can't be more happy now with Canada kicking me out.

[foobar_]

Damn .. it sucks dealing with these clowns. I will never allow these clowns to take away the joy of working with code and fellow programmers from me. That way they win!

I hope you are having a swell time working in your new gig. How is the coding culture with the Chinese folks?

[baybal2]

I can not generalise at all. Chinese companies can be on both sides of the extreme.

But one thing is certain, there is much more natural selection involved with businesses. A factory producing low quality widgets will be evaluated incomparably more harshly by professional buyers than a customer facing brand selling them in the US.

There are bosses who learned to respect engineers, and there ones who didn't. The later keep loosing businesses, go from one master to another, until they hit the bottom, unless there is somebody who keeps bailing them, which is not rare.

I knew one dude who lost 3 businesses as an appointed director, but each time he failed, his well connected uncle was ready to refer him to then next "good friend."

In China, "the boss" is much more of a social/hereditary class than a job, much more than it is in USA. The majority of the economy is still kept by the people called "the first generation money," though they been slowly losing their dominance in the economy over decades. You can imagine, a lot of the first gen wealth were former party bosses themselves, or their relatives.

Out of that class of people, there are some good bosses who were taught by hard life experiences, and ones who weren't. I myself recommend people not to risk and try to find an employer whose boss is not coming from that social group.