[lowdose]

But code in any language can be read by any engineer in the world that is proficient in it. I do not speak or read Chinese but when I pull an interesting looking repo from Github that is Chinese I only have to stroke 3 keys to translate all python comments in the file to English. Works great!

You don't need really need another language when you have a common one in place. Even without code comments you should be able to sniff out the crackpots.

Chinese repos are trending on Github everyday. They do really cool things beyond the cutting edge on every side of our business. From frontend react and vue to shiny ML and backend golang.

[stingraycharles]

This is not as much as cultural “translation” of code, it’s about handing over years of knowledge of running a platform. Even if Microsoft was buying some US-based social media company, they would at least want to have access to several engineers to handle the transition and transfer knowledge.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft handles this, but I can’t believe it will be without access to some TikTok engineers for an extended period of time.

[lowdose]

Isn't Github basically the blueprint for running an infrastructure to manage a full remote coding workspace?

I'm actually surprised the mature way Microsoft handles the Github acquisition. It's not anything like that of what they did with Skype. What you are referring to a managerial nuances on a blueprint like this.

And it is not like Microsoft would have any problem to multiply these engineers salary by 10X because they still would not pay software engineering market rate in Seattle or another hub.