6 ms·

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 experie

by cleric 10y ago

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: hr@p1.comcough). 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.

are595 10y ago
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 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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
  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 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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
fao_ 10y ago
Hm, I'm curious: How much has the Chinese web blocking impacted on your usage of the web compared to Sweden?
- raihansaputra 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
      - johansch 10y ago
        Thanks for that - it's great to have a confirmation. Obfuscated/unobfuscated VPN traffic, what is the actual difference at protocol level?
        univerio 10y ago
        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-firewall-of-china http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...
      - rahimnathwani 10y ago
msvan 10y ago
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.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  I don't agree. English in Beijing is not so common, but Hong Kong its very common.
  - msvan 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        > 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.
johansch 10y ago
Do you speak e.g. Mandarin? If not, how does cooperation with a team that is probably 90-98% Chinese work?
bogomipz 10y ago
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.
GordonS 10y ago
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
Fej 10y ago
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.
- cttet 10y ago
  The pollution situation is also different in different parts of China as well. http://aqicn.org/map/#@g/27.2404/110.7692/4z http://aqicn.org/map/#@g/27.2404/110.7692/4z If you around Shenzhen/Guangzhou area the air quality is quite OK
- cleric 10y ago
  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/ 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 10y ago
    I think if I had to live there I would wear a hazmat suit daily.

by cleric 10y ago

are595 10y ago

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 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 10y ago
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 10y ago
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 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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.

fao_ 10y ago

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

raihansaputra 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
    - johansch 10y ago
      Thanks for that - it's great to have a confirmation. Obfuscated/unobfuscated VPN traffic, what is the actual difference at protocol level?
      - univerio 10y ago
        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-firewall-of-china http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...
    - rahimnathwani 10y ago

msvan 10y ago

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.

bogomipz 10y ago
I don't agree. English in Beijing is not so common, but Hong Kong its very common.
- msvan 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      > 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.

johansch 10y ago

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

bogomipz 10y ago

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.

GordonS 10y ago

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

Fej 10y ago

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.

cttet 10y ago
The pollution situation is also different in different parts of China as well. http://aqicn.org/map/#@g/27.2404/110.7692/4z http://aqicn.org/map/#@g/27.2404/110.7692/4z If you around Shenzhen/Guangzhou area the air quality is quite OK
cleric 10y ago
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/ 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 10y ago
  I think if I had to live there I would wear a hazmat suit daily.