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In my experience: Yes, they are emulating at least parts of SV startup culture. Except that they hire hundreds of people where an American or European company w
by johansch 10y ago
In my experience: Yes, they are emulating at least parts of SV startup culture. Except that they hire hundreds of people where an American or European company would hire 20-30 people.
My guess is that the thinking is that they'll be able to do it even quicker than their western counterparts merely by numbers.
A couple of years ago I worked with a team of about 35 in Europe that made a global product that had 250M global monthly users.
Meanwhile in China, the team that had been set up to adapt our product there ended up being about 150 people. 90% of what they published there was made by those 35 people in Europe.
- diiaann 10y agoA few years can mean pretty big changes. Salaries for a good Software Engineer in a city like Shanghai are on the rise. Mega teams for lowly skill work yes, but definitely much less so for skilled workers.
- jackcosgrove 10y agoHow much of a that is poor or inexperienced management hiring too many or not reading the Mythical Man Month, and how much of that is cultural or political pressure to hire people even if their jobs are make-work? I would be surprised if Chinese managers were not aware of these inefficiencies, but justified them as part of a social contract.
- johansch 10y agoThey had very smart but quite junior engineering management. There was a lot of political pressure from investors etc to match the effort of a local competitor - who had sort-of (naturally they missed all the good, non-obvious bits) cloned our product with a staggering staff of 600 people. So probably a little bit of both.