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Lu Ban's axe and working with your Chinese suppliers

203 points by rdl 9y ago

jjeremycai 9y ago
This is fantastically well-written. Great insights.
- justicezyx 9y ago
  I am not sure how did you draw this conclusion. The article is at best just reaffirming stereotype, at worst plain dilkusional manipulation...
forkLding 9y ago
Naomi Wu has a youtube channel about hardware, electronics etc if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh_ugKacslKhsGGdXP0cRRA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh_ugKacslKhsGGdXP0cRRA
- gleb 9y ago
  NSFW in US - for better or worse
  - forkLding 9y ago
    Thats more her style, not doing it for attracting attention, more because shes interested in modifying her body EDIT: not sure where the downvote came from, you can read about it from her own pastebin
    - adventured 9y ago
      > Thats more her style, not doing it for attracting attention, more because shes interested in modifying her body You're probably getting downvoted for that premise. It's blatantly obvious she's using it to drive views on YouTube (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that). Even her name is intentionally pointed toward that: SexyCyborg; she's telling you right there what she's doing. It would be just as obvious if it were some hot guy that did every video of his with his shirt off. It's no different from Howard Stern shock-jocking for listeners, or the thousand times Jenna Marbles leveraged her looks to push views, or Matthew McConaughey taking his shirt off on camera. It's always obvious what they're doing and why.
      - forkLding 9y ago
        Then I dont mind haha, theres more clickbaity stuff happening on my fb feeds everyday, at least she got the breasts done before the internet fame and not the other way around from how I remember it.
        thrownblown 9y ago
        Err...most people miss it but I don't talk about sex Just completely immodest when it comes to skin, that's sexy for other people, not me https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/903441607709540352 https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/903441607709540352
      - userbinator 9y ago
        On the topic of "attracting attention", there's also this which I came across a few months ago when someone else on an electronics forum brought it up: http://sexycyborgisaliar.blogspot.ca/2017/05/naomi-sexy-cyborg-wu-is-liar-and-fake.html http://sexycyborgisaliar.blogspot.ca/2017/05/naomi-sexy-cybo... Maybe a bit slanderous and biased, but certainly some interesting evidence to ponder...
    - korzun 9y ago
      > Thats more her style, not doing it for attracting attention, more because shes interested in modifying her body That doesn't change the fact that the media is still NSFW in the U.S.
whack 9y ago
> For Chinese, this means you think you know better than a professional, than experts. It’s the act of seeing something and saying “why don’t they do this instead?”. Traditionally, this is viewed as extremely arrogant and certainly not something to be encouraged in children or anyone else. > Simply put, in a strictly hierarchical society, proposing a solution missed by your superiors is at the very least perceived as arrogant. You’re just as likely to be penalized in some way for making whoever is responsible for the current solution lose face as you are to benefit in any way from proposing a better way. Is this generally true in other industries as well? How do Chinese companies try to be innovative, if people are discouraged from suggesting ideas?
- ajross 9y ago
  Surely it's not true everywhere. Most of us have known plenty of Chinese engineers who are unafraid to report bugs and suggest solutions. But in the broad sense you mean: yeah, kinda. Chinese companies (in the PRC in particular of course, but also outfits the stem from Hong Kong and Taiwan) tend not to be particularly innovative. It's a lagging market, filled with well-implemented but fundamentally cloned products first pioneered elsewhere. China has products that can compete well against, say, Google and Samsung's offerings, but there are no chinese Googles or Samsungs.
  - owebmaster 9y ago
    > but there are no chinese Googles or Samsungs There is no american or european WeChat.
    - revelation 9y ago
      They call it WhatsApp. It has more users than WeChat. For every successful social network or similar in everywhere but China there is a chinese clone whose main feature is that it spies on it's users for the government. It's not innovation, it's a bizarre Orwellian AOL portal maintained through first regulation then force.
      - 9y ago
logicallee 9y ago
This was an interesting article! At the same time, there are innovations out of China (that surpass anything which may have inspired it, or which they could have started out copying). So judging by their output, whatever cultural issues surrounded: >For Chinese, this means you think you know better than a professional, than experts. It’s the act of seeing something and saying “why don’t they do this instead?”. Traditionally, this is viewed as extremely arrogant and certainly not something to be encouraged in children or anyone else. does not seem to extend to the whole of their ecosystem. I realize the author calls the above a "traditional" perspective. Could anyone here who is current with current developments of Chinese IP and innovation comment on the validity of this general characterization? The author in the entirety of the article certainly paints the Chinese culture with a very broad brush. But as would concern readers here on HN, the only thing that matters is what engineers who might work with them think. What do people here think of the perspective in the article? For Chinese readers, do you agree with it?
- yzmtf2008 9y ago
  As a Chinese reader, every sentence in this article rings true, even more so in the historic perspectives. Especially in the PRC, you're in general incentivized to be an "excellent cog in the machine", and they teach this value to you in schools. "Being unique" in your first 18 years of life is considered a bad thing, and respect for hierarchy is enforced every day. I wouldn't write everyone in China off to the type presented in the article -- most people in China know that this is not an efficient way of approaching things. However, their hands are tied in a society that enforces hierarchy in every possible way.
  - logicallee 9y ago
    Thank you. Especially since you write that "every sentence in the article rings true" for you, can you expand on this from the article: >engineers that you know to be otherwise reasonably competent simply choosing not to bring up glaring and obvious problems. What does it refer to? How would/should someone guard against it? Normally we are usually used to being able to receive a bit of push-back (maybe polite) if we propose something with a glaring and obvious problem. Does this mean engineers would build something that doesn't work at all? (For some reason that's completely obvious to them.) In point of fact, I'm not sure what the article refers to, as it doesn't give an example. Could you give an example of what you think they mean, and how someone might protect against this effect? Thanks.
vinhboy 9y ago
> If you’d showed your axe to Edison he’d either have stolen the design or declared it a menace and tried to run you out of business so he could sell more saws LOL... best part of the article. Good writing in general.
boombip 9y ago
Could some of this also result from the contractual nature of using Chinese suppliers? I know that from my own experience with contracting, that proposing an improvement can be difficult if you also want to attach a fee to the improvement. How do you say, "I think your proposal is flawed, this way is better, but it will cost you $X more" in a way that doesn't feel like a money grab or an insult? It can be in your best interest to allow the flaw to stand, let the client notice and propose the improvement during the next round of contract negotiations. And so the only improvements a contractor can propose are those that do not cost substantially more then the established price. Of course this is more for fixed price for fixed work contracting. Contracts with more variable pricing my be better. Maybe other contacting setups can alleviate this issue, but I haven't seen many that could work and that clients are willing to sign.
- bittercynic 9y ago
  I think it depends on having good rapport with the other party, but how about this: "If you'd like, we can do X for an additional $Y."
timaz 9y ago
I can't believe how far the electrical engineer ghostwriter has taken this online persona. If anyone's ever been to the hacker meetups in ShenZhen when "Naomi Wu" first started making these videos, you'd see someone lurking in the corner. It's getting kind of ridiculous where this guy gets Patreon every month now.. [0]: http://sexycyborgisaliar.blogspot.com/2017/05/naomi-sexy-cyborg-wu-is-liar-and-fake.html http://sexycyborgisaliar.blogspot.com/2017/05/naomi-sexy-cyb...
- bm1362 9y ago
  Isn't that article about you?
  - rdl 9y ago
    pretty sure hn user timaz != reddit user timaz. I'd bet hn user timaz is the author of the blog post ("Brianna Wu"). I don't really care about the provenance of the work; it's a well-written article on tech in China. If it's a team of a western engineer and a local Chinese person (who happens to be far more attractive/better presenter, probably), I'm fine with that.
    - timaz 9y ago
      I'm not the owner of that blog. I'm ok with the article being presented better, but I do think profiting off it bears ill-will. One of my favourite benefits of the internet is the ability to hide yourself. Pretending to be someone else more attractive and making up a story crosses the line for me.
      - gertef 9y ago
        It's just branding and packaging. If people like buying stuff from a pretty female face, it's not the engineer's sin to satisfy the bias of the customer.
        timaz 9y ago
booleandilemma 9y ago
Since we are on the topic of idiom, this one rings true: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down”. Unless you’re the boss of the company you rarely stand to profit from problem solving or creative thinking — and usually speaking up will be detrimental to you in some way. Are American companies that different? The few places I've worked software engineers didn't get bonuses, only the people in sales did. Software engineers are seen as a resource.
- skybrian 9y ago
  Depends where you work? Yearly bonuses seem pretty common in Silicon Valley. (Or other compensation like stock options.)
- bm1362 9y ago
  Two NYC startups I've worked at have bonuses in the contracts. 10/20% based on performance with modifiers each way.
  - chris11 9y ago
    How is performance generally measured for dev positions though?
    - bonzini 9y ago
      Mentoring, helping with customers issues, architecting new features, etc.
    - bm1362 9y ago
      Peer and management feedback was used for the perf reviews.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  Companies I've worked for treat engineers very well, and good engineers are highlighted and fast-tracked for promotions.
- aidenn0 9y ago
zangiku 9y ago
Interesting to see the _very_ strong parallels to Japanese culture here. For everyone arguing about whether this is true of all Chinese culture, of course there is innovative thinking in China, Wu is simply pointing out that in places where people aren't getting paid to innovate but rather are there to do a 9-5 job, there is little (and, in many cases, negative) incentive culturally to think outside the box and push the envelope. Don't expect that your contractor is going to go the extra mile for you. Getting specifications right and driving the production process are on you.
- GuiA 9y ago
  I don't think people half assing 9-5 jobs they have no interest in is unique to Chinese culture. It's actually a pretty universal thing in every country I've lived in.
- zhemao 9y ago
  > places where people aren't getting paid to innovate but rather are there to do a 9-5 job, there is little (and, in many cases, negative) incentive culturally to think outside the box and push the envelope That's pretty much every country, including the US. Even many Silicon Valley companies are this way.
- zorked 9y ago
  And, for that matter, Germany. This culture isn't bad and works reasonably well in a lot of places. (not my thing though)
exikyut 9y ago
Avoiding the sentiment of the other comments here (which are not completely confusing, but nonetheless a little over my head), I have a practical question: How does one relate to and incentivize the Chinese people, then? Where are good places to start learning more? Context/example: I'm tentatively interested in approaching China from a "hobbyist with a tiny bit of money" standpoint. I want to do limited runs (3 to 4 zeros, or if circumstances allow, less!) of small handheld electronic devices - PCB, thin removable enclosure, possibly some buttons/keys on the front. Plastic caps directly over tactile buttons is cheap and compact, but rubber-dome systems seem to have a higher-quality finish. The challenge here is that rubber-dome "mats" are likely expensive to tool for, while sticking the dome under a plastic cap means extra thickness. I'd need to find out what my options are here (if I could achieve making a small keyboard, with full key-click - like the Psion Series 5 or HP palmtops - that would be amazing). As a separate thing, I'm also really fascinated by the chip-on-board techniques used to manufacture credit-card-thin solar calculators. It would be amazingly fun to be able to play with those manufacturing techniques, but going on the cheapness and sheer numbers of devices like this out in the wild (and the fact that I'm seeing the same designs on eBay as I saw in electronics catalogues from 1999!), it seems reasonable to think that the tooling to make these is probably eye-watering, sadly. But I don't know. I'm not asking for solutions or answers to these problems/questions here (although if anyone wants to comment...); they're just for context. My point is that I have no idea how or where to start in terms of contacting people and going through all the machinery; I know the volume I can promise is effectively nil, and I read this article from the standpoint of knowing I have an extra job of convincing to do because of that. I also recently read https://lwn.net/Articles/504865/ https://lwn.net/Articles/504865/ (found in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138028; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138028; replies say the main focus of the (2012) article is outdated; I'm curious if the bits I'm quoting are relevant). It's a transcript of a talk about some teething problems with trying to do runs of hardware to run KDE on. It reads > ... the manufacturers are "all about volume" ... and > Because the volume of devices that [Make Play Live] could promise to sell was fairly low, the manufacturer had little interest in consulting or even notifying the company about the changes. and > In the Q&A session, Seigo further explained some of the problems that MPL had run into. Unless it can promise a quarter of a million (or some other six-digit number) of units, MPL won't be able to get any input into the process. This info will likely be old hat to some. But I begin to wonder that whoever agrees to do small production runs will just be amusedly humoring me - because if the speaker of the transcripted talk linked above said '"Our order is a rounding error"'... what does that make my run? (Would it even need a receipt? :P) So I'm interested to understand Chinese culture more - particularly with manufacturing, and in terms of learning more about the tech scene - so I know how and where and the best place(s) to jump in. I read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138739 a couple of days ago; to quote: > ... [T]he most impressive I've seen were some calculators I saw in Shenzhen a few years ago which looked like simple solar-powered 4-function ones, but were actually programmable and had several tens of KB of memory. Trying to use that functionality with a 8-digit 7-segment display, however, was quite challenging. That's awesome. That's the sort of thing I mean by "scene" and what I want to learn tons more about.
justicezyx 9y ago
> Few Chinese companies promote engineering staff internally or even compensate them particularly well, so there’s little incentive to put an idea forward that may result in additional work and time away from their families. Too much forced analogy. This one is just plain out of context. Even people dont want to be educated in public, that does not translate who do the job doesn't get paid.
- gabeytani 9y ago
  Yeah...Baidu/Tencent/Alibaba pays engineers REALLY WELL, comparing to the local standard. Software engineering are already the best paid job category[1], outpacing finance, for Chinese university graduates, as the best profession to go to. I would say that is not the case here in US, where engineers are well paid, but the still far from the envy of everyone, which would be lawyers and doctors. 1. http://www.chinanews.com/sh/2016/05-16/7871331.shtml http://www.chinanews.com/sh/2016/05-16/7871331.shtml (in Chinese though) Side notes: It is pretty interesting to read those articles try to analyze Chinese or East Asian people in general as they are machines from the same factory tagged with serial number. I cannot see how that could give you really insightful conclusions that generalize to 1.4 Billion people.
rawnlq 9y ago
Another interesting cultural bit from the same author on chinese collaboration: > You know how overseas Chinese students in America all copy each others work to get answers? This workflow scale. How we work when older too. So if I have a question I open up QQ and have a few hundred friends. We all help each other with whatever. Many are engineers or work in factories here in Shenzhen. Most of the electronics in the world are made here and a lot of them designed and engineered here also. So easy to get very very professional help. This network has been called gongkai. Also why so many hardware startup here. Found from the author's comment history on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/3c9l2m/my_diy_underlit_led_hikaru_skirt_updated/cstmwmn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/3c9l2m/my_diy_underlit.... She seems to have a lot of (culturally) interesting opinions in general: https://www.reddit.com/user/SexyCyborg/comments/?sort=top https://www.reddit.com/user/SexyCyborg/comments/?sort=top
- ummmm 9y ago
  > She The author is actually a guy
- justicezyx 9y ago
  She was calling out common traits for people then trying to label them Chinese, and readers, like you, suddenly feel "interesting"... > how overseas Chinese students in America all copy each others work to get answers? Student colluding is any special? I was college ta before, I do not think there is ever a class students do not copy each other.
  - viraptor 9y ago
    There's a difference between some students going that way for whatever reason -vs- copying work being absolutely normal and generally expecting that this is the way to go. There are many articles talking about it if you google. Some connect it to "you advance to a university or stay rural with your family forever" situation, some with other factors.
    - justicezyx 9y ago
aleyan 9y ago
> Even now, engineers are not held in anywhere near the same regard in China as they are in the West. I have to respectfully disagree with the author on the esteem of engineers in China versus the West. I am not Chinese, nor an expert on their culture, but I do live in the West so I understand half of the equation. Current President of China, Xi Jinping was educated as a chemical engineer[1]. His predecessor Hu Jintao was a hydroelectric engineer[2]. His predecessor Jiang Zemin was an electrical engineer[3]. Compare that with recent American presidents like Obama (JD), Bush(MBA), Clinton(JD), Bush Sr(BA in Econ), Reagan (BA in Econ). These are only a few points, but seems to me it is in China where engineers rise to the highest echelons of power. We have lawyers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping#Early_life_and_educ... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Jintao#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Jintao#Early_life [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Zemin#Background_and_ascendancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Zemin#Background_and_asc...
- samirillian 9y ago
  It's the technocracy! I also think that's what Americans didn't like about Hillary Clinton (among other things). She seems to look at governing much more like an engineer.
  - theWatcher37 9y ago
    HRC is the farthest from an engineer you will ever see. I'm not sure how anyone with a professional background in engineering could suggest this.
    - jowiar 9y ago
      Deeply deeply disagree (and my background is CS/Software Engineering+Public Policy). She has way more attention to minute policy detail than anyone who has been elected president in the past few decades. And the knowledge of detail is a double edged sword, because it's hard to sell what you know to be an oversimplification (which almost everyone here can relate to).
    - 9y ago
dis-sys 9y ago
> Even now, engineers are not held in anywhere near the same regard in China as they are in the West. what a joke. Three Chinese Presidents in a row all had engineering background, yet this is still not enough? President Jiang Zemin was an engineer for decades. President Hu Jintao was an engineer for almost a decade. President Xi Jinping majored in chemical engineering from Tsinghua. Then you look at property prices in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, it almost got a point that you can't afford to buy a home unless you work for some Internet companies or some banks. That is still not enough? How about the fact that most Software engineers got paid far more than lawyers and doctors/dentists?
- chippy 9y ago
  Reworded: Even now, presidents are held with the same regard in China as they are in the West.
bambax 9y ago
On the subject of manufacturing in China, everyone seems to be saying the same thing, namely that you get exactly what you ask for, without any input or suggestion from the manufacturer, even in the presence of obvious flaws in your original design. This hasn't been my experience. I manufacture small metal objects in China, that are not very complex (no electronics, etc.) but I get good inputs from manufacturers. For the packaging for example, we designed cases and envelopes with a manufacturer, and they came up with several ideas that we tested on prototypes -- some good, some bad, but the point is, they did have ideas and they did offer them for consideration. More importantly, it differs from manufacturer to manufacturer. Some factories will produce garbage and then try to explain to you that there is no other way (after the fact); other factories correct mistakes before they even show you the result, because they understand what you want and they iterate autonomously, in order to get there. What is true is that manufacturing is sloooow. The total duration quoted at the beginning of a project should be at least doubled. But this is probably not Chinese-specific.
ptorrone 9y ago
for some context. the "community" on hacker news has said limor (ladyada) fried is not a "real engineer" or she has help and doesn't really do engineering, or she is not a real person, or she is just a marketer, or it's not really her code, amongst other attacks anytime her work appears here on hacker news. the same attacks on hacker news on naomi wu have been said to other women who make things, share their projects, and are online, including limor, on hacker news. before you hit "add comment" - what is the goal here hacker news community?
- Yuffster 9y ago
  HN isn't always hostile to women. The last time I made the front page under my real name,[0] I got a very encouraging comment about how it was nice that I had just started programming and was already thinking of hard problems. Thankfully, it's simple enough to add an nginx rule to bounce anyone from news.ycombinator.com right back to where they came from. -- [0] For some reason HN comments are much more respectful when I use a pseudonym. I must have a silly name or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - ptorrone 9y ago
    perhaps "HN isn't always hostile to women" but it's enough times for every woman i know to say it is. hacker news community, what is your goal here?

203 points by rdl 9y ago

jjeremycai 9y ago

This is fantastically well-written. Great insights.

justicezyx 9y ago
I am not sure how did you draw this conclusion. The article is at best just reaffirming stereotype, at worst plain dilkusional manipulation...

forkLding 9y ago

Naomi Wu has a youtube channel about hardware, electronics etc if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh_ugKacslKhsGGdXP0cRRA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh_ugKacslKhsGGdXP0cRRA

gleb 9y ago
NSFW in US - for better or worse
- forkLding 9y ago
  Thats more her style, not doing it for attracting attention, more because shes interested in modifying her body EDIT: not sure where the downvote came from, you can read about it from her own pastebin
  - adventured 9y ago
    > Thats more her style, not doing it for attracting attention, more because shes interested in modifying her body You're probably getting downvoted for that premise. It's blatantly obvious she's using it to drive views on YouTube (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that). Even her name is intentionally pointed toward that: SexyCyborg; she's telling you right there what she's doing. It would be just as obvious if it were some hot guy that did every video of his with his shirt off. It's no different from Howard Stern shock-jocking for listeners, or the thousand times Jenna Marbles leveraged her looks to push views, or Matthew McConaughey taking his shirt off on camera. It's always obvious what they're doing and why.
    - forkLding 9y ago
      Then I dont mind haha, theres more clickbaity stuff happening on my fb feeds everyday, at least she got the breasts done before the internet fame and not the other way around from how I remember it.
      - thrownblown 9y ago
        Err...most people miss it but I don't talk about sex Just completely immodest when it comes to skin, that's sexy for other people, not me https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/903441607709540352 https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/903441607709540352
    - userbinator 9y ago
      On the topic of "attracting attention", there's also this which I came across a few months ago when someone else on an electronics forum brought it up: http://sexycyborgisaliar.blogspot.ca/2017/05/naomi-sexy-cyborg-wu-is-liar-and-fake.html http://sexycyborgisaliar.blogspot.ca/2017/05/naomi-sexy-cybo... Maybe a bit slanderous and biased, but certainly some interesting evidence to ponder...
  - korzun 9y ago
    > Thats more her style, not doing it for attracting attention, more because shes interested in modifying her body That doesn't change the fact that the media is still NSFW in the U.S.

whack 9y ago

> For Chinese, this means you think you know better than a professional, than experts. It’s the act of seeing something and saying “why don’t they do this instead?”. Traditionally, this is viewed as extremely arrogant and certainly not something to be encouraged in children or anyone else. > Simply put, in a strictly hierarchical society, proposing a solution missed by your superiors is at the very least perceived as arrogant. You’re just as likely to be penalized in some way for making whoever is responsible for the current solution lose face as you are to benefit in any way from proposing a better way. Is this generally true in other industries as well? How do Chinese companies try to be innovative, if people are discouraged from suggesting ideas?

ajross 9y ago
Surely it's not true everywhere. Most of us have known plenty of Chinese engineers who are unafraid to report bugs and suggest solutions. But in the broad sense you mean: yeah, kinda. Chinese companies (in the PRC in particular of course, but also outfits the stem from Hong Kong and Taiwan) tend not to be particularly innovative. It's a lagging market, filled with well-implemented but fundamentally cloned products first pioneered elsewhere. China has products that can compete well against, say, Google and Samsung's offerings, but there are no chinese Googles or Samsungs.
- owebmaster 9y ago
  > but there are no chinese Googles or Samsungs There is no american or european WeChat.
  - revelation 9y ago
    They call it WhatsApp. It has more users than WeChat. For every successful social network or similar in everywhere but China there is a chinese clone whose main feature is that it spies on it's users for the government. It's not innovation, it's a bizarre Orwellian AOL portal maintained through first regulation then force.
    - 9y ago

logicallee 9y ago

This was an interesting article! At the same time, there are innovations out of China (that surpass anything which may have inspired it, or which they could have started out copying). So judging by their output, whatever cultural issues surrounded: >For Chinese, this means you think you know better than a professional, than experts. It’s the act of seeing something and saying “why don’t they do this instead?”. Traditionally, this is viewed as extremely arrogant and certainly not something to be encouraged in children or anyone else. does not seem to extend to the whole of their ecosystem. I realize the author calls the above a "traditional" perspective. Could anyone here who is current with current developments of Chinese IP and innovation comment on the validity of this general characterization? The author in the entirety of the article certainly paints the Chinese culture with a very broad brush. But as would concern readers here on HN, the only thing that matters is what engineers who might work with them think. What do people here think of the perspective in the article? For Chinese readers, do you agree with it?

yzmtf2008 9y ago
As a Chinese reader, every sentence in this article rings true, even more so in the historic perspectives. Especially in the PRC, you're in general incentivized to be an "excellent cog in the machine", and they teach this value to you in schools. "Being unique" in your first 18 years of life is considered a bad thing, and respect for hierarchy is enforced every day. I wouldn't write everyone in China off to the type presented in the article -- most people in China know that this is not an efficient way of approaching things. However, their hands are tied in a society that enforces hierarchy in every possible way.
- logicallee 9y ago
  Thank you. Especially since you write that "every sentence in the article rings true" for you, can you expand on this from the article: >engineers that you know to be otherwise reasonably competent simply choosing not to bring up glaring and obvious problems. What does it refer to? How would/should someone guard against it? Normally we are usually used to being able to receive a bit of push-back (maybe polite) if we propose something with a glaring and obvious problem. Does this mean engineers would build something that doesn't work at all? (For some reason that's completely obvious to them.) In point of fact, I'm not sure what the article refers to, as it doesn't give an example. Could you give an example of what you think they mean, and how someone might protect against this effect? Thanks.

vinhboy 9y ago

> If you’d showed your axe to Edison he’d either have stolen the design or declared it a menace and tried to run you out of business so he could sell more saws LOL... best part of the article. Good writing in general.

boombip 9y ago

Could some of this also result from the contractual nature of using Chinese suppliers? I know that from my own experience with contracting, that proposing an improvement can be difficult if you also want to attach a fee to the improvement. How do you say, "I think your proposal is flawed, this way is better, but it will cost you $X more" in a way that doesn't feel like a money grab or an insult? It can be in your best interest to allow the flaw to stand, let the client notice and propose the improvement during the next round of contract negotiations. And so the only improvements a contractor can propose are those that do not cost substantially more then the established price. Of course this is more for fixed price for fixed work contracting. Contracts with more variable pricing my be better. Maybe other contacting setups can alleviate this issue, but I haven't seen many that could work and that clients are willing to sign.

bittercynic 9y ago
I think it depends on having good rapport with the other party, but how about this: "If you'd like, we can do X for an additional $Y."

timaz 9y ago

I can't believe how far the electrical engineer ghostwriter has taken this online persona. If anyone's ever been to the hacker meetups in ShenZhen when "Naomi Wu" first started making these videos, you'd see someone lurking in the corner. It's getting kind of ridiculous where this guy gets Patreon every month now.. [0]: http://sexycyborgisaliar.blogspot.com/2017/05/naomi-sexy-cyborg-wu-is-liar-and-fake.html http://sexycyborgisaliar.blogspot.com/2017/05/naomi-sexy-cyb...

bm1362 9y ago
Isn't that article about you?
- rdl 9y ago
  pretty sure hn user timaz != reddit user timaz. I'd bet hn user timaz is the author of the blog post ("Brianna Wu"). I don't really care about the provenance of the work; it's a well-written article on tech in China. If it's a team of a western engineer and a local Chinese person (who happens to be far more attractive/better presenter, probably), I'm fine with that.
  - timaz 9y ago
    I'm not the owner of that blog. I'm ok with the article being presented better, but I do think profiting off it bears ill-will. One of my favourite benefits of the internet is the ability to hide yourself. Pretending to be someone else more attractive and making up a story crosses the line for me.
    - gertef 9y ago
      It's just branding and packaging. If people like buying stuff from a pretty female face, it's not the engineer's sin to satisfy the bias of the customer.
      - timaz 9y ago

booleandilemma 9y ago

Since we are on the topic of idiom, this one rings true: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down”. Unless you’re the boss of the company you rarely stand to profit from problem solving or creative thinking — and usually speaking up will be detrimental to you in some way. Are American companies that different? The few places I've worked software engineers didn't get bonuses, only the people in sales did. Software engineers are seen as a resource.

skybrian 9y ago
Depends where you work? Yearly bonuses seem pretty common in Silicon Valley. (Or other compensation like stock options.)
bm1362 9y ago
Two NYC startups I've worked at have bonuses in the contracts. 10/20% based on performance with modifiers each way.
- chris11 9y ago
  How is performance generally measured for dev positions though?
  - bonzini 9y ago
    Mentoring, helping with customers issues, architecting new features, etc.
  - bm1362 9y ago
    Peer and management feedback was used for the perf reviews.
hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
Companies I've worked for treat engineers very well, and good engineers are highlighted and fast-tracked for promotions.
aidenn0 9y ago

zangiku 9y ago

Interesting to see the _very_ strong parallels to Japanese culture here. For everyone arguing about whether this is true of all Chinese culture, of course there is innovative thinking in China, Wu is simply pointing out that in places where people aren't getting paid to innovate but rather are there to do a 9-5 job, there is little (and, in many cases, negative) incentive culturally to think outside the box and push the envelope. Don't expect that your contractor is going to go the extra mile for you. Getting specifications right and driving the production process are on you.

GuiA 9y ago
I don't think people half assing 9-5 jobs they have no interest in is unique to Chinese culture. It's actually a pretty universal thing in every country I've lived in.
zhemao 9y ago
> places where people aren't getting paid to innovate but rather are there to do a 9-5 job, there is little (and, in many cases, negative) incentive culturally to think outside the box and push the envelope That's pretty much every country, including the US. Even many Silicon Valley companies are this way.
zorked 9y ago
And, for that matter, Germany. This culture isn't bad and works reasonably well in a lot of places. (not my thing though)

exikyut 9y ago

Avoiding the sentiment of the other comments here (which are not completely confusing, but nonetheless a little over my head), I have a practical question: How does one relate to and incentivize the Chinese people, then? Where are good places to start learning more? Context/example: I'm tentatively interested in approaching China from a "hobbyist with a tiny bit of money" standpoint. I want to do limited runs (3 to 4 zeros, or if circumstances allow, less!) of small handheld electronic devices - PCB, thin removable enclosure, possibly some buttons/keys on the front. Plastic caps directly over tactile buttons is cheap and compact, but rubber-dome systems seem to have a higher-quality finish. The challenge here is that rubber-dome "mats" are likely expensive to tool for, while sticking the dome under a plastic cap means extra thickness. I'd need to find out what my options are here (if I could achieve making a small keyboard, with full key-click - like the Psion Series 5 or HP palmtops - that would be amazing). As a separate thing, I'm also really fascinated by the chip-on-board techniques used to manufacture credit-card-thin solar calculators. It would be amazingly fun to be able to play with those manufacturing techniques, but going on the cheapness and sheer numbers of devices like this out in the wild (and the fact that I'm seeing the same designs on eBay as I saw in electronics catalogues from 1999!), it seems reasonable to think that the tooling to make these is probably eye-watering, sadly. But I don't know. I'm not asking for solutions or answers to these problems/questions here (although if anyone wants to comment...); they're just for context. My point is that I have no idea how or where to start in terms of contacting people and going through all the machinery; I know the volume I can promise is effectively nil, and I read this article from the standpoint of knowing I have an extra job of convincing to do because of that. I also recently read https://lwn.net/Articles/504865/ https://lwn.net/Articles/504865/ (found in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138028; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138028; replies say the main focus of the (2012) article is outdated; I'm curious if the bits I'm quoting are relevant). It's a transcript of a talk about some teething problems with trying to do runs of hardware to run KDE on. It reads > ... the manufacturers are "all about volume" ... and > Because the volume of devices that [Make Play Live] could promise to sell was fairly low, the manufacturer had little interest in consulting or even notifying the company about the changes. and > In the Q&A session, Seigo further explained some of the problems that MPL had run into. Unless it can promise a quarter of a million (or some other six-digit number) of units, MPL won't be able to get any input into the process. This info will likely be old hat to some. But I begin to wonder that whoever agrees to do small production runs will just be amusedly humoring me - because if the speaker of the transcripted talk linked above said '"Our order is a rounding error"'... what does that make my run? (Would it even need a receipt? :P) So I'm interested to understand Chinese culture more - particularly with manufacturing, and in terms of learning more about the tech scene - so I know how and where and the best place(s) to jump in. I read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138739 a couple of days ago; to quote: > ... [T]he most impressive I've seen were some calculators I saw in Shenzhen a few years ago which looked like simple solar-powered 4-function ones, but were actually programmable and had several tens of KB of memory. Trying to use that functionality with a 8-digit 7-segment display, however, was quite challenging. That's awesome. That's the sort of thing I mean by "scene" and what I want to learn tons more about.

justicezyx 9y ago

> Few Chinese companies promote engineering staff internally or even compensate them particularly well, so there’s little incentive to put an idea forward that may result in additional work and time away from their families. Too much forced analogy. This one is just plain out of context. Even people dont want to be educated in public, that does not translate who do the job doesn't get paid.

gabeytani 9y ago
Yeah...Baidu/Tencent/Alibaba pays engineers REALLY WELL, comparing to the local standard. Software engineering are already the best paid job category[1], outpacing finance, for Chinese university graduates, as the best profession to go to. I would say that is not the case here in US, where engineers are well paid, but the still far from the envy of everyone, which would be lawyers and doctors. 1. http://www.chinanews.com/sh/2016/05-16/7871331.shtml http://www.chinanews.com/sh/2016/05-16/7871331.shtml (in Chinese though) Side notes: It is pretty interesting to read those articles try to analyze Chinese or East Asian people in general as they are machines from the same factory tagged with serial number. I cannot see how that could give you really insightful conclusions that generalize to 1.4 Billion people.

rawnlq 9y ago

Another interesting cultural bit from the same author on chinese collaboration: > You know how overseas Chinese students in America all copy each others work to get answers? This workflow scale. How we work when older too. So if I have a question I open up QQ and have a few hundred friends. We all help each other with whatever. Many are engineers or work in factories here in Shenzhen. Most of the electronics in the world are made here and a lot of them designed and engineered here also. So easy to get very very professional help. This network has been called gongkai. Also why so many hardware startup here. Found from the author's comment history on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/3c9l2m/my_diy_underlit_led_hikaru_skirt_updated/cstmwmn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/3c9l2m/my_diy_underlit.... She seems to have a lot of (culturally) interesting opinions in general: https://www.reddit.com/user/SexyCyborg/comments/?sort=top https://www.reddit.com/user/SexyCyborg/comments/?sort=top

ummmm 9y ago
> She The author is actually a guy
justicezyx 9y ago
She was calling out common traits for people then trying to label them Chinese, and readers, like you, suddenly feel "interesting"... > how overseas Chinese students in America all copy each others work to get answers? Student colluding is any special? I was college ta before, I do not think there is ever a class students do not copy each other.
- viraptor 9y ago
  There's a difference between some students going that way for whatever reason -vs- copying work being absolutely normal and generally expecting that this is the way to go. There are many articles talking about it if you google. Some connect it to "you advance to a university or stay rural with your family forever" situation, some with other factors.
  - justicezyx 9y ago

aleyan 9y ago

> Even now, engineers are not held in anywhere near the same regard in China as they are in the West. I have to respectfully disagree with the author on the esteem of engineers in China versus the West. I am not Chinese, nor an expert on their culture, but I do live in the West so I understand half of the equation. Current President of China, Xi Jinping was educated as a chemical engineer[1]. His predecessor Hu Jintao was a hydroelectric engineer[2]. His predecessor Jiang Zemin was an electrical engineer[3]. Compare that with recent American presidents like Obama (JD), Bush(MBA), Clinton(JD), Bush Sr(BA in Econ), Reagan (BA in Econ). These are only a few points, but seems to me it is in China where engineers rise to the highest echelons of power. We have lawyers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping#Early_life_and_educ... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Jintao#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Jintao#Early_life [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Zemin#Background_and_ascendancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Zemin#Background_and_asc...

samirillian 9y ago
It's the technocracy! I also think that's what Americans didn't like about Hillary Clinton (among other things). She seems to look at governing much more like an engineer.
- theWatcher37 9y ago
  HRC is the farthest from an engineer you will ever see. I'm not sure how anyone with a professional background in engineering could suggest this.
  - jowiar 9y ago
    Deeply deeply disagree (and my background is CS/Software Engineering+Public Policy). She has way more attention to minute policy detail than anyone who has been elected president in the past few decades. And the knowledge of detail is a double edged sword, because it's hard to sell what you know to be an oversimplification (which almost everyone here can relate to).
  - 9y ago

dis-sys 9y ago

> Even now, engineers are not held in anywhere near the same regard in China as they are in the West. what a joke. Three Chinese Presidents in a row all had engineering background, yet this is still not enough? President Jiang Zemin was an engineer for decades. President Hu Jintao was an engineer for almost a decade. President Xi Jinping majored in chemical engineering from Tsinghua. Then you look at property prices in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, it almost got a point that you can't afford to buy a home unless you work for some Internet companies or some banks. That is still not enough? How about the fact that most Software engineers got paid far more than lawyers and doctors/dentists?

chippy 9y ago
Reworded: Even now, presidents are held with the same regard in China as they are in the West.

bambax 9y ago

On the subject of manufacturing in China, everyone seems to be saying the same thing, namely that you get exactly what you ask for, without any input or suggestion from the manufacturer, even in the presence of obvious flaws in your original design. This hasn't been my experience. I manufacture small metal objects in China, that are not very complex (no electronics, etc.) but I get good inputs from manufacturers. For the packaging for example, we designed cases and envelopes with a manufacturer, and they came up with several ideas that we tested on prototypes -- some good, some bad, but the point is, they did have ideas and they did offer them for consideration. More importantly, it differs from manufacturer to manufacturer. Some factories will produce garbage and then try to explain to you that there is no other way (after the fact); other factories correct mistakes before they even show you the result, because they understand what you want and they iterate autonomously, in order to get there. What is true is that manufacturing is sloooow. The total duration quoted at the beginning of a project should be at least doubled. But this is probably not Chinese-specific.

ptorrone 9y ago

for some context. the "community" on hacker news has said limor (ladyada) fried is not a "real engineer" or she has help and doesn't really do engineering, or she is not a real person, or she is just a marketer, or it's not really her code, amongst other attacks anytime her work appears here on hacker news. the same attacks on hacker news on naomi wu have been said to other women who make things, share their projects, and are online, including limor, on hacker news. before you hit "add comment" - what is the goal here hacker news community?

Yuffster 9y ago
HN isn't always hostile to women. The last time I made the front page under my real name,[0] I got a very encouraging comment about how it was nice that I had just started programming and was already thinking of hard problems. Thankfully, it's simple enough to add an nginx rule to bounce anyone from news.ycombinator.com right back to where they came from. -- [0] For some reason HN comments are much more respectful when I use a pseudonym. I must have a silly name or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- ptorrone 9y ago
  perhaps "HN isn't always hostile to women" but it's enough times for every woman i know to say it is. hacker news community, what is your goal here?