8 ms·

Disclaimer: I am speaking from personal experiences and know that, despite these experiences, there are tons of Chinese engineers who work their ass off and mai

• Shank 8y ago
  > I would venture to say that there is a cultural disconnect with the Chinese when it comes to the idea of intellectual property. I would much more strongly link it to the fact that academic success and workplace success leads to high economic again and societal standing. This is fostered at an early age and progresses all throughout life. The gaokao [0] is a striking example of just how much pressure goes into academics in particular: > Suicides are a regular feature of every exam season; a 2014 study claimed that exam stress was a contributing factor in 93% of cases in which school students took their own lives. Last year, a middle school in Hebei province fenced off its upper-floor dormitory balconies with grates, after two students jumped to their deaths in the months leading up to the gaokao. Given that many classes don't have an impact on the end career (or at least, many feel this way), it's unsurprising that students would rather cheat on the "less important" work that they just need to pass, versus what they actually find valuable. I don't think it's correlated to IP. Just societal expectations and norms. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/12/gaokao-china-toughest-school-exam-in-world https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/12/gaokao-china-t...
  • sjroot 8y ago
    I agree that’s a huge part of it that I left out. I guess I threw that in the bin of “cultural differences.”
    • saluki 8y ago
      One of my friends at university had a Chinese student copy off him during an exam without my friend's knowledge. When they received their graded exams back the cheating student came up to my friend yelling at him for making him miss points due to the answers he copied from my friend being incorrect. Of course we embellished the story over the years where the guy was yelling all kinds of things and about how he ruined his life, etc.
      • oval_atom 8y ago
        your story reminded me of an experience i had in college taking an Organic Chem exam. The exam took place in an auditorium and I had a hall mate who i studied with sit to my left, and then some jocks (turned out to from another section) sat to my right. The exam was multiple choice and you filled out your answers on a scan sheet. So leery of the jocks, i circled my answers on the test paper, if answer was A, i would circle B, and so on. When i was done i went to the front and filled out the scan sheet. The prof queried as to what i was doing, so i told him and he asked me to also turn in my test paper just in case i messed up. So when the grades got posted, my friend stopped by to ask me if I wanted him to get my grade. I said i would see it later and proceeded to tell him what i did. He did not look to good, and i started to wonder what was up. When i checked my grade later, i saw his....worst grade on the Final. Next year he did not return to school.........he was pre-Med.
• melling 8y ago
  I was in graduate school about 25 years ago and several Chinese students got caught cheating on the compiler project. I always thought this was a bit strange because I’m sure most software developers could transform a piece of source code so that it would not appear to be a copy.
  • pavlov 8y ago
    > cheating on the compiler project ... transform a piece of source code so that it would not appear to be a copy Sounds like the cheat itself would make a decent project for the compiler class.
    • megablast 8y ago
      You mean changing variable names and rearranging bits of code. Not really.
  • arbie 8y ago
    Colleges now have sophisticated software to catch cheating even in computer programming courses. I believe they compile down to an AST, and then compare for similarities.
    • jessaustin 8y ago
      The college I attended had this 25 years ago...
• pvg 8y ago
  Why intellectual property? Intellectual property is not the basis of academic integrity rules.
  • sjroot 8y ago
    The stealing of ideas can be applied to legal intellectual property or academic assignments.
    • pvg 8y ago
      Not really. People don't get tossed out of school for plagiarism because they're violating someone's copyright. In fact, you don't need the notion of intellectual property at all to have the independent notion of academic integrity - one is significantly older than the other.
      • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        My high school calculus teacher put a copyright on his exams. He didn’t need to—copyrights are implicit. But it communicated the point.
        • pvg 8y ago
          Your high school calculus teacher wouldn't have flunked you if you copied your neighbour's exam answers because you were violating their copyright. They'd have flunked you because you cheated. If someone in Ancient Egypt sent their cousin to sit the Obelisk Chiseling Guild exam for them and got caught, same thing. None of this has anything to do with 'intellectual property'.
• lawnchair_larry 8y ago
  It’s funny how afraid people are about tiptoeing around this issue. Cheating among chinese students is widespread and blatant, and they do not even pretend to care. They are completely shameless about it. Everyone with Chinese students knows it, but it’s politically incorrect to call it out. Which they are also aware of, and take advantage of.
  • biocomputation 8y ago
    People who can, do, and people who can't, cheat. It's the way of the world, and not isolated to any particular ethic group, social class, or otherwise.
    • sjroot 8y ago
      That might be true, but I think it is occurring disproportionally amongst Chinese students (and perhaps as a result, Chinese engineers).
      • biocomputation 8y ago
        I'm not doubting that some Chinese students cheat. Maybe it's even higher than the proportion of students in other ethnic groups who cheat. I'm simply saying that it shouldn't be framed as a problem with Chinese culture because it is a problem in all human cultures. That's all.
        • sjroot 8y ago
          That we can agree on!
  • whooshee 8y ago
    People are not afraid to calling out cheating. Yes, there are Chinese students do that. People are just not that into overgeneralize a giant group of people.
    • 8y ago
• natecavanaugh 8y ago
  I can speak to both my own personal experience and anecdotal info, in that I've personally only worked with Chinese engineers who are of the utmost scruples and integrity (even when I don't always agree with their choices from an engineering perspective), but it does seem to be that there is some cultural traction against the kind of mindset we appreciate in the West. But I tend to view it in the context of Feynman's remarks about Brazilians (who I've also had the pleasure of working with and being enlightened by) [0]. Even if there is some cultural resistance, there will always be exceptions, depending how you choose to select from that data. Personally, I value those traits that choose certain value over others. Being right (with the qualification of being right, rather than appearing right) is essential for a good engineer. I don't think any country has a monopoly on good engineers or on bad. The best we can do is engage these like minds and cultivate a shared appreciation of the Good. I think politics (from the education level up) makes it hard to question the cultural norm, I find there are plenty of folks who hold "correctness" a higher value than compliance. All this said as a white guy looking in and lucky enough to have found aligned mentalities among the folks I've worked with. [0] http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
• tlear 8y ago
  Do you not know all cultures are same? To Re-education camp with you. Being a TA for undergrad courses this pattern is very common. Other group that consistently gets caught was guys from ME. East Europeans cheat but they almost always put enough effort to make it hard to catch. Thing is that universities do not prosecute this at all. I have seen people graduate who I think never submitted their own assignment at all. Additional thing is that “community” usually has all the tests for last 10 years and profs don’t change them that much. So they memorize the whole thing which is enough to get passing grade. There was one Math prof that I adored who would put clever traps into his tests. Every single time he would catch people.. and they would not learn. Still graduated.
  • kasey_junk 8y ago
    When I TA’d many years ago you could graph the frat brothers by their test/assignment answers.
    • shanghaiaway 8y ago
      Oh, so Americans cheat too?
    • briandear 8y ago
      Did they cheat or did they study together?
      • kasey_junk 8y ago
        Cheat. Had literal cabinets full of test answers & assignments. Though frankly there were shops near campus that sold such things as well.
        • jerkstate 8y ago
          Cabinets full of test and assignment answers was one of the selling points of the frats at the engineering school I attended.
    • 8y ago
• brian-armstrong 8y ago
  Bunnie Huang covers this in his (really excellent) book on manufacturing in Shenzhen. It sounds like it just comes down to a difference in cultural beliefs on intellectual property. Of course, reading HN, you get the idea maybe it isn't such a different perspective from (parts of) the West's.
• nwatson 8y ago
  Aptly numbered podcast episode #666 of Planet Money named "Episode 666: The Hoverboard Life" explores the discovery of the "hoverboard" phenomenon from a couple of years back -- "The hottest toy this holiday season has no identifiable logo, no main distributor, and no widely agreed upon name". The podcast (I listened to it a long time back) goes into how the Hoverboard invention was fueled in late-night drinking sessions by Chinese engineers / businesspeople trying to make a more accessible and more fun and less dorky Segway. All those people bounced ideas off each other and made incremental improvements to get to the form that was commercialized by umpteen companies. Maybe this product was developed in a prototypical "Chinese model" where ideas are cheap, widely shared or purloined, improved on, reverse-engineered, etc. -- with the obvious downsides of rushing low-quality products to market that are subject to exploding batteries with no accountability. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/27/457404184/episode-666-the-hoverboard-life https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/27/457404184/epis...
• outworlder 8y ago
  While this experience may give some insights on cultural biases as a whole, it is pointless if we try to apply it to any given individual.
• est 8y ago
  > Chinese graduate students has been incredibly disappointing That's kinda selective bias. Only these students have higher chance of making it to the U.S. lol
• themagician 8y ago
  China is a collectivist society. Their ideas of property rights and intellectual property are fundamentally different. There is “the” answer, not “your” answer. It seems weird to us but it’s worked well for them. And while our system might seem better, or at the very least “normal” it certainly has its flaws (i.e. patent trolling). There is probably some middle ground we could come to in the future but the US is completely unwilling to budge from its position. The Chinese simply don’t even understand what that is. How can someone own an idea? Especially one which is just a fundamental truth. Think about that for a second. Think about it as if you were a child. It’s kind of strange. We grow up in the US being taught that we can own just about anything, and to the exclusion of all others, and then we develop systems to promote and protect this. That’s definitely something you can do (as we do) but there is nothing natural about it.
  • yzmtf2008 8y ago
    I mean I don’t know where you got the idea about property and idea ownership in China, but it certainly wasn’t from the China that I grew up in. Wow.
    • themagician 8y ago
      When did you grow up in China?
      • yzmtf2008 8y ago
        Within the last two decades.
        • themagician 8y ago
          What is your perspective? What about that of your parents?
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • walkadder 8y ago
• downrightmike 8y ago
  The problem with students has been an ongoing problem: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-cheating-iowa/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...
• reaperducer 8y ago
  >I would venture to say that there is a cultural disconnect with the Chinese when it comes to the idea of intellectual property. Back when I did business in Asia, we had a cultural training session before our group went over. We were told that in certain Asian nations, especially China but to a lesser extent South Korea and Thailand, the concept of copying someone else's work or intellectual property as a bad thing is foreign. Instead, the cultural feeling is that copying someone else's work is a subtle way of honoring them and their work. Our consultants said that South Korea was growing out of this phase in its development, the way Japan did decades earlier. In both nations because the growth of home-grown ideas gave intellectual property cultural worth. Perhaps over the next 30 years, China will also learn to respect other people's property as it develops into a modern industrial power. This was a couple of decades ago, though. Things might be different now.
  • fraudsyndrome 8y ago
    > Instead, the cultural feeling is that copying someone else's work is a subtle way of honoring them and their work. > learn to respect other people's property Are these two not conflicting? If they feel inspired to use other's work as a way of honoring them, isn't that similar to them respecting their work? I'm just confused because it sounds like most of the time it's a matter of perspective. If you think from the way you've been brought up that what they're doing is disrespecting other's property, but they see it as respecting - is there a right/wrong?
    • reaperducer 8y ago
      If you think from the way you've been brought up that what they're doing is disrespecting other's property, but they see it as respecting - is there a right/wrong? Life is messy. As I said in the original comment, other countries have felt the same way, but their views changed as they began to value intellectual property more. Is that right or wrong? The truth is fluid.
• dawhizkid 8y ago
  Chinese engineers also play the tech company referral game very well. My team went from having one Chinese engineer to being almost completely Chinese in less than a year. All through referrals that started with one.
• walkadder 8y ago
  Where I work, we've had a problem with Chinese engineers sharing our internal interview question bank (with answers) to their friends, along with coaching for other interview types. They then refer their friends and get the referral bonus when they join. It's now roughly 50% Chinese and this has caused some issues, although it's not something that can be discussed.
  • voltagex_ 8y ago
    If the interview questions are the only barrier to entry, then that's probably a problem with the hiring process itself.
  • hermitdev 8y ago
    My personal experience when we had a contract with (a very large consulting firm) to provide Chinese contractors that didn't speak English, so we had to go through a translator, we started to get near verbatim exact answers from every candidate we "interviewed" after say candidate number 3. We obviously caught on to this and point blank told our director that we didn't trust the interviews or the capability of the candidates. Other teams found the same. We ended up eating a multimillion dollar contract that was already signed because after the fact, no one trusted the competence of the contractors.
• directionless 8y ago
  Some perspective around the different ideas in IP https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
• TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  How do we reconcile problems raised in this comment with the idea that copyright and IP laws are too strong?
• paradite 8y ago
  I'm a Chinese engineer working outside US and China. A few points that I think is relevant: The culture in universities are generally more relaxed with processes being more open as compared to high schools. This is more pronounced in China with college entrance exams being the most stressful and rigorous process that decides your future. So when students join colleges (China or US), they would no longer feel restricted by the rigorous curriculum and exams in high school. Like a spring that has been pressed for very long time, they would "bounce back" and neglect their school work, sometimes going too far into cheating. While this issue in generally applicable anywhere, China's college entrance exam makes it worse for Chinese students entering college. On top of that, overseas colleges are farther from their families and friends so they feel even less restrictions and easily steer into wrong paths. The other point to consider is that part of the overseas Chinese student body consists of rich kids whom their parents sent to overseas in search of better education. They might not have the same aptitude as others who studied hard and passed exams to go overseas hence resort more to cheating.
• Kagerjay 8y ago
  When I was undergrad I had to take some graduate level courses where a good 80% of the room were Chinese grad students. I've noticed blatant cheating more so than other ethnic group out there. Chinese culture is rather weird... probably because a lot of its traditional "respectful" norms were tossed out the door during the communist revolution. The success mentality in China is more if you can get away with it by all means do so to get ahead in life. This includes things like stealing IP, cheating, scamming, etc. There's also very little punishment for these kinds of things over there as well. For example, petty things like scamming tourists is kind of ignored in major cities. At the same time there's a much more collective mindset is the open-ness of sharing ideas. Its also the reason why China is so innovative when it comes to manufacturing. Probably because you could just walk down the street and exchange ideas with your neighbors. I wouldn't say everyone thinks this way but the cultural mindset is definitely there. You also have to understand that they don't use american software in China really - things like youtube, amazon, facebook are all under the great firewall. They have baido, taibo, alibaba, wechat, etc. You can still get rehosted content elsewhere though from those sites. As a side note, if I ever want to find the latest version of a computer science textbook in PDF format its almost always hosted on a chinese person's github account.