4 ms·
Anectodal, but I spent a year on a recent project collaborating with a group of firmware engineers in Shenzhen, and it was an absolute nightmare. Apart from th
by gregkerzhner 6y ago
Anectodal, but I spent a year on a recent project collaborating with a group of firmware engineers in Shenzhen, and it was an absolute nightmare. Apart from the timezones, the code quality was horrendous and basically never worked correctly. They also ignored all common standards, and made assumptions about things like ordering of fields in JSON. None of their engineers spoke english, so code communication had to go though the project manager who wasn't technical.
I can see how english fluent Mexican, South American and Canadian employees will be in competition - this is already happening, but I think that China might be one of the last places I would higher a developer due to the huge time difference and their poor english speaking ability.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y agoYou probably got what your company paid for.
- rootusrootus 6y agoMy company has an office in Hyderabad India. My experience is that a US-equivalent developer in India isn't actually that much cheaper, and when you weigh the timezone disadvantage it may not really be worth the hassle. We still have a thousand developers there and we pay $2500/mo for each of them. There are plenty of nice people, and a few rockstars, but on average this money doesn't buy top talent in India.
- foogazi 6y agoAre SV based companies getting what they pay for?
- quicklime 6y agoI’ve worked with Chinese developers and their English and programming skills were fine. Just check for English language skills in the interview if it’s important to your company. Personally I think that non technical project managers are the bigger problem, remote or not.
- vangelis 6y agoI wouldn't higher a developer due to their poor English speaking quality either.
- ilaksh 6y agoThere are around 5 million software developers in China. Are you really sure it makes sense to assume that they all suck? I'm sorry but that is a silly prejudice. You worked with one group.
- gregkerzhner 6y agoChina has the 7th lowest english speaking rate in the world. I doubt that they are going to be a large outsourcing hub to English speaking people any time soon. If you speak Mandarin though, its a great place to hire cheap developers - just look at Zoom.
- ilaksh 6y agoHe said they were all bad developers.