17 ms·

How Huawei controls its employees in Europe

257 points by imartin2k 6y ago

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
Both Apple and Huawei do R&D in Europe at a massive scale, hiring the top researchers and the best minds from universities, research labs and from the competition (Nokia, Ericsson, ARM, Imagination, even intelligence services) with top pay to boot. While Apple is nowhere near as evil as Huawei, it's sad when you think about it, that EUs best and brightest minds, educated with EU money are helping strengthen the Chinese and US tech titans instead of the domestic ones but Europe dug it's own grave here by not funding its domestic tech sector enough and sleeping at the wheel while US and China were stealing their lunch from underneath their nose.
- intev 6y ago
  Can you elaborate on "Europe dug it's own grave here"?
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Look at what EU "tech" companies pay vs what FAANG/Huawei pays. A friend finished his PhD in ML and ended up taking a job at a FAANG in the EU as the tech companies from Germany and France were only willing to pay half of that. You can't be at the top if you treat your SW devs and researchers as an IT cost center.
    - bogantech 6y ago
      They pay worse than even non-FAANG tech companies in Australia too
    - moonbug 6y ago
      there's more to a job than the salary.
      - f6v 6y ago
        An important mission or great workplace culture don’t pay for mortgage.
        acatton 6y ago
        But even if you accept the paycut, it's not like the workplace culture is great: https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/790101370/french-telecom-company-convicted-of-moral-harassment-after-employee-suicides https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/790101370/french-telecom-comp...
        sofixa 6y ago
        One case at a shitty former-public-becoming-private company. Not really applicable everywhere.
      - andi999 6y ago
        But this goes hand in hand. If the salary is very high, management will try not to waste your potential. If low they might not care.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        Right - I also want my work to be interesting and impactful, my colleagues to be motivated and talented, to get generous time off, etc... and guess what even in Europe the North American companies do better at all these aspects as well!
      - _hao 6y ago
        There is, but it's the main consideration to be honest...
      - ftoscano 6y ago
        Yes, there is more than just the salary. Except that, in Europe, most (if not all) forms of "equity" are proportional: your title, your salary, your ability to decide, etc. It becomes an equivalence: * Since you decide nothing, therefore your salary is low. * Since your salary is low, you therefore decide nothing. This stems fundamentally from a (backward?) European strict view of companies, regardless of how hierarchical/flat their structure may be. And that view is that the corporate environment is split into two groups: * Managers: they decide; * Workers: they do work. This split may have made sense in the Industrial Revolution era but it has shown it's age in this day and age. And yet the model (and the perception, and the values) persist. If you, as a knowledge worker, ever make the mistake of "getting down and get things done" you will have chosen your side.
    - intev 6y ago
      Oh wow, I didn't realize there's such a huge discrepancy in salary.
      - csunbird 6y ago
        Yup. The average salary for a junior (e.g. with 1 to 3 years experienced) developer is around 45-50k Euro gross. You can get very exceptional and very experienced engineers for 90-100k Euro gross annually.
        908B64B197 6y ago
        Why not simply come to SV?
        dukeyukey 6y ago
        It's not that easy. Even if you already work for a US company, and that company is willing to sponsor you, and you win the visa lottery, it can take years to move to the US, and many years after that to get a green card. And at any point something could go wrong, your company screws up paperwork or something, and you get sent back to the start.
        908B64B197 6y ago
        Lots of talented EU Engineers do it. Maybe some EU countries should look into getting a better deals for their citizen trying to go abroad.
        dukeyukey 6y ago
        At a macro level, sure. At a personal level, it's not easy. As far as I know, only Mexico, Canada and Australia have preferred access to US visas for their citizens (though I'm hoping the UK will join them during trade deal negotiations).
        kazen44 6y ago
        because leaving behind the people and community around me is not worth the money and work/life balance? also, the US has a political and social problem which make it a place I would not want to live.
    - rapsey 6y ago
      To be fair funding options for US companies compared to EU ones is absurd. US tech is swimming in money compared to EU tech.
      - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        which is what the thread is about - US tech is swimming in money partly because the US supported their tech industry to the point where it became a big monster swimming in money, at which point the brains in EU drain off to the money oceans of the US.
        passivate 6y ago
        I wonder how much of the easy access to credit in the US is simply the strength of the dollar - we keep printing more $$ but the dollar doesn't devalue as much. Add to the fact that our poor interest rates on savings accounts makes private equity investments the only means to increase wealth.
        rapsey 6y ago
        The joys of being a reserve currency.
      - 908B64B197 6y ago
        EU investors are way too conservative.
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      I did think of working for a FAANG, but they don't really do much in my corner of Europe (there's a group working on Docs and similar in Germany but I don't want to move to Germany), and they are scary in that they seem to aim for the university high-achievers. I don't want to have to learn leetcode for a job interview, knowing full well that leetcode is not the day job there either. Plus I like being (or ok, feeling) productive, instead of spending 99% of my time on politics, analysis and waiting for small code changes.
      - smueller1234 6y ago
        You seem to have looked at Google specifically (mention of Docs). Google has substantial engineering presence in several european countries. Just a few cities/countries off the top of my head in no specific order: Munich, Zürich, London, Dublin, Warsaw. There's others, IIRC a bit on Stockholm for example, but I think those I named after among the larger presences. Anyway. Not just Germany. There's also SRE, which has a slightly different twang on how we spend our time and then interview makeup. For what it's worth, I'm not a computer science grad at all and I'm doing just fine at Google. Got hired as a senior manager, though, so YMMV. Not trying to convince you of anything, just trying to be helpful. :)
        ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        Out of curiosity what education/career path did you follow to get to your current position?
    - langitbiru 6y ago
      I think you can replace EU with "the rest of the world". In Asia, we are also jealous of Silicon Valley. Obligatory article: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene-doesnt-work/ https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene...
      - MichaelZuo 6y ago
        Well I’m sure it’s possible to attract really good folks at low salaries even in SEA/Japan/SK/Taiwan/India/etc. if folks are compensated with significant ownership stakes instead. It’s about what the business owners are willing to do.
      - 908B64B197 6y ago
        Why doesn't Canada simply... compete? Honestly, bragging your engineers are worth 50K less while pitching for HQ2 won't stop their brain drain.
- newbie578 6y ago
  I didn't know this, it is quite sad in fact if true. Do you have some more info?
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    In almost every EU tech hub you will find a Huawei lab and usually a stone throw way from their major western competition (Nokia, Ericsson, ARM, Imagination) and in Paris, Apple hires cryptographers from ANSSI, the French National Cybersecurity Agency (France's NSA) to work on their DRM and Apple Pay.
  - pas 6y ago
    Why would this be sad? Comparative advantages are useful. If they are doing something we don't like, we have to address that. (Eg. child labor, unsafe work conditions, carbon tariff if they don't have a carbon tax.) In itself there's absolutely no problem with having an R&D hub in the EU for a US or Chinese company.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Why is it sad? Global market at work.
- nabla9 6y ago
  Same in the US (Santa Clara CA, Plano TX, and Bridgetwater NJ) They are currently moving their US R&D to their Canada research centre due to sanctions. All international companies have R&D all around the world. ps. It's not stealing when you do R&D in foreign country.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  I mostly agree, though to be honest several EU companies dug their own graves. How long since you've heard about anything relevant on the market from "Big German electronics manufacturer" (wink)? And from "Big Dutch electronics manufacturer" (though this one seems to be still around in some areas)? And if Huawei pays good salaries then other companies better get on with it, right? Competition is competition. Only management can give the direction, the focus and the urgency needed and the European companies were awful at it.
  - i_am_proteus 6y ago
    ASML, a Dutch semiconductor company, is a titan in the fab business. TSMC might be the world leader is chip fabrication, but the kit that they use is Dutch-sourced.
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      ASML gets mentioned so often as counter example to EU's downfall in tech that all it does it prove the point. One drop of water doesn't mean it's raining.
      - mschuster91 6y ago
        > One drop of water doesn't mean it's raining. The German Mittelstand is famous for their "hidden champions" - in fact, 48% of small-ish "world market leaders" are German, while only 28 of the big "Top 500" are (per https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40796571 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40796571). The problems with our Mittelstand are a) modern IT technologies (the amount of Mittelstand companies operating on fax-ed POs or with extremely shoddy IT setups is... mind blowing) and b) finding new and competent staff, given that many young people move to cities because the rural areas are unliveable.
        ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        TBH, as a SW engineer who used to work in family owned Mittelstand companies, those places are the worst you can choose to work in and no wonder they can't find employees willing to work for them anymore. Good riddance!
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  As a British person, I'm very happy working for North American companies, but it's a bit of a shame that I have to do that to find interesting and reasonably paid work with pleasant conditions. I wish we could generate our own companies with the initiative and ambition of those in North American to do meaningful computer science work. Nobody seems to even be trying. (Don't try to suggest ARM is an option - their pay is really uncompetitive.)
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    > Don't try to suggest ARM is an option - their pay is really uncompetitive. Off-topic but: Is that so? For some reason I always thought they were on par with the American high-paying companies.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      I'm probably exaggerating in my memory, but I think I recall seeing an internship offer from ARM that was the same daily rate as Oracle were offering hourly.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - consp 6y ago
    It's not just ARM, many European companies don't pay well. Especially for engineers and developers. In Europe you have to be management to get payed anything substantial. Though most management is still doing the jobs which any engineer could combine with their work and probably do equally well or better.
    - dsnr 6y ago
      > many European companies don't pay well. Especially for engineers and developers. You have to take into account the fact that in Europe the state takes a big chunk of your gross salary (probably around 50%) in form of social contributions and other taxes, to cover things like healthcare, unemployment, pension, welfare, parental leave and so on. In the US you have to cover these things yourself most of the time. So while most people praise the European system they would like at the same time to earn as much as their US counterparts, which is unrealistic tbh. As the saying goes, "you can't have your cake and..."
- oytis 6y ago
  > Europe dug it's own grave here by not funding its domestic tech sector enough But nobody was funding Apple. U.S. just created the environment where tech business can thrive and let the competition do the rest. EU market on the contrary is still controlled by century-old companies. From my (not that long) experience with German tech job market, I've got an impression that US-based companies normally have better (more open, more inclusive, more developer-centric) culture and better compensation.
  - ginko 6y ago
    >But nobody was funding Apple. U.S. just created the environment where tech business can thrive and let the competition do the rest. EU market on the contrary is still controlled by century-old companies. The US tech sector is essentially pegged by the petrodollar. Countries have to use the dollar to sell oil and then invest their excess dollars in the US economy.
    - oytis 6y ago
      What about Chinese tech sector? Yes, there is a lot of protectionism exercised by the Chinese government, but still Huawei and other big players are not funded by the government, they have to compete really hard to survive.
      - ginko 6y ago
        >but still Huawei and other big players are not funded by the government What makes you think that?
        oytis 6y ago
        Uhm... Because China needs tech sector as money source, not a money sink maybe? So it is implausible they would spend money on a tech company. I'm not aware of any facts in favor of the contrary.
        ginko 6y ago
- pjc50 6y ago
  > Europe dug its own grave here by not funding its domestic tech sector enough Is the argument that (one of): - the EU budget should be expanded to directly subsidise tech companies, or take equity ownership in companies, using taxpayer money - individual EU companies should do the same sort of state capitalism, using taxpayer money, and probably violating EU rules on state aid - EU investment funds should deliberately select less profitable investments for nationalist reasons - the small group of hyper-wealthy globalised investors such as Softbank (Japan) that currently hand out ridiculous sums to SV companies should hand them out to EU companies instead, because .. reasons I have very ambivalent views about this myself, but if you want EU state capitalism to compete with Chinese state capitalism then please say so and we can gang up on the doctrinaire free market lot. The UK is very odd sometimes; I have a half-SV-salary and it puts me in the 97%ile of UK pay. The only people who seem to be well paid are footballers and company directors, yet London house prices are set by the marginal oligarch.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    And finance people. Like, when I worked for a FAANG we found it hard to get senior people as the company wouldn't benchmark against finance companies, thus no-one would work for them. Additionally, the late hours necessary in a satellite office don't map well to senior+ people, as they will often have families and children.
    - dukeyukey 6y ago
      Hah, my first job out of uni had this problem. We were the UK office of a medium-sized Seattle-headquartered tech company. One of our department heads got a job at a fintech not long after I left, and gradually poached the rest of his team. Despite the salary raise being like 70%, the company refused to benchmark against them, because the were Central London, and we were Outer London. I ended up jumping ship a couple of years later to that fintech, that 70% raise was lovely.
- nisa 6y ago
  > Europe dug it's own grave here by not funding its domestic tech sector enough and sleeping at the wheel while US and China were stealing their lunch from underneath their nose. IMHO it's not a failure of the technology skills but rather a huge failure of the elites and management (and how management is educated in European universities) - everything was sourced out and lot's of small companies died due to mismanagement - also instead of nurturing the highly educated former east-bloc countries they were crushed by neoliberal politics to avoid having more competition for western european firms. So the whole of eastern europe became a factory hall for management in the west.
- throwaway9870 6y ago
  I used to work at a large US tech company known for making a lot of acquisitions. One time I was assisting with one and was having drinks with the VP coordinating a lot of this growth and he explained he would never acquire a French company because of the labor laws. Now, he was a German, so take that with a grain of salt :) However, the key point here is the same story we see repeated all the time: simple things such as labor laws protecting employees can backfire in unexpected ways. I am not claiming I have the answer or the French laws are wrong, just presenting a data point. Nevertheless, this is HN, so I expect people how dumb I am and how I have no idea what I am talking about. Fire away.
  - oauea 6y ago
    How is that a backfire? Sounds like the employees were sufficiently protected from a company that clearly had no intention of following said law.
    - throwaway9870 6y ago
      The company is a multi-billion dollar company that absolutely follows all employment laws. They just didn't want to deal with the French laws.
      - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        And yet Apple, Microsoft, SAP and Facebook have offices in Paris. What's up with that then? This shows that even giant US and German companies can work with French labor laws just fine otherwise they wouldn't be there. So, to me, this whole current push in the west to drive down labor laws in the sake of "staying competitive" is just a big globalization scam on the working class and a backtrack of all the quality of life progress made from years of struggle by previous generations. Good for France for not giving in!
        volkl48 6y ago
        What are the size of those offices? (I don't know the answer to this question). Every multinational company of a sufficient size is going to have "an office" in a major developed country. The question to me is whether or not that office is employing more than the minimum required for the company to sell products in that country. If your "office" is just local sales and support, some lawyers for local legal issues, etc, I don't think that's a strong case. Do they do substantial R&D there? Are there new products that come out developed by "Microsoft Paris"? Etc.
- RGamma 6y ago
  You'd hope "European top minds" would have different things on their mind than mere money. (have given up hope for our US friends) Virtually none of the discoveries that fundamentally changed the world were _driven_ by thoughts about that mindnumbing thing. It really kills ingenuity and curiosity
  - calgoo 6y ago
    Well, if you have to worry about money every month because you are living month to month, then yes money is important. This is the situation in many EU countries.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    There you are, dreaming of this awesome new thing that will be amazeballs while eating ramen in your shitty flat. Then someone comes and offers you a ton of money to go think about some other stuff for a few years. You figure you can always come back to thinking about the awesome thing, but a few years of eating decent food and living in decent housing would be nice.
    - RGamma 6y ago
      This sound like you're living in a not-so-developed (part of the) country though? Sorry if that's the case, but from my experience living in Germany you can easily afford decent food (in fact there's little bad food, except the artificial American stuff) and housing while going to uni for free (you might even apply for BaFöG and stipends). This would especially apply to you as a bright person.
      - marcus_holmes 6y ago
        I wasn't really talking about me, more about a hypothetical researcher and the decision they might have to make when faced with this
        RGamma 6y ago
        Mhh fair enough, guess I'm just a fan of ideals in science.
- anovikov 6y ago
  It's not about funding, it's about culture. In Europe, no good developer wants to work at a startup - they want to work in a large century-old semi-government company which provides long paid vacations, slow work pace and work-life balance. No one wants to fund a startup either. Almost no way to exit. And whole "industry disruption" thing is even inappropriate to talk about - you are supposed to go with the flow and play by the numerous formal and informal rules and uphold hierarchy.
  - nisa 6y ago
    The reason is also pretty simple: Most german startups I've seen were some more or less (mostly less) good ideas from rich economics students - and they are looking for developers that are badly paid, get little benefits and have to work out all the issues - as a thank you, they get nothing in return if they are sold or die. Additionally it's extremely hard to get funding - there are some programs like EXIST - www.exist.de but this is also shaped pretty much for economics students and offers little help for a technical startup.
    - anovikov 6y ago
      It is commonly accepted that it is business people who build businesses, and technical people are replaceable and should be hired as cheaply and easy to dump as possible, and not approached seriously. Sometimes literally lowest bidder gets the job. Same thing in Russia. In almost every startup i saw here in Cy started by Russians, founders have no idea how to code. They mostly siphon off cash from someone rich and dumb enough. Naturally technical part doesn't matter all that much to them.
      - jacknews 6y ago
        "founders have no idea how to code. They mostly siphon off cash from someone rich and dumb enough. " This seem to be common model worldwide.
  - dukeyukey 6y ago
    I can promise you this doesn't hold across at least some of "Europe". Take where I work, London, for example. The stuff places like the BBC and GDS (Government Digital Service) are doing are pretty cool, but companies like Monzo, DeepMind and Revolut are the ones people talk about, plus the financial giants like JP Morgan and Bloomberg.
- chmod775 6y ago
  >that EUs best and brightest minds, educated with EU money are helping strengthen the Chinese and US tech titans It goes farther than that. Universities in many EU countries are essentially free, even for foreign students. About 30% of students at my university in Berlin are foreign, coming from mostly Asian, Arabian, and American countries. And you know what? I wouldn't change a thing about it. This "us vs. them", or more accurately "US vs. them" attitude needs to stop.
  - iorrus 6y ago
    Will be very interesting to see how these two different ideologies play out over the coming years. According to the article Huawei favours ethnic Chinese over Europeans especially at management level and I’ve heard the same about TikTok so we have a great opportunity to watch how these competing visions play out
  - trinix912 6y ago
    > even for foreign students This is not completely true, it only applies to students from other EU/EEA countries. There are some exceptions for a few other european countries but apart from those, international students still have to pay the tuition.
    - trumpeta 6y ago
      correct, but the tuition is peanuts compared to US or in some cases places like India.
    - chmod775 6y ago
      > This is not completely true, it only applies to students from other EU/EEA countries. This is incorrect (for Germany) unless you want to go to a university in Baden-Württemberg (one of the 16 states of Germany), which introduced tuition for international students in 2017. Everywhere else you will pay virtually the same fees[1] as a German national (<1k euro/year), except that you may be required to pay into a 'security fund' for international students if you have the means, which helps less-well-off international students or those who have fallen on hard times to pay those same fees. Take the TU Berlin as an example: https://www.tu.berlin/en/studying/studienorganisation/finanzierung/ https://www.tu.berlin/en/studying/studienorganisation/finanz... [1] Note that these fees are not tuition. About half of them pays for a greatly discounted public transport ticket, the other half for an assortment of smaller things.
- throwarayes 6y ago
  Historically, US has been a large homogeneous market, compared to Europe where there’s been more separation between French, German, Spanish, UK, markets. This really changes how the market works in Europe. You can simply make one product in the US and be successful marketing to 330 million people. In Europe, however, you find There’s well established brands in each country. Perhaps only in the last 1-2 decades have brands like Easy jet been able to penetrate across Europe to a certain pan-Europe generation. Even there people want to do business in their own native languages and cultures quite often
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Not sure if the brightest minds end up at Huawei, because while the pay might be good, bright people might know that they need to expect different standards. Some do it for the money for a few years of course. Often when we talk about tech, we talk about pop-tech. Aside from social media, chip giants like Intel or TSMC are the topic. The machines they use are build in the Netherlands by a company very few people know by name. Sure, the chip design is perhaps the essence, but I believe that US companies are just good at marketing, Chinas companies are good at scale. Europe has many world market leader in the middle class. It is a misconception that you end up with a business titan in such a position. It doesn't generate press, but I believe this is a far better foundation for an economy compared to having some superstars. Although the US has certainly a lot of really good high tech. For example Texas Instruments has incredible tech just in their drawers, but they generate comparatively few headlines.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  Nokia, Siemens and Alcatel were trail-blazing European companies: they went toe-to-toe with Motorola and... I was going to say Nortel, but they were Canadian. Nokia (handset division) and Alcatel were bought-out by American companies (or merged). The EU let American money buy-out their crown jewels.
  - lokar 6y ago
    They were in serious decline by the time of the buyout.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  Why doesn't Europe simply... compete? Buy tech instead of offering endless (paperwork intensive) subsidies. Harmonize markets so you can just sell everywhere without having to fund the local civil servant union by filling the new-and-special-snowflake paperwork for every country you want to sell to.
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    Europe is pretty corrupt in this regard. What you suggest would have to be approved by the very same people that massively benefit from this fragmentation and endless debates on every topic where everybody roots only for themselves/their benefactor/their country. Not going to happen, however sad it makes me as european. EU is good for quite a few things, but this ain't one of them.
    - stingraycharles 6y ago
      Could you elaborate more on your “this is because Europe is corrupt” claim? I like to think European politics is not much more flawed than American politics, and would like to see such a claim backed up with some actual evidence. I personally like to think Europe is very different from the US culturally, in that the countries themselves are much less aligned than the US states are. I would never consider corruption to be the cause of this, as much as it’s mostly about the egos of the individual countries and citizens.
      - saiya-jin 6y ago
        Corruption has many faces, it doesn't have to pipe all the money straight to 'Ndrangheta bank accounts. Rooting for sub-optimal solutions (overpriced, subpar quality but company from given state) compared to best one is frequent. Rooting for choices that favor ie large agricultural producers say from France/Spain/Italy, or some multinational based in Netherland and forcing restrictions on all member states is common too. Hardly the best choice for regular citizens who just always foot the extra bill. Heck, we have tons of legal lobbyists in Brusel, what do you think is their sole source of (very good) income? On national level, the more you go to the east, the more corrupt the state themselves are, ie previous government of Slovakia stepped down exactly due to too close ties to Italian mafia (and a murder of journalist+girlfriend who investigated this). Why Italian mafia you may ask? Well to pipe all the money coming from EU dotations into 'friendly' companies that deliver little and take a lot. Classic laundering of dirty money, this time done by state itself. All eastern states within EU have some non-trivial level of this. I wouldn't compare EU and US politics directly, both are corrupt in some aspect and not so much in others (ie US and its 'defensive' market used only very offensively, board members of those companies being former politicians and vice versa). Still better than 3rd world obviously, or places like former soviet republics (not sure if 2nd world countries is the proper term for those).
- gumby 6y ago
  But these folks have jobs in the EU, often close to home, and pay their taxes where they live -- isn't that the point of the government spending?
newbie578 6y ago
I implore everyone to read the article. It is well documented and quite shocking.
- hilbert42 6y ago
  I have and you're right.
rataata_jr 6y ago
Chinese company. Not surprised.
- f6v 6y ago
  Out of interest, have you worked in Chinese companies before, or just doing racial judgement?
  - zthrowaway 6y ago
    People who work at Chinese companies such as TikTok speak about how differently they are treated if they are not Chinese, you can even see this all over Blind. You can judge a culture without looking at their race.
    - johan_larson 6y ago
      I worked for Huawei in Canada for a bit less than a year before I left, because my boss insisted on assigning me work I didn't believe I could deliver on. Of course I was only there for a short time, so I could be mistaken, but I did note that 75% of the employees in the lab (in Canada) were Chinese, as were seven of the eight first-level managers. That said, I never felt badly treated because of my ethnicity, and I never saw anyone else treated badly either. While it is possible things could have ended up this way for innocuous reasons, I would bet against it. I'm guessing some informal "good fit" discrimination is going on. There is also an awful lot of Chinese spoken at the company. They try to run their foreign operations in English, and I have to give them credit for putting some real effort into it. But given the distribution of their staff in Canada and even more so over in China, in practice things switch over to Chinese quite frequently. It makes sense that they do this, since some of the engineers in China struggle to communicate in English, but when it happens the non-Chinese are excluded. And it's hard to object when one is the only blue-eye among a dozen Chinese. Given what I saw, I would advise any non-Chinese engineer considering taking a job at Huawei to consider alternatives carefully, and absolutely not take the job if they do not speak Chinese and do not plan to learn it.
  - ashneo76 6y ago
ohduran 6y ago
> They tell of a technology company that seems to see its employees first and foremost as raw materials from which it wants to forge its own success. How unlike any other company I know.
f6v 6y ago
> They tell of a technology company that seems to see its employees first and foremost as raw materials from which it wants to forge its own success. Oh no, just like most of the companies out there. I get it, Huawei might not be an ideal workplace. But the article is riding the China hate train.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
It's "fashionable" to hit Huawei and China, but more broadly this is East Asian culture. In many Japanese and Korean companies the reality is quite similar to what is described in this article (which is quite lopsided). As China continues to open to the world, and Chinese go study abroad, I think that Chinese companies will slowly become more mindful of these issues.
- someperson 6y ago
  I generally agree, but Japan generally has a management culture where age above all else traditionally determines seniority. The forced retirement thing described in the article is nearly identical though.
- shard 6y ago
  Yes. At Samsung, you see many of the same things: militaristic culture, long work hours, senior execs in overseas branches almost all Korean, important information passed on during company dinners, people switching to Korean during meetings and in emails due to poor English skills, glass ceiling for non- Koreans, people not promoted to exec levels retiring at 50 due to "up-or-out" culture.
ilaksh 6y ago
Are we sure it's not actually a type of military endeavour? Or is this just culturally how workers are generally treated in China? Is there any hope for worker rights in China? Has there actually been some conscious decision to treat industry as a type of warfare? After all, the lack of manufacturing competitiveness in the United States is actually considered by some to be a security issue.
someperson 6y ago
For a great documentary on the clash between American work culture and Chinese work culture, I recommend the 2019 documentary "American Factory".
jrochkind1 6y ago
> European employees rarely find out what is really going on in the company during the day at work, says a former German employee. However, Chinese colleagues occasionally ask in the evening if they want to have dinner together. „After a few beers, you find out what is going on in the company and what is not.“ Yet many Western employees did not want to get involved and preferred to go home. That sounds pretty familiar to me from ordinary very large US companies, no? Maybe German companies are less dysfuntional.
- dukeyukey 6y ago
  In the UK the post-work beers is where you find out the juicy stuff. Hell, I got my last job thanks to a chat in a beer garden.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    As I think about it more, I'm really kind of astounded this is being made as an accusation about Huawei specifically being nefarious.
Hnrobert42 6y ago
I am pre-disposed to hate Huawei, but I didn’t find the article compelling. Few of the sources were named with little justification for the anonymity. If they are ex-employee, what is the fear? Even about a court case, Huawei denies they were sued, yet the article doesn’t address whether court records dispute that. As for the terrible working conditions, the article takes an absurdly long time to make a few tepid points. Chinese expats don’t mingle with the locals. They are rotated if they do develop ties with the local population. The articles asserts that employees are handcuffed by payment in shares. When leaving the company, they must sell their shares. The articles says this robs them of their retirement. How? Must they be sold at a loss? When my employer matched my retirement contributions in shares, I was pissed that I couldn’t sell until I quit. Again, I would love to hate Huawei, but this article isn’t doing it for me.
- jeffrallen 6y ago
  As an ex-Cisco employee it is easy for me to hate Huawei, no need for an article. :) But seriously... Disrespecting the local culture as an expat has nothing but bad effects on the organization in the long term. Huawei will pay a price for this, in the long term.
- konschubert 6y ago
  > They are rotated if they do develop ties with the local population. That's the killer for me. That's illegal.
  - Hnrobert42 6y ago
    Sure it’s illegal, but meh. Quit or sue.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    It's only illegal when it's not the government doing it. Rotating duty to prevent sympathizing with the locals is standard procedure for law enforcement agencies above the municipal level.
    - 6y ago
londons_explore 6y ago
> One ex-employee says there is effectively a glass ceiling for European workers. „When you walk through the corridors, it is very obvious that 99.9 per cent of the management is Chinese.“ FWIW, this is the case in American companies in Europe too. People with US roots progress up the organisation faster, and nearly all the top spots are occupied by people with an american accent...
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  It's the same case with big German companies (Siemens, Bosch, BMW, Porsche, etc.). Senior management positions are only awarded to ethnic Germans so it's quite ironic to hear them complain when they get the same treatment at foreign companies. This mentality is somewhat changing, but very slowly and white westerns are still prioritized. You won't see any Indians run German auto companies any time soon like you see them running major US tech companies.
  - cooervo 6y ago
    True, I used to work in Germany and all my managers/bosses were white german males. Two exception 1 from USA and another from balkans.
    - MagnumOpus 6y ago
      To lead in Germany you have to know German - the people who don't will have problems (Cryan did at DB, as did Jennifer Morgan at SAP). And there are few foreign managers in these companies willing to learn German to a good enough standard - unlike in English or American companies.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Siemens, Bosch, BMW, Porsche Let's see. Siemens USA: CEO Barbara Humpton, not German. Bosch USA: Mike Mansuetti, not German. BMW USA: President Bernhard Kuhnt (sounds German), but top leadership team includes lots of Non-Germans: Shaun Bugbee, Lisa Errion Saums, Adam Sykes, Howard S. Harris, Adam McNeill, Michael Peyton, Trudy Hardy Porsche USA: CEO Kjell Gruner (German), but top leadership includes mostly names that are not German: Joe Lawrence, Thierry Kartochian, George Feygin, Angus Fitton, Glenn Garde, Pedro Mota, Scott Codute, Trevor Arthur, John Cappella. I guess you either don't know or you do know but spread misinformation on purpose.
usrusr 6y ago
Pretty much in line with how late 20th century cyberpunk dystopia was painting the spirit of the supranational Corp. Just with a bit of a colonialist element that wasn't much in the focus of those writers. But not ruled out either: In those dystopias the "supranational" was rarely meant to imply some cosmopolitan post-national qualities, just lack of being bound by local laws. A "Chinese West India Company" under an unspecified amount of CCP influence would fit right in.
gthtjtkt 6y ago
9-9-6 schedule, "brainwashing" training, public humiliation for mistakes, automatic termination at age 50, penalties for integrating with EU culture. This isn't employment, it's slavery.
john2010 6y ago
Not sure why these EU/Germans want to work there? Why not leave this job?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jacknews 6y ago
OK, it's about coyotes, not wolves, and finacial innovation and organizations, not tech/business infiltrations, but: Too Clever By Half https://www.epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/
cthaeh 6y ago
I worked at Huawei as intern 2 years ago. Honestly, they seemed like just any other tech company- chill, interesting work with nice people. They even had a month where they doubled everyone's salaries randomly- as a thank you for working hard. At the same time I did see the "shadow government" but would like to clarify that it seemed to me to progress beyond a team leader you had to be fluent in mandarin, not necessariy be Chinese. Which makes sense considering that yes, upper managements English is usually poor.
IOT_Apprentice 6y ago
I find it disturbing that the focus of the article is on the wolf culture of Huawei, and the discussion here ignores that and veers off into nonsense about Apple. I've worked with former Americans who worked for Huawei here in the US, they confirm this behavior. Huawei also filed patents around facial identification of Uyghurs, who are of course being held in concentration camps. But go ahead talk about R&D investment in Europe and ignore the behavior of the firm.
- blackrock 6y ago
  Don’t American companies have facial recognition software to identify brown people, or black people, or Asian people? I’ve been seeing this lately. But I fail to see why China or Huawei is getting hit by it. Unless it’s just blind hatred by the HNers here about anything and everything China related. I’m sure the FBI is employing facial recognition software that delineates between black vs. white people too.
- jackjeff 6y ago
  > Huawei also filed patents around facial identification of Uyghurs, who are of course being held in concentration camps. Let’s not forget mass sterilization of women in those camps which is a form of genocide.
dilyevsky 6y ago
I visited huawei engineering offices in shenzhen about ten years ago for some due diligence work and it was hilarious to what length they went to protect their ip. They didn’t even have inter-building network not to mention internet anywhere on the premises
Animats 6y ago
Sounds like IBM in the glory days of mainframes. Non-US operations were controlled by American IBM employees. No country outside the US made enough parts to make a full computer. IBM employees used to say the initials stood for "I've Been Moved".
ppeetteerr 6y ago
The only thing of concern is their treatment of 50+ year old employees. Everything else seems in line with how I understand Chinese companies to behave towards their employees.
1cvmask 6y ago
Huawei by virtue of being Chinese is definitely sexist against men letting women retire 5 years earlier. They are also clearly ageist as they make sure some employees earn way too much so that they retire early in their 40s. From the article: “The retirement age in China is 60 for men and 55 for women. At Huawei, however, according to our sources, it is common to end one’s career already in one’s mid-40s. When long-serving Chinese managers reach this age, they often cash out the value of their company shares and effectively retire.” - It is great to see the funders of this journalism are against this ageism in tech and include the likes of the McArthur foundation and Soros affiliates. Great that the article highlighted some potential management glass ceilings for Europeans in the Chinese company. The Chinese should learn from the lack of glass ceilings to non-Europeans in European companies. Or how egalitarian and meritocratic they are in hiring and don’t even care about formal diplomas or your ethnic background. It baffles me why any (western) European would move to the US and leave behind such great meritocratic European tech companies.

257 points by imartin2k 6y ago

Both Apple and Huawei do R&D in Europe at a massive scale, hiring the top researchers and the best minds from universities, research labs and from the competition (Nokia, Ericsson, ARM, Imagination, even intelligence services) with top pay to boot. While Apple is nowhere near as evil as Huawei, it's sad when you think about it, that EUs best and brightest minds, educated with EU money are helping strengthen the Chinese and US tech titans instead of the domestic ones but Europe dug it's own grave here by not funding its domestic tech sector enough and sleeping at the wheel while US and China were stealing their lunch from underneath their nose.

intev 6y ago
Can you elaborate on "Europe dug it's own grave here"?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Look at what EU "tech" companies pay vs what FAANG/Huawei pays. A friend finished his PhD in ML and ended up taking a job at a FAANG in the EU as the tech companies from Germany and France were only willing to pay half of that. You can't be at the top if you treat your SW devs and researchers as an IT cost center.
  - bogantech 6y ago
    They pay worse than even non-FAANG tech companies in Australia too
  - moonbug 6y ago
    there's more to a job than the salary.
    - f6v 6y ago
      An important mission or great workplace culture don’t pay for mortgage.
      - acatton 6y ago
        But even if you accept the paycut, it's not like the workplace culture is great: https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/790101370/french-telecom-company-convicted-of-moral-harassment-after-employee-suicides https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/790101370/french-telecom-comp...
        sofixa 6y ago
        One case at a shitty former-public-becoming-private company. Not really applicable everywhere.
    - andi999 6y ago
      But this goes hand in hand. If the salary is very high, management will try not to waste your potential. If low they might not care.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      Right - I also want my work to be interesting and impactful, my colleagues to be motivated and talented, to get generous time off, etc... and guess what even in Europe the North American companies do better at all these aspects as well!
    - _hao 6y ago
      There is, but it's the main consideration to be honest...
    - ftoscano 6y ago
      Yes, there is more than just the salary. Except that, in Europe, most (if not all) forms of "equity" are proportional: your title, your salary, your ability to decide, etc. It becomes an equivalence: * Since you decide nothing, therefore your salary is low. * Since your salary is low, you therefore decide nothing. This stems fundamentally from a (backward?) European strict view of companies, regardless of how hierarchical/flat their structure may be. And that view is that the corporate environment is split into two groups: * Managers: they decide; * Workers: they do work. This split may have made sense in the Industrial Revolution era but it has shown it's age in this day and age. And yet the model (and the perception, and the values) persist. If you, as a knowledge worker, ever make the mistake of "getting down and get things done" you will have chosen your side.
  - intev 6y ago
    Oh wow, I didn't realize there's such a huge discrepancy in salary.
    - csunbird 6y ago
      Yup. The average salary for a junior (e.g. with 1 to 3 years experienced) developer is around 45-50k Euro gross. You can get very exceptional and very experienced engineers for 90-100k Euro gross annually.
      - 908B64B197 6y ago
        Why not simply come to SV?
        dukeyukey 6y ago
        It's not that easy. Even if you already work for a US company, and that company is willing to sponsor you, and you win the visa lottery, it can take years to move to the US, and many years after that to get a green card. And at any point something could go wrong, your company screws up paperwork or something, and you get sent back to the start.
        908B64B197 6y ago
        Lots of talented EU Engineers do it. Maybe some EU countries should look into getting a better deals for their citizen trying to go abroad.
        dukeyukey 6y ago
        At a macro level, sure. At a personal level, it's not easy. As far as I know, only Mexico, Canada and Australia have preferred access to US visas for their citizens (though I'm hoping the UK will join them during trade deal negotiations).
        kazen44 6y ago
        because leaving behind the people and community around me is not worth the money and work/life balance? also, the US has a political and social problem which make it a place I would not want to live.
  - rapsey 6y ago
    To be fair funding options for US companies compared to EU ones is absurd. US tech is swimming in money compared to EU tech.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      which is what the thread is about - US tech is swimming in money partly because the US supported their tech industry to the point where it became a big monster swimming in money, at which point the brains in EU drain off to the money oceans of the US.
      - passivate 6y ago
        I wonder how much of the easy access to credit in the US is simply the strength of the dollar - we keep printing more $$ but the dollar doesn't devalue as much. Add to the fact that our poor interest rates on savings accounts makes private equity investments the only means to increase wealth.
        rapsey 6y ago
        The joys of being a reserve currency.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      EU investors are way too conservative.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I did think of working for a FAANG, but they don't really do much in my corner of Europe (there's a group working on Docs and similar in Germany but I don't want to move to Germany), and they are scary in that they seem to aim for the university high-achievers. I don't want to have to learn leetcode for a job interview, knowing full well that leetcode is not the day job there either. Plus I like being (or ok, feeling) productive, instead of spending 99% of my time on politics, analysis and waiting for small code changes.
    - smueller1234 6y ago
      You seem to have looked at Google specifically (mention of Docs). Google has substantial engineering presence in several european countries. Just a few cities/countries off the top of my head in no specific order: Munich, Zürich, London, Dublin, Warsaw. There's others, IIRC a bit on Stockholm for example, but I think those I named after among the larger presences. Anyway. Not just Germany. There's also SRE, which has a slightly different twang on how we spend our time and then interview makeup. For what it's worth, I'm not a computer science grad at all and I'm doing just fine at Google. Got hired as a senior manager, though, so YMMV. Not trying to convince you of anything, just trying to be helpful. :)
      - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        Out of curiosity what education/career path did you follow to get to your current position?
  - langitbiru 6y ago
    I think you can replace EU with "the rest of the world". In Asia, we are also jealous of Silicon Valley. Obligatory article: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene-doesnt-work/ https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene...
    - MichaelZuo 6y ago
      Well I’m sure it’s possible to attract really good folks at low salaries even in SEA/Japan/SK/Taiwan/India/etc. if folks are compensated with significant ownership stakes instead. It’s about what the business owners are willing to do.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      Why doesn't Canada simply... compete? Honestly, bragging your engineers are worth 50K less while pitching for HQ2 won't stop their brain drain.
newbie578 6y ago
I didn't know this, it is quite sad in fact if true. Do you have some more info?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  In almost every EU tech hub you will find a Huawei lab and usually a stone throw way from their major western competition (Nokia, Ericsson, ARM, Imagination) and in Paris, Apple hires cryptographers from ANSSI, the French National Cybersecurity Agency (France's NSA) to work on their DRM and Apple Pay.
- pas 6y ago
  Why would this be sad? Comparative advantages are useful. If they are doing something we don't like, we have to address that. (Eg. child labor, unsafe work conditions, carbon tariff if they don't have a carbon tax.) In itself there's absolutely no problem with having an R&D hub in the EU for a US or Chinese company.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Why is it sad? Global market at work.
nabla9 6y ago
Same in the US (Santa Clara CA, Plano TX, and Bridgetwater NJ) They are currently moving their US R&D to their Canada research centre due to sanctions. All international companies have R&D all around the world. ps. It's not stealing when you do R&D in foreign country.
raverbashing 6y ago
I mostly agree, though to be honest several EU companies dug their own graves. How long since you've heard about anything relevant on the market from "Big German electronics manufacturer" (wink)? And from "Big Dutch electronics manufacturer" (though this one seems to be still around in some areas)? And if Huawei pays good salaries then other companies better get on with it, right? Competition is competition. Only management can give the direction, the focus and the urgency needed and the European companies were awful at it.
- i_am_proteus 6y ago
  ASML, a Dutch semiconductor company, is a titan in the fab business. TSMC might be the world leader is chip fabrication, but the kit that they use is Dutch-sourced.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    ASML gets mentioned so often as counter example to EU's downfall in tech that all it does it prove the point. One drop of water doesn't mean it's raining.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      > One drop of water doesn't mean it's raining. The German Mittelstand is famous for their "hidden champions" - in fact, 48% of small-ish "world market leaders" are German, while only 28 of the big "Top 500" are (per https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40796571 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40796571). The problems with our Mittelstand are a) modern IT technologies (the amount of Mittelstand companies operating on fax-ed POs or with extremely shoddy IT setups is... mind blowing) and b) finding new and competent staff, given that many young people move to cities because the rural areas are unliveable.
      - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        TBH, as a SW engineer who used to work in family owned Mittelstand companies, those places are the worst you can choose to work in and no wonder they can't find employees willing to work for them anymore. Good riddance!
chrisseaton 6y ago
As a British person, I'm very happy working for North American companies, but it's a bit of a shame that I have to do that to find interesting and reasonably paid work with pleasant conditions. I wish we could generate our own companies with the initiative and ambition of those in North American to do meaningful computer science work. Nobody seems to even be trying. (Don't try to suggest ARM is an option - their pay is really uncompetitive.)
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  > Don't try to suggest ARM is an option - their pay is really uncompetitive. Off-topic but: Is that so? For some reason I always thought they were on par with the American high-paying companies.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    I'm probably exaggerating in my memory, but I think I recall seeing an internship offer from ARM that was the same daily rate as Oracle were offering hourly.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- consp 6y ago
  It's not just ARM, many European companies don't pay well. Especially for engineers and developers. In Europe you have to be management to get payed anything substantial. Though most management is still doing the jobs which any engineer could combine with their work and probably do equally well or better.
  - dsnr 6y ago
    > many European companies don't pay well. Especially for engineers and developers. You have to take into account the fact that in Europe the state takes a big chunk of your gross salary (probably around 50%) in form of social contributions and other taxes, to cover things like healthcare, unemployment, pension, welfare, parental leave and so on. In the US you have to cover these things yourself most of the time. So while most people praise the European system they would like at the same time to earn as much as their US counterparts, which is unrealistic tbh. As the saying goes, "you can't have your cake and..."
oytis 6y ago
> Europe dug it's own grave here by not funding its domestic tech sector enough But nobody was funding Apple. U.S. just created the environment where tech business can thrive and let the competition do the rest. EU market on the contrary is still controlled by century-old companies. From my (not that long) experience with German tech job market, I've got an impression that US-based companies normally have better (more open, more inclusive, more developer-centric) culture and better compensation.
- ginko 6y ago
  >But nobody was funding Apple. U.S. just created the environment where tech business can thrive and let the competition do the rest. EU market on the contrary is still controlled by century-old companies. The US tech sector is essentially pegged by the petrodollar. Countries have to use the dollar to sell oil and then invest their excess dollars in the US economy.
  - oytis 6y ago
    What about Chinese tech sector? Yes, there is a lot of protectionism exercised by the Chinese government, but still Huawei and other big players are not funded by the government, they have to compete really hard to survive.
    - ginko 6y ago
      >but still Huawei and other big players are not funded by the government What makes you think that?
      - oytis 6y ago
        Uhm... Because China needs tech sector as money source, not a money sink maybe? So it is implausible they would spend money on a tech company. I'm not aware of any facts in favor of the contrary.
        ginko 6y ago
pjc50 6y ago
> Europe dug its own grave here by not funding its domestic tech sector enough Is the argument that (one of): - the EU budget should be expanded to directly subsidise tech companies, or take equity ownership in companies, using taxpayer money - individual EU companies should do the same sort of state capitalism, using taxpayer money, and probably violating EU rules on state aid - EU investment funds should deliberately select less profitable investments for nationalist reasons - the small group of hyper-wealthy globalised investors such as Softbank (Japan) that currently hand out ridiculous sums to SV companies should hand them out to EU companies instead, because .. reasons I have very ambivalent views about this myself, but if you want EU state capitalism to compete with Chinese state capitalism then please say so and we can gang up on the doctrinaire free market lot. The UK is very odd sometimes; I have a half-SV-salary and it puts me in the 97%ile of UK pay. The only people who seem to be well paid are footballers and company directors, yet London house prices are set by the marginal oligarch.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  And finance people. Like, when I worked for a FAANG we found it hard to get senior people as the company wouldn't benchmark against finance companies, thus no-one would work for them. Additionally, the late hours necessary in a satellite office don't map well to senior+ people, as they will often have families and children.
  - dukeyukey 6y ago
    Hah, my first job out of uni had this problem. We were the UK office of a medium-sized Seattle-headquartered tech company. One of our department heads got a job at a fintech not long after I left, and gradually poached the rest of his team. Despite the salary raise being like 70%, the company refused to benchmark against them, because the were Central London, and we were Outer London. I ended up jumping ship a couple of years later to that fintech, that 70% raise was lovely.
nisa 6y ago
> Europe dug it's own grave here by not funding its domestic tech sector enough and sleeping at the wheel while US and China were stealing their lunch from underneath their nose. IMHO it's not a failure of the technology skills but rather a huge failure of the elites and management (and how management is educated in European universities) - everything was sourced out and lot's of small companies died due to mismanagement - also instead of nurturing the highly educated former east-bloc countries they were crushed by neoliberal politics to avoid having more competition for western european firms. So the whole of eastern europe became a factory hall for management in the west.
throwaway9870 6y ago
I used to work at a large US tech company known for making a lot of acquisitions. One time I was assisting with one and was having drinks with the VP coordinating a lot of this growth and he explained he would never acquire a French company because of the labor laws. Now, he was a German, so take that with a grain of salt :) However, the key point here is the same story we see repeated all the time: simple things such as labor laws protecting employees can backfire in unexpected ways. I am not claiming I have the answer or the French laws are wrong, just presenting a data point. Nevertheless, this is HN, so I expect people how dumb I am and how I have no idea what I am talking about. Fire away.
- oauea 6y ago
  How is that a backfire? Sounds like the employees were sufficiently protected from a company that clearly had no intention of following said law.
  - throwaway9870 6y ago
    The company is a multi-billion dollar company that absolutely follows all employment laws. They just didn't want to deal with the French laws.
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      And yet Apple, Microsoft, SAP and Facebook have offices in Paris. What's up with that then? This shows that even giant US and German companies can work with French labor laws just fine otherwise they wouldn't be there. So, to me, this whole current push in the west to drive down labor laws in the sake of "staying competitive" is just a big globalization scam on the working class and a backtrack of all the quality of life progress made from years of struggle by previous generations. Good for France for not giving in!
      - volkl48 6y ago
        What are the size of those offices? (I don't know the answer to this question). Every multinational company of a sufficient size is going to have "an office" in a major developed country. The question to me is whether or not that office is employing more than the minimum required for the company to sell products in that country. If your "office" is just local sales and support, some lawyers for local legal issues, etc, I don't think that's a strong case. Do they do substantial R&D there? Are there new products that come out developed by "Microsoft Paris"? Etc.
RGamma 6y ago
You'd hope "European top minds" would have different things on their mind than mere money. (have given up hope for our US friends) Virtually none of the discoveries that fundamentally changed the world were _driven_ by thoughts about that mindnumbing thing. It really kills ingenuity and curiosity
- calgoo 6y ago
  Well, if you have to worry about money every month because you are living month to month, then yes money is important. This is the situation in many EU countries.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  There you are, dreaming of this awesome new thing that will be amazeballs while eating ramen in your shitty flat. Then someone comes and offers you a ton of money to go think about some other stuff for a few years. You figure you can always come back to thinking about the awesome thing, but a few years of eating decent food and living in decent housing would be nice.
  - RGamma 6y ago
    This sound like you're living in a not-so-developed (part of the) country though? Sorry if that's the case, but from my experience living in Germany you can easily afford decent food (in fact there's little bad food, except the artificial American stuff) and housing while going to uni for free (you might even apply for BaFöG and stipends). This would especially apply to you as a bright person.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      I wasn't really talking about me, more about a hypothetical researcher and the decision they might have to make when faced with this
      - RGamma 6y ago
        Mhh fair enough, guess I'm just a fan of ideals in science.
anovikov 6y ago
It's not about funding, it's about culture. In Europe, no good developer wants to work at a startup - they want to work in a large century-old semi-government company which provides long paid vacations, slow work pace and work-life balance. No one wants to fund a startup either. Almost no way to exit. And whole "industry disruption" thing is even inappropriate to talk about - you are supposed to go with the flow and play by the numerous formal and informal rules and uphold hierarchy.
- nisa 6y ago
  The reason is also pretty simple: Most german startups I've seen were some more or less (mostly less) good ideas from rich economics students - and they are looking for developers that are badly paid, get little benefits and have to work out all the issues - as a thank you, they get nothing in return if they are sold or die. Additionally it's extremely hard to get funding - there are some programs like EXIST - www.exist.de but this is also shaped pretty much for economics students and offers little help for a technical startup.
  - anovikov 6y ago
    It is commonly accepted that it is business people who build businesses, and technical people are replaceable and should be hired as cheaply and easy to dump as possible, and not approached seriously. Sometimes literally lowest bidder gets the job. Same thing in Russia. In almost every startup i saw here in Cy started by Russians, founders have no idea how to code. They mostly siphon off cash from someone rich and dumb enough. Naturally technical part doesn't matter all that much to them.
    - jacknews 6y ago
      "founders have no idea how to code. They mostly siphon off cash from someone rich and dumb enough. " This seem to be common model worldwide.
- dukeyukey 6y ago
  I can promise you this doesn't hold across at least some of "Europe". Take where I work, London, for example. The stuff places like the BBC and GDS (Government Digital Service) are doing are pretty cool, but companies like Monzo, DeepMind and Revolut are the ones people talk about, plus the financial giants like JP Morgan and Bloomberg.
chmod775 6y ago
>that EUs best and brightest minds, educated with EU money are helping strengthen the Chinese and US tech titans It goes farther than that. Universities in many EU countries are essentially free, even for foreign students. About 30% of students at my university in Berlin are foreign, coming from mostly Asian, Arabian, and American countries. And you know what? I wouldn't change a thing about it. This "us vs. them", or more accurately "US vs. them" attitude needs to stop.
- iorrus 6y ago
  Will be very interesting to see how these two different ideologies play out over the coming years. According to the article Huawei favours ethnic Chinese over Europeans especially at management level and I’ve heard the same about TikTok so we have a great opportunity to watch how these competing visions play out
- trinix912 6y ago
  > even for foreign students This is not completely true, it only applies to students from other EU/EEA countries. There are some exceptions for a few other european countries but apart from those, international students still have to pay the tuition.
  - trumpeta 6y ago
    correct, but the tuition is peanuts compared to US or in some cases places like India.
  - chmod775 6y ago
    > This is not completely true, it only applies to students from other EU/EEA countries. This is incorrect (for Germany) unless you want to go to a university in Baden-Württemberg (one of the 16 states of Germany), which introduced tuition for international students in 2017. Everywhere else you will pay virtually the same fees[1] as a German national (<1k euro/year), except that you may be required to pay into a 'security fund' for international students if you have the means, which helps less-well-off international students or those who have fallen on hard times to pay those same fees. Take the TU Berlin as an example: https://www.tu.berlin/en/studying/studienorganisation/finanzierung/ https://www.tu.berlin/en/studying/studienorganisation/finanz... [1] Note that these fees are not tuition. About half of them pays for a greatly discounted public transport ticket, the other half for an assortment of smaller things.
throwarayes 6y ago
Historically, US has been a large homogeneous market, compared to Europe where there’s been more separation between French, German, Spanish, UK, markets. This really changes how the market works in Europe. You can simply make one product in the US and be successful marketing to 330 million people. In Europe, however, you find There’s well established brands in each country. Perhaps only in the last 1-2 decades have brands like Easy jet been able to penetrate across Europe to a certain pan-Europe generation. Even there people want to do business in their own native languages and cultures quite often
raxxorrax 6y ago
Not sure if the brightest minds end up at Huawei, because while the pay might be good, bright people might know that they need to expect different standards. Some do it for the money for a few years of course. Often when we talk about tech, we talk about pop-tech. Aside from social media, chip giants like Intel or TSMC are the topic. The machines they use are build in the Netherlands by a company very few people know by name. Sure, the chip design is perhaps the essence, but I believe that US companies are just good at marketing, Chinas companies are good at scale. Europe has many world market leader in the middle class. It is a misconception that you end up with a business titan in such a position. It doesn't generate press, but I believe this is a far better foundation for an economy compared to having some superstars. Although the US has certainly a lot of really good high tech. For example Texas Instruments has incredible tech just in their drawers, but they generate comparatively few headlines.
sangnoir 6y ago
Nokia, Siemens and Alcatel were trail-blazing European companies: they went toe-to-toe with Motorola and... I was going to say Nortel, but they were Canadian. Nokia (handset division) and Alcatel were bought-out by American companies (or merged). The EU let American money buy-out their crown jewels.
- lokar 6y ago
  They were in serious decline by the time of the buyout.
908B64B197 6y ago
Why doesn't Europe simply... compete? Buy tech instead of offering endless (paperwork intensive) subsidies. Harmonize markets so you can just sell everywhere without having to fund the local civil servant union by filling the new-and-special-snowflake paperwork for every country you want to sell to.
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  Europe is pretty corrupt in this regard. What you suggest would have to be approved by the very same people that massively benefit from this fragmentation and endless debates on every topic where everybody roots only for themselves/their benefactor/their country. Not going to happen, however sad it makes me as european. EU is good for quite a few things, but this ain't one of them.
  - stingraycharles 6y ago
    Could you elaborate more on your “this is because Europe is corrupt” claim? I like to think European politics is not much more flawed than American politics, and would like to see such a claim backed up with some actual evidence. I personally like to think Europe is very different from the US culturally, in that the countries themselves are much less aligned than the US states are. I would never consider corruption to be the cause of this, as much as it’s mostly about the egos of the individual countries and citizens.
    - saiya-jin 6y ago
      Corruption has many faces, it doesn't have to pipe all the money straight to 'Ndrangheta bank accounts. Rooting for sub-optimal solutions (overpriced, subpar quality but company from given state) compared to best one is frequent. Rooting for choices that favor ie large agricultural producers say from France/Spain/Italy, or some multinational based in Netherland and forcing restrictions on all member states is common too. Hardly the best choice for regular citizens who just always foot the extra bill. Heck, we have tons of legal lobbyists in Brusel, what do you think is their sole source of (very good) income? On national level, the more you go to the east, the more corrupt the state themselves are, ie previous government of Slovakia stepped down exactly due to too close ties to Italian mafia (and a murder of journalist+girlfriend who investigated this). Why Italian mafia you may ask? Well to pipe all the money coming from EU dotations into 'friendly' companies that deliver little and take a lot. Classic laundering of dirty money, this time done by state itself. All eastern states within EU have some non-trivial level of this. I wouldn't compare EU and US politics directly, both are corrupt in some aspect and not so much in others (ie US and its 'defensive' market used only very offensively, board members of those companies being former politicians and vice versa). Still better than 3rd world obviously, or places like former soviet republics (not sure if 2nd world countries is the proper term for those).
gumby 6y ago
But these folks have jobs in the EU, often close to home, and pay their taxes where they live -- isn't that the point of the government spending?

newbie578 6y ago

I implore everyone to read the article. It is well documented and quite shocking.

hilbert42 6y ago
I have and you're right.

rataata_jr 6y ago

Chinese company. Not surprised.

f6v 6y ago
Out of interest, have you worked in Chinese companies before, or just doing racial judgement?
- zthrowaway 6y ago
  People who work at Chinese companies such as TikTok speak about how differently they are treated if they are not Chinese, you can even see this all over Blind. You can judge a culture without looking at their race.
  - johan_larson 6y ago
    I worked for Huawei in Canada for a bit less than a year before I left, because my boss insisted on assigning me work I didn't believe I could deliver on. Of course I was only there for a short time, so I could be mistaken, but I did note that 75% of the employees in the lab (in Canada) were Chinese, as were seven of the eight first-level managers. That said, I never felt badly treated because of my ethnicity, and I never saw anyone else treated badly either. While it is possible things could have ended up this way for innocuous reasons, I would bet against it. I'm guessing some informal "good fit" discrimination is going on. There is also an awful lot of Chinese spoken at the company. They try to run their foreign operations in English, and I have to give them credit for putting some real effort into it. But given the distribution of their staff in Canada and even more so over in China, in practice things switch over to Chinese quite frequently. It makes sense that they do this, since some of the engineers in China struggle to communicate in English, but when it happens the non-Chinese are excluded. And it's hard to object when one is the only blue-eye among a dozen Chinese. Given what I saw, I would advise any non-Chinese engineer considering taking a job at Huawei to consider alternatives carefully, and absolutely not take the job if they do not speak Chinese and do not plan to learn it.
- ashneo76 6y ago

ohduran 6y ago

> They tell of a technology company that seems to see its employees first and foremost as raw materials from which it wants to forge its own success. How unlike any other company I know.

f6v 6y ago

> They tell of a technology company that seems to see its employees first and foremost as raw materials from which it wants to forge its own success. Oh no, just like most of the companies out there. I get it, Huawei might not be an ideal workplace. But the article is riding the China hate train.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

It's "fashionable" to hit Huawei and China, but more broadly this is East Asian culture. In many Japanese and Korean companies the reality is quite similar to what is described in this article (which is quite lopsided). As China continues to open to the world, and Chinese go study abroad, I think that Chinese companies will slowly become more mindful of these issues.

someperson 6y ago
I generally agree, but Japan generally has a management culture where age above all else traditionally determines seniority. The forced retirement thing described in the article is nearly identical though.
shard 6y ago
Yes. At Samsung, you see many of the same things: militaristic culture, long work hours, senior execs in overseas branches almost all Korean, important information passed on during company dinners, people switching to Korean during meetings and in emails due to poor English skills, glass ceiling for non- Koreans, people not promoted to exec levels retiring at 50 due to "up-or-out" culture.

ilaksh 6y ago

Are we sure it's not actually a type of military endeavour? Or is this just culturally how workers are generally treated in China? Is there any hope for worker rights in China? Has there actually been some conscious decision to treat industry as a type of warfare? After all, the lack of manufacturing competitiveness in the United States is actually considered by some to be a security issue.

someperson 6y ago

For a great documentary on the clash between American work culture and Chinese work culture, I recommend the 2019 documentary "American Factory".

jrochkind1 6y ago

> European employees rarely find out what is really going on in the company during the day at work, says a former German employee. However, Chinese colleagues occasionally ask in the evening if they want to have dinner together. „After a few beers, you find out what is going on in the company and what is not.“ Yet many Western employees did not want to get involved and preferred to go home. That sounds pretty familiar to me from ordinary very large US companies, no? Maybe German companies are less dysfuntional.

dukeyukey 6y ago
In the UK the post-work beers is where you find out the juicy stuff. Hell, I got my last job thanks to a chat in a beer garden.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  As I think about it more, I'm really kind of astounded this is being made as an accusation about Huawei specifically being nefarious.

Hnrobert42 6y ago

I am pre-disposed to hate Huawei, but I didn’t find the article compelling. Few of the sources were named with little justification for the anonymity. If they are ex-employee, what is the fear? Even about a court case, Huawei denies they were sued, yet the article doesn’t address whether court records dispute that. As for the terrible working conditions, the article takes an absurdly long time to make a few tepid points. Chinese expats don’t mingle with the locals. They are rotated if they do develop ties with the local population. The articles asserts that employees are handcuffed by payment in shares. When leaving the company, they must sell their shares. The articles says this robs them of their retirement. How? Must they be sold at a loss? When my employer matched my retirement contributions in shares, I was pissed that I couldn’t sell until I quit. Again, I would love to hate Huawei, but this article isn’t doing it for me.

jeffrallen 6y ago
As an ex-Cisco employee it is easy for me to hate Huawei, no need for an article. :) But seriously... Disrespecting the local culture as an expat has nothing but bad effects on the organization in the long term. Huawei will pay a price for this, in the long term.
konschubert 6y ago
> They are rotated if they do develop ties with the local population. That's the killer for me. That's illegal.
- Hnrobert42 6y ago
  Sure it’s illegal, but meh. Quit or sue.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  It's only illegal when it's not the government doing it. Rotating duty to prevent sympathizing with the locals is standard procedure for law enforcement agencies above the municipal level.
  - 6y ago

londons_explore 6y ago

> One ex-employee says there is effectively a glass ceiling for European workers. „When you walk through the corridors, it is very obvious that 99.9 per cent of the management is Chinese.“ FWIW, this is the case in American companies in Europe too. People with US roots progress up the organisation faster, and nearly all the top spots are occupied by people with an american accent...

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
It's the same case with big German companies (Siemens, Bosch, BMW, Porsche, etc.). Senior management positions are only awarded to ethnic Germans so it's quite ironic to hear them complain when they get the same treatment at foreign companies. This mentality is somewhat changing, but very slowly and white westerns are still prioritized. You won't see any Indians run German auto companies any time soon like you see them running major US tech companies.
- cooervo 6y ago
  True, I used to work in Germany and all my managers/bosses were white german males. Two exception 1 from USA and another from balkans.
  - MagnumOpus 6y ago
    To lead in Germany you have to know German - the people who don't will have problems (Cryan did at DB, as did Jennifer Morgan at SAP). And there are few foreign managers in these companies willing to learn German to a good enough standard - unlike in English or American companies.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Siemens, Bosch, BMW, Porsche Let's see. Siemens USA: CEO Barbara Humpton, not German. Bosch USA: Mike Mansuetti, not German. BMW USA: President Bernhard Kuhnt (sounds German), but top leadership team includes lots of Non-Germans: Shaun Bugbee, Lisa Errion Saums, Adam Sykes, Howard S. Harris, Adam McNeill, Michael Peyton, Trudy Hardy Porsche USA: CEO Kjell Gruner (German), but top leadership includes mostly names that are not German: Joe Lawrence, Thierry Kartochian, George Feygin, Angus Fitton, Glenn Garde, Pedro Mota, Scott Codute, Trevor Arthur, John Cappella. I guess you either don't know or you do know but spread misinformation on purpose.

usrusr 6y ago

Pretty much in line with how late 20th century cyberpunk dystopia was painting the spirit of the supranational Corp. Just with a bit of a colonialist element that wasn't much in the focus of those writers. But not ruled out either: In those dystopias the "supranational" was rarely meant to imply some cosmopolitan post-national qualities, just lack of being bound by local laws. A "Chinese West India Company" under an unspecified amount of CCP influence would fit right in.

gthtjtkt 6y ago

9-9-6 schedule, "brainwashing" training, public humiliation for mistakes, automatic termination at age 50, penalties for integrating with EU culture. This isn't employment, it's slavery.

john2010 6y ago

Not sure why these EU/Germans want to work there? Why not leave this job?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jacknews 6y ago

OK, it's about coyotes, not wolves, and finacial innovation and organizations, not tech/business infiltrations, but: Too Clever By Half https://www.epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/too-clever-by-half/

cthaeh 6y ago

I worked at Huawei as intern 2 years ago. Honestly, they seemed like just any other tech company- chill, interesting work with nice people. They even had a month where they doubled everyone's salaries randomly- as a thank you for working hard. At the same time I did see the "shadow government" but would like to clarify that it seemed to me to progress beyond a team leader you had to be fluent in mandarin, not necessariy be Chinese. Which makes sense considering that yes, upper managements English is usually poor.

IOT_Apprentice 6y ago

I find it disturbing that the focus of the article is on the wolf culture of Huawei, and the discussion here ignores that and veers off into nonsense about Apple. I've worked with former Americans who worked for Huawei here in the US, they confirm this behavior. Huawei also filed patents around facial identification of Uyghurs, who are of course being held in concentration camps. But go ahead talk about R&D investment in Europe and ignore the behavior of the firm.

blackrock 6y ago
Don’t American companies have facial recognition software to identify brown people, or black people, or Asian people? I’ve been seeing this lately. But I fail to see why China or Huawei is getting hit by it. Unless it’s just blind hatred by the HNers here about anything and everything China related. I’m sure the FBI is employing facial recognition software that delineates between black vs. white people too.
jackjeff 6y ago
> Huawei also filed patents around facial identification of Uyghurs, who are of course being held in concentration camps. Let’s not forget mass sterilization of women in those camps which is a form of genocide.

dilyevsky 6y ago

I visited huawei engineering offices in shenzhen about ten years ago for some due diligence work and it was hilarious to what length they went to protect their ip. They didn’t even have inter-building network not to mention internet anywhere on the premises

Animats 6y ago

Sounds like IBM in the glory days of mainframes. Non-US operations were controlled by American IBM employees. No country outside the US made enough parts to make a full computer. IBM employees used to say the initials stood for "I've Been Moved".

ppeetteerr 6y ago

The only thing of concern is their treatment of 50+ year old employees. Everything else seems in line with how I understand Chinese companies to behave towards their employees.

1cvmask 6y ago

Huawei by virtue of being Chinese is definitely sexist against men letting women retire 5 years earlier. They are also clearly ageist as they make sure some employees earn way too much so that they retire early in their 40s. From the article: “The retirement age in China is 60 for men and 55 for women. At Huawei, however, according to our sources, it is common to end one’s career already in one’s mid-40s. When long-serving Chinese managers reach this age, they often cash out the value of their company shares and effectively retire.” - It is great to see the funders of this journalism are against this ageism in tech and include the likes of the McArthur foundation and Soros affiliates. Great that the article highlighted some potential management glass ceilings for Europeans in the Chinese company. The Chinese should learn from the lack of glass ceilings to non-Europeans in European companies. Or how egalitarian and meritocratic they are in hiring and don’t even care about formal diplomas or your ethnic background. It baffles me why any (western) European would move to the US and leave behind such great meritocratic European tech companies.