I'm not China-based, but I grew up in China, is now working in Silicon Valley. My father now runs a medium sized tech company in Nanjing and he used to be a hig

I'm not China-based, but I grew up in China, is now working in Silicon Valley. My father now runs a medium sized tech company in Nanjing and he used to be a high level exec at one of the largest Chinese tech companies. I actually follow the Chinese tech scene relatively closely due to this. What you heard is all true, and those are actually not really conflicting point of views. The situation in China is very unique and cannot be fully explained without going on and on about the culture and its current political/economical climate. A few points to note though: Tech people there are smart, educated, and very, very hard working. However the number one thing they all value is "efficiency", or rather: "the efficiency of getting things done". I've talked to people from Tencent, and one guy laughed at American companies approach of writing good, scalable, maintainable but very often over-engineered code. Over at Tencent they very often do whatever it takes to be first to market, and if needed to be, refactor everything 6 months down the road, and rinse wash repeat. It's the only approach that works for them in a hugely competitive market (also the largest one in the world). Company management wouldn't tolerate coding practices that very often serves no purpose other than to stroke the ego of senior software architects. One may argue the merits of that approach, but if you look at how well services like Weibo, QQ, and Taobao scale (I think Taobao handled the largest E-commerce single-day-ordering in the world last year without having any major problems), it obviously works just as well as the western approach. So an extension to this mentality is that whatever method it takes to get things done is the best and most celebrated method. Even if it includes brutal copying of a competitor's business model, or bribery of a government official, or direct corporate espionage being employed. The Art of War never mentioned any code of business conduct. I have a hypothesis that a hardworking American engineering with a super-competitive dog-eats-dog Wall Street mentality may do very well in China, or even enjoy it, but I would never go there with any sort of idealistic vision of an "utopia". Things happen there happen very fast, and a lot of money flows around very quickly, countless opportunities come and go on a daily basis. It's an amazing place that can make and crush people in the blink of an eye, so in the end, it's really up to what kind of person you are and what kind of lifestyle you want to pursue.