I agree this one is more of a marketing fluff. But if you think all tech advances in China are Cold War era propaganda then you have not been paying attention to the tech world in the last 20 years.
I state that China advanced immensely but nowhere close to the level of the hype now.
I'm laser-focused on the developing markets (although China is already past that stage). Moreover, I hold investments in mutual funds for emerging markets, including those with stock in Tencent (for instance).
But I can't name anything in China except:
* bigger supercomputers
* bigger bitcoin mining facilities
* clone cryptocurrencies
* bigger number of patents filed by Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu
* hiring of Andrew Ng and then him quitting Baidu
* proliferation of cashless payments
* excellent team work of techies and business people resulting in WeChat, which would not have succeeded elsewhere
* I no longer buy the claims of ML applications (speech recognition, face recognition) surpassing human accuracy - I've been hearing these for years and then reading refutations, but yes, sure, let's assume a few algorithms were tweaked successfully
Does it all work, yes. It's far beyond the China where I was doing business a decade ago wondering whether the developers I was in contact with have a functioning brain. But is it "more advanced than Silicon Valley" - nowhere close to it, it's well-managed cookie-cutter tech. If anything, the credit goes to the Chinese tech-savvy business people not prone to the American corporate waste syndrome and forced to dive deeper into the tech.
Can you name 3 (three) projects where the tech was not licensed or borrowed elsewhere and is indeed so advanced it did not surface elsewhere? I'd be sincerely interested to learn of such.
I don't know if China's advanced, but I do know if you're making electronics, you want to be in China. Everything I order comes with about a month lead-time from Shanghai. They've also started making some really good electronics. Rapid prototyping is really important, and I think becoming more important all the time, since robotics is becoming both cheaper and better.
I haven't heard of anything 'pure tech', but there's a big network effect to having the world's electronics industry on your doorstep. If you're building a microscope, you don't have to wait for months for the parts to arrive. If you're building a new kind of centrifuge, you have a massive pool of great engineers who can do it for you, just a phonecall away.
So, if I'm interviewing with a startup in AI, and asked all these questions, how many good answers I should expect? Is it ok for a startup to have a defensible business to solve a problem 10x better, knows how to make money in a big market, but have no experience in marketing and haven't talked to many potentially users?
As a wanna be startup founder, I found my ideas have bad answers to at least 2-3 of these questions.
Any bad answer to these questions is a showstopper, yes.
It's an indicator that this company is definitely going to fail.
In your example, not having talked to many customers is the classical Juicero approach: Build a solution, then search for a problem that this solution is solving.
Not talking to customers means not understanding if there is demand for something, and if there are customers who would like to pay for a solution. (Problems exist in markets where target groups are not used or not willing to pay for digital solutions)
If you're starting out, I highly recommend reading the blog of Amy Hoy and Alex Hillmann (https://stackingthebricks.com/) - they defend the idea to first go on a "sales safari" where you simply obvserve your target group, and then find a solution for their pains.
As a founder, you want to continuously talk to potenttial customers about your idea or your prototype: make them use it and perform thinking-aloud tests.
Good points. But how many customers you talk to is enough? If I'm building a product for enterprise, is talking to one keen potential customer enough? For a first time founder, I can't imagine someone without much connections can get the chance to talk to multiple potential enterprise customers.
What about a product targeting the mass market, if I'm building a mobile app, is talking to a dozen friends enough? or should I pay for a market research which can reach hundreds of strangers.
Do you talk to customers with prototypes of the features or do you just have a basic skeleton and say 'what if I have this and that'?
I actually subscribed to Amy Hoy's mailing list but haven't checked it out for a while...
Can't open the doc because it's blocked by my employer. But generally the developer wage is very low in Europe compared with US(Bay area).
AFAIK London have the highest salary among european countries, usually handed out by Investment banks and other financial service companies.
In London a tier 1 bank's VP developer will typically get £90k-110k base, plus 15-40% bonus. If you work for a hedge fund, the base is typically 10% higher with 10-20% more bonus. To get a VP job in a bank you usually need 7 year+ experience after graduation.
In contrast the big tech companies in london pays about 10-20% less base salary than banks, far less cash bonus. But depends on which one you are working for, the RSU could be either similar to the states side or a bit less. The signon bonus is usually quite low as well.
Startups in London have very low pay, typically 50-60% of your market value in a bank.
So if you are a top developer with 15 years+ experience, works for a top hedge fund in London, you'll most likely take home < £200k, which is like $260, that's only about average wage for a google senior developer.
> Because it usually comes with built-in social security and nationwide health insurance.
That's not the case. Health insurance plays very little role in this. I can go to a private doctor for peanuts. Salaries are low, because companies are "broke" and don't have million dollar funding and you can have a great lifestyle with fifth/tenth of a SV salary.
I know that, but you wrote "among european countries" an Switzerland is definitely one of them. It doesn't really make a difference for EU citizens if Switzerland is in or out.
That logic makes no sense. Since health isn’t an employer cost, salaries in Europe should be higher than the US where the employer incurs health/social costs. However, in France “social charges” are incurred by the employer which means that their cost per employee is about double of their actual salary. That means that French employers are paying social charges which finance those who aren’t employed.
In the US:
An employer pays salary + health costs for that employee.
In Europe:
Employer pays salary + health costs for both the employee AND the rest of society. Which means your European salary is subsidizing other people not even related to the company.
On top of that, the employee gets to pay tax rates approaching 50% in many cases.
The average take home pay after factoring out health costs and benefits is dramatically lower than an equivalent position in the US.
Health care isn't the reason for the pay gap. The technology sector in Europe is far smaller than those in the US, these days there isn't a single tech company in the EU can rival those tech giants in the US, so the pay gap makes sense.
If you are a banker or a hedge fund PM working in London, your pay will be on par with or even more than your colleagues in New York.
I don't agree with that, at least not in Sweden. Sweden had one of the flattest wage distributions in the world. Developers make very little here when you compare to other countries and other professions.
In Stockholm there are some companies that pay more, e.g. Google, but not near London.
The answer depends very much if you're looking at median salary or 'peak' salary. It also matters if you're talking before or after taxes. Median pre-tax dev. salaries are almost certainly higher in Scandinavia (or at least in Norway and Denmark), but you'll never earn what some of the top devs in finance in London earn.
In the UK in the South you can similar salaries to London without the expense of London. I am a Senior .NET dev can I could get £50-70k. The expense compared to London is about 75%.
Up North in the UK get £40K for a senior dev is pretty hard work but everything costs half as much so it is totally relative to where you are living in the UK. The South is crowded with no infrastructure to handle it (driving in a nightmare).
Gibraltar is probably the best place to go if you can get a Job in Europe. Spain is stupidly cheap. Wages are less than say London, I lived like an absolute king on £27,000.
HongKong's rise was largely due to the decline of Shanghai and mainland China falling to communist government. Now with the rest of China rise up, I can't see how HongKong can return to its former glory
I actually think document should be kept/written by a chat/email app.
Most companies have a wiki for document, but how many of them can stay up to date? Discussions happen all the time, and they often require changes to previous documents. Maybe an ideal tool is one can capture team communication, present it in a organised way, and let people edit it later for a more polished view.
the home hub looks interesting, but it seems the main selling point is it can work with other devices? so does it mean I can do things like asking Alexa to stream my itunes library on chromecast?
As a foreigner I have lived in London for more than a decade and have friends and families living in SF. One interesting I found is although both London and SF have large number of foreigners/immigrants, in London not one group of immigrants have dominant majority and deep roots in the city. Immigrants usually live scattered around the boroughs, this I think makes London more diverse than many US cities. Because new comers will have to interact with people of other background and try to fit the culture of where they are living.
Teams like strats or any quantitive developer roles may not be good either. There may be some interesting jobs in systems require ultra low latency if you get to build them from scratch or rewrite them.
It shouldn't come as a surprise, the bank interviews are way easier than interviews with google/facebook.
The sad reality is, in London there are very few employers pay as much as the financial service sector, if you can't get into google/facebook, and don't want to migrate to another country, you either work for a financial service company, or take a massive pay cut.
