Hacker News Reader

> I feel like Taiwan represents a talent opportunity like no other.

Yup.

When I was in Korea I met a few Taiwanese that my employer poached from Asus, HTC, Benq, ...

The state of their tech scene seemed quite dire. They would easily double their salary in Korea, for a pretty similar CoL. Eventually most got fed up with the Korean work culture and left for even higher salaries in... mainland China!

A lack of language/cultural barriers would work well for those who go to mainland China. 5-10% of Taiwanese currently reside on the mainland, due largely to China granting long term resident status (with full rights to work and public services) to virtually everyone. It's a masterstroke in increasing ties and knowledge transfer while undermining the island's economy through brain drain.

Yup, that easily fits in the evil genius category

Plenty of Taiwanese and Korean and even Japanese SDEs work in the mainland because the pay is much better (this is how it was when I was working at MS China). China is almost second only to the states in programmer salaries.

Tech companies are the ones to blame. There is insane numbers of untapped talent willing to work remote and to adapt to the bay area time zone if needed. They'll also work for less than 1/10th of their US based ones.

There are two possible explanations:

1- Tech companies didn't try to expand overseas; didn't care and just tried to limit salaries inland (I just remembered their fiasco).

2- Tech companies failed to expand overseas. This might be due to concentrating in a single location (India) for all outsourcing.

I think they should try to have satellite offices in most countries out-there. Instead of big ones, rather small ones that higher only the best of the best of that particular country.

They don't even need to look abroad. Plenty of the flyover country and the south eastern USA would work Cali hours and accept probably half or less the pay for a better qol than can be had in the Bay area.

Central VA has UVA and VTech, half the people I work with went to one, the other, it both. A lot of them pull maybe $100,000/year. Around my area that's a pretty comfortable pay, few acres and 3000sqft would cost maybe 150k all in.

And Charlottesville has Ting FTTH. The fiber in Silly Valley is AFAIK in SF and to the north.

This will be good for Taiwan and god Google. They already have a pretty decent presence in TW, though my understanding is there was some env but not a whole lot of eng. This will up the presence. It’s interesting they’re doing more in TW than in JP (if it’s strictly about talent rather than a kind of bridge to China).

It be good if Google influences a better work-life balance given the propensity to stay in the office till the boss leaves even when there’s nothing to do (it’s not just a trope in their TV shows, it actually happens a lot for office workers).

Remember when (USA) mall bookstores had technical books (or at least programming books)? In Taiwan they still do. I remember seeing Pro/E CAD manual in Chinese there among many others.

Do people still go to mall bookstores? There is a pretty big online bookstore now.

Yeah. Going to a bookstore has the same feeling as going clothes shopping with respect to online shopping: it feels good to look at lots of product and to feel the pages in your hand. You can't tell if something will spark joy over Amazon.

Are you saying that you want find a business model with potential that is being fudged by the silicon valley slackers, who only care about work life balance and spending quality time with friends and families, and try to get that built in Taiwan where you can overwork and exploit desperate workers. Talking like a true visionary.

> Overworked, underpaid, extremely competent was my experience of Taiwanese engineering

As an undergrad student studying both Electrical Engineering and CS in Taiwan, this is what I heard from my seniors. For most of the tech job, you are held "responsible" for the progress, so overtime is very common.

We're held responsible for our work in San Francisco as well.

My take is that the overwork aspect is raw culture - arbitrarily needing to stay as late as your boss while you fiddle with your phone, lacking any actual work to do.

Underpay is because of market forces - the average salary is 30k because the average salary is 30k because the average salary is 30k.

My advice to you is learn to pull solo contract work off US companies early.

This is similar to what I am doing in Seoul with a side project called Current - http://currentdev.com

>> a clone of some upcoming business model

>> target foreign contracts

Both involve working for someone for a long time, then leaving on your own. Really high risk, and people will just dump all their problems on you.

This is actually what I've been looking into - and the biggest issue is:

1. Capital

2. Crony/Local Graft.

3. Supply Chain/Logistics

4. Talented people/niche rows. Thankfully if it's software, Eastern Europe has best bang for buck, Filipinos are 50/50 and the language barriers for Chinese/Japanese are high (but not so high if you take some time to learn nuances e.g. JLPT N4-N3 for Japanese)

5. Local banking regulation/Residency/Working as a non-national (foreigner.) Especially if you're an American (FACTA)

Tried, and tried again and just you need a solid team of people that know the natural climate/society and see if your clone can be molded to fit theirs.

Still trying though :)