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Comment by kmarc | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote time.

I worked on a Deutsche Telekom cloud project, which was somewhat internally competing with the Huawei-built Open Telekom Cloud. At the same time, a business partner and I also consulted other telco companies.

What I have seen, down to the data center from Huawei was insane. From a technical perspective (hardware and software) was great, but the pace they ate up people was something I am not familiar with in European culture.

This one day, checking the servers in the DC, a manager-like dude was shouting at his subordinate engineer to fix things. I found it weird (and a bit unprofessional). Next day, a new engineer joined the team, the previous one was not there anymore. When I asked how did they replace him so quickly, they told me that they literally flew someone in from China overnight.

They delivered. Their things worked. Tech was great. I wouldn't want to work in such environment.

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In China, Huawei is known for offering competitive salaries but also demands a lot from its employees. Many people tolerate the toxic work environment in exchange for financial benefits, particularly as they gradually improve their family's lifestyle with their rising income.

As a successful company, Huawei has also popularized the so-called "Wolf-like Spirit" among other Chinese firms.

The "Wolf-like Spirit" implies an expectation to work extremely hard and do whatever is necessary to achieve the company's goals.

One anecdote involves some Japanese customers who visited ZTE, a competitor of Huawei. To break the deals, Huawei allegedly sent individuals who pretended to be ZTE employees and entertained the customers with drinking and whoring for a week.

No one should trust a company like Huawei. Or any companies with deep CCP connection from China.

Any company with deep financial dependency on the Chinese market (basically all Chinese companies) will have connections with the Chinese Communist party (aka the ruling government), including all Chinese citizens in the country... They will have "deep connection" with the government because all these people and entities are subject to the local laws and established interests and they don't really have an alternative. It's not like the US or the West is so immigration happy welcoming them in with open arms.

As such if the default stance is not to trust or do business with Chinese-related parties this will exclude the entire country eventually, since they aren't given any realistic alternatives to being completely blacklisted they'll likely retaliate (understandably).

What should they do? Just "cooperate"? No amount of cooperation or action from the Chinese side will get them to be trusted or viewed differently, because the fundamental issue isn't that Huawei is selling backdoored or hacked devices (which they aren't, or otherwise everything would have been ripped out instantly)... it's that they fundamentally do not trust the company, or anything from China.

It is funny, because even foreign experts working in China are expected to join the trade union, although they can’t vote in its elections (not a huge loss). Huawei’s connection to the PLA stands out among Chinese companies, but you are correct that every company in China will have strong ties to the CPC and could have strong involvement by the PLA. They mostly don’t, however, the government isn’t that well organized outside if just governing, and China’s corporate scene is very chaotic. A lot of it is just a hyper competitive market that turns them a certain way.

Well, Nortel had a former US Navy Admiral as CEO at some point.

Deep links between government and large companies exist in every country whether acknowledged or not.

In Huawei's case, frankly the issue was that it was the first time a company not in the West's control became a major player in a strategic industry. Alleged CCP/PLA links are just part of the narrative built against them but the issue was more general.

> As such if the default stance is not to trust or do business with Chinese-related parties this will exclude the entire country eventually, since they aren't given any realistic alternatives to being completely blacklisted they'll likely retaliate (understandably).

If a company is making ball bearings or bathroom fixtures, you don't have to worry much about their ties as long as they're not your sole supplier. How do you backdoor a manual mechanical valve?

Whereas for anything that has computer code in it, open source down to the microcode or GTFO. Countries will (and should) want to stick to suppliers in the local and allied countries if a foreign one isn't willing to provide that, and have no objections if a country they're doing that to wants to do the same to them.

> If a company is making ball bearings

I know it was an anecdotal example, but a Western company purchasing Chinese-produced ball bearings will most probably mean that Western company doing business with and empowering the Chinese military-industrial complex, seeing how ball bearings are such an integral part of military armoured materiel.

Which goes to show that splitting economic things up into civilian vs. non-civilian is an exercise in futility at the end of it all, and this goes for the West, too.

> a Western company purchasing Chinese-produced ball bearings will most probably mean that Western company doing business with and empowering the Chinese military-industrial complex, seeing how ball bearings are such an integral part of military armoured materiel.

It's not about that. You could say that about doing business with them on anything whatsoever. If you buy their plastic toys they could use the profits to build tanks.

The problem here is that they're giving you a device you're putting in a sensitive place containing opaque binary computer code that could be doing anything, which customers can't feasibly replace with their own or audit because they don't have the source code.

Open source does nothing if you can't verify the shipped code is actually running that. Plus after the whole Supermicro controversy we'd have to check what appear to be ball bearings for embedded spying circuitry.

I think it’s related to Huawei’s PLA roots. Its founder spent an 11 year career in the PLA. It is not clear about huawei’s ownership structure outside that it is kind of owned by employees, but not really.

PLA in the past is basically a career choice for people from rural area. You get sponsored for education, and will get a job in the city after you quit the army. Most of my childhood friends served in the army before they got their jobs, because they sucked in school. That was the only choice for them.

He wasn’t really rural though, and he was drafted/conscripted anyways.

Sure. He is older than me, I don't know what was the policy then.

My friends weren't from villages, their parents work in state owned entities, in order to get a position in these big state companies, you have to either have good education or being offered a job after military. In the past, the government must offer a job to people out of military. The most common reason for people to go into military is to have a job in the future. This applies to both city and villages. However, with the reduction of the army, this has changed. Now you get paid a good salary while in military, but you don't automatically get a job.

If you study well, but you cannot afford school, you can also go to military universities, where your expenses is paid, but you will have to work in the military for a fix number of years afterward.

Wait until the world finds out that most Israeli tech founders have roots in Unit 8200 ;) And a lot of US companies were founded through known CIA fronts.

Military roots or no, in the end every company must obey the laws of the country they’re founded first and foremost, and then try not to break the laws of the countries they operate in. This is the reality. Just like AT&T can be compelled to spy on X, Y; so can any other company be compelled by their government.

And this idea that western spying is good and Chinese spying is bad… its ludricuous. Spying is just bad.

It isn’t that Chinese spying is somehow less virtuous than American spying, it’s more why take the chance? The only reason China ever bothered with Cisco or Nortell at all was to copy their tech, but China wouldn’t let an overseas tech come in today to drive their cellphone network today. They would think that’s just stupid. But when America does the same they cry bloody murder.

Well, US has zero domestic 5G equipment manufacturers. So it is not really a question of China managing US mobile networks.

And Nokia/Ericsson/Samsung could have won the 5G core bids if the pricing structure and/or features were better than Huawei’s.

Not defending Huawei, but considering how the US market works… they won pretty fairly.

In the end customers will pay the price of “China bad”. And most likely tax payers for all the subsidies governments will telcos to remove Huawei equipment from their networks.

Isn’t Qualcomm American? Also, Cisco, HPE, etc…

Reminds me of this incident: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/29/689663720/a-robot-named-tappy...

The article refers to T-Mobile US, which is majority owned by Deutsche Telekom.

> No one should trust a company like Huawei. Or any companies with deep CCP connection from China.

No one should trust any company. Period.

I also worked on the telco side and we did dd for huawei equipment in 2010 (it was early days of IMS). They actually flew us to their hq in shenzhen and i spent weeks there. I haven’t seen anything like what you’re describing but one thing I remember is how paranoid about security (including physical security) they were always talking shit about “those thieves from zte”. I found this pretty hilarious and still do

>This one day, checking the servers in the DC, a manager-like dude was shouting at his subordinate engineer to fix things. I found it weird (and a bit unprofessional).

I would call that highly unprofessional and a red flag.

The environment you are describing is 'developing world', especially when it wants to play the catch up game. It can only get worse because they soon find out catching-up is a lot more difficult than they imagined. As a Chinese I don't want to work in Chinese companies, but I do understand why they do it.

Eh in sweden I got asked to do unpaid overtime and the CTO refused to write me a recommendation letter since I had refused to do the (completely illegal) unpaid overtime.

They were hiring mostly young immigrants because they are more pliable to this sort of things.

Was it even legal to ask for unpaid overtime in Sweden?

Unfortunately that's the reality. Young immigrants feel insecure in the country and would grab and hold on anything can keep them afloat above the water level. People make different decisions based on their circumstances. It is not going to change a lot.

Most people were from EU, you don't get kicked out if you lose your job.

So he was pivoting to hiring more non EU people.

All massively successful companies, especially starting from scratch are very demanding.

That's one of the reasons European companies have faltered while Chinese ones (or American) are expanding. Can do attitude and hard work, there's no magic recipe.

Work/life balance, Friday afternoons off, leave office no later than 6pm, 4 day week, etc are all very nice but then if your competition work their asses off 6-7 days a week you're going to be eaten alive.

It's a difficult problem:

Work hard: The organization can become rife with politics and self-interested high-risk high-reward behaviors. People may stop collaborating, i.e. sharing knowledge, which can impede decision making, increase risk, and undermine innovation. Employees may only care about financial compensation, so it's easy for other companies to poach them, and indirectly steal insider information. Employees may burn-out causing resignations and interruptions to projects.

That's why the alternative arose.

Work/life balance: The organization is focused on productivity, not hardship. On sharing the work burden, on being able to trust your colleagues to come through. Meetings are short, direct, and no time is spent on fighting. Like an effective sports team, that passes the ball when appropriate.

My perspective is that European companies are failing for other reasons. In particular, the US, both as a state, and their private actors, are actively undermining the European economies and industries, and corruption has become rampant, partly due to the enormous bribes that are possible by well-funded actors. All legal, of course, in the same way that Super PACs are unquestionably legal.

Anyway, more to the point: I want to focus on the organizational culture aspect. Sometimes employees do get "lazy", or complacent. Isn't that a leadership problem?

I'd love to hear your various ideas on how these problems can be solved.

The issues and benefits you list are not specific to either "side". It feels a bit like you picked and chose through rose-tinted glasses when, really, everything you listed may happen in either case and are more symptoms of the quality of leadership.

The US act in their own interests as they should and, I think, are ruthlessly pragmatic. Europe undermines itself because they are constantly shooting themselves in the foot, starting from their own governments.

Yes, that's quite typical of Chinese (and to a lesser extent Korean) work culture. Shouting orders, slogans, zealotry, fierce competition, 996.

What is 996 (short googling gave only a model of a sports car)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.

Working from 9 to 9 six days a week

ChatGPT got 996 as the work schedule instead of the car

https://chat.openai.com/share/2778df30-19c5-4cf6-8f0b-07c30a...

Lol, same experience working with a big-ish Chinese game developer. The project manager I worked with for over a year had simply disappeared when I returned from a 2 week vacation, and nobody wanted to talk about what the reason was, only "oh, he doesn't work here anymore".

Same but much more frequently for the regular developers, people you worked with just disappeared from one day to another with everybody pretending that nothing happened (of course I was an outsider in the company and nobody would have told me anything anyway, but usually you'd get an announcement or a good-bye-mail on the internal mailing list or Slack channel, but nothing ever, people just disappeared, and somebody else showed up to take their place after a a few days).

Total clown show.

Chinese will have farewell parties with coworkers who have good relationship with. They just don't like sending announcement or good-bye-mail to the entire company.

If you a just "someone" to a Chinese, you will not be notified.

With the risk of sounding to defend this culture, sprinkled with a tiny bit of whataboutism:

I also worked in a very PC cultured, all colors and genders and opinions and whatever welcome, very western, woke style company and a new joiner, who was allegedly unhappy with his job, disappeared without a trace from one day to the next. After many weeks me questioning, what happened, I got at least a "he is alive and reasonably well" answer.

Not saying that this is common, but when it's about saving face, companies, regardless of their previously projected image, can turn to such autocratic style when it comes to communication. Basically what they radiate: "just stop asking and move on", your colleague is not of concern anymore.

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