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Comment by clippit | Hacker News Reader

Many big Internet companies in China only care about profit and believe OSS is only a waste of time. Furthermore, large majority of Chinese developers are suffering from low pay, mandatory overtime, etc. The life sucks, how can I have a motivation to make contributions? IMHO, the industry even the whole society need to enhance understanding to local developers, accept their hidden individualities, make better environment in technology(fk off GFW). I believe the OSS or hacker community will be stronger as time goes on.

I'm obviously a Chinese and sorry for my English(language matters, you see? :)

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> The life sucks, how can I have a motivation to make contributions?

It may not be for everyone, but you could dis the local market and work remotely for western companies. And finding oversea opportunities can be achieved by marketing yourself. One extremely clever way of doing that is through open-source contributions.

Also, there's plenty of opportunity to open-source stuff without making an effort. If you work as a software developer you've got plenty of by-products around, like little helpers or libraries you wrote and that aren't core to the business you're working for. Packaging those by-products with minimal documentation and throwing them in a GitHub account takes minimal effort.

I don't know about Chinese developers, but I feel the need to publish stuff when I'm NOT motivated by my job.

Not much different from the situation in the Western world a decade or more ago. This will change in the next decade:

- The latest generation of Chinese tech companies is already very different from their established counterpart (Tencent, Baidu...) in almost every aspect, especially towards their employees.

- The GFW won't survive another decade in its current form. There is simply too much internal pressure.

I'm actually convinced that there is an incredible human potential in China, provided you give them the proper opportunities.

If your job sucks so much, consider joining us : we're recruiting folks to build stuff with node.js, NoSQL, Elastic Search and a gazillion other Open Source technologies.

In what ways are the latest generation of Chinese tech companies different from established counterparts?

I'm not sure I have an accurate answer to this but let me try.

I feel like the younger companies have developed more aggressive engineering cultures. Tudou, Dianping, Douban seem to embrace more their technical side, when Baidu for example has more of a business and sales spin to it.

In particular, I've noticed this difference through;

- The involvement of these newer companies in OSS, tech event s...

- The reaction of local geeks towards these companies: you'll find a lot of young Chinese programmers who think Taobao is a pretty awesome company when it comes to tech, Baidu not so much (I think most of them refer to it as a sales company...).

Life sucks, yep. Low pay, yep. Management that has no idea how to run a business that creates intellectual property, yep.

Here's what you may not know: There are a growing number of small to mid sized IT shops in China that need good talent, know how to treat them right and are willing to pay better. FIND THEM and pick yourself up and things will get better. Go to these hacker meetups and learn to mix and mingle.

All my employees work only 40 hours a week, with benefits and pay well beyond the norm. And I invest in their future by preparing their skill set for what's to come next. I'm not the only person in China doing this. I know the man that wrote this article here is very progressive and invests in his people.

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