Foxconn to hire 3,000 to support Firefox OS and software development | Hacker News Reader

Foxconn to hire 3,000 to support Firefox OS and software development

itworld.com

121 pointsrobin_reala52 comments

Firstly, FoxConn has 1m+ employees. 3,000 is a drop in the ocean. Secondly, of those 3,000, "wastage" will whittle it down to an effective corps of maybe 100, plus 1,000 support staff.

In a year's time, the commit logs for Firefox will have @foxconn all over weird and wonderful hardware compatibility bugs for Foxconn's big customers.

This is simply a marker, put down to say "if you are a handset manufacturer, and thinking of trying this new OS, then make it with us, because we are investing in it too"

Its a sensible move, covering their bets. And if FirefoxOS takes off (and I hope it does) they can double down next year.

EDIT: On second thought, I think what they're actually saying is: "Don't worry sharemarket, our future revenue won't all depend on Apple". At this point the mechanics aren't important.

Agree with your assessment that organizing a team like this inside a hardware company is going to waste a lot of human capital.

Because 3k ppl would be order-of-magnitude size of the Windows 8 team. However Microsoft have decades of experience doing this stuff and frankly they're still the giant that walks, e.g. their organisation is so large it's frankly astounding they manage to ship things.

Ref: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/17/introducing-th... (estimating as (40 devs + 45 testers/managers) * 35 feature groups = 3k, plus tech writers, overhead, usability, localization, etc, etc = 10k?)

This is a joke, these people are good at hardware OEM, but they don't understand software. They are using hardware OEM thinking to build software. Maybe they think crafting software is all like to pipeline components and make cheap labor assemble them. Good try, but it won't work.

You never know how low IT salary it is in Taiwan, 20K USD is a pretty good annual salary for a new graduate Computer Science student as Software Engineer You can also see 8.8K USD annual salary for software engineer title everywhere here. How can you find talent with that shitty payment? All they can find is cheap labor.

Try to pay really good salary and find few but pretty top talents. It is better to have a 10 members elite team rather than 3000 not-so-good developers. Otherwise, go back and do your OEM.

I'm pretty sure you don't realize that it's what people here in Europe have been saying about China for the last 15 years, until they started competing with us on the nuclear power plant and fast train businesses.

Then, we lost all our jobs in the industry (except for Germany, but for how long ?), and Europe now faces the biggest economical crisis it has ever known.

US still reigns the software industry, but should China decides to make that a top priority, you can be sure that it won't take long until we all start using "made in china" OSes and softwares.

> (except for Germany, but for how long ?)

We just work together with china and not against it. We sell them fabrication machines, together with services and skill around those.

(And in the end, we export enough weapons to not care.)

I'm all for the liberal way of thinking. Making business with someone is supposed to be good for both sides. But that works when you're making business with a democracy that plays it "fair".

Working "together" with China is a pretty idealistic way of seeing it. They've spent the last 20 years asking for european companies (both civilians and military) to give them their industrial and technological secrets before they buy anything, so that they could clone pretty much everything and sell goods back to us for 10% of the price, thanks to a workforce that lives in barely human conditions and no patent system or anything close to it (but also very smart and education oriented people, to be honest). With software, my bet is it's going to go even faster, since everything is pretty much open source those days.

Now, I know things are slowly changing and i don't mean to be too hard on the chinese regime, which managed to let that country grow tremendously, and probably improve the life of many citizens. I just wanted to balance your idealistic point of view a little bit.

You are basically right about China, they are raising fast. But what the news talking about is to recruit 3000 developers in Taiwan rather than in China, I think it could be so hard even to recruit 50 okay software developers in Taiwan. Actually there is no software/Internet industry in Taiwan. You can name Internet company as a long list such as Baidu, Taobao, Webo and what so ever in China, but you cannot find even a famous website which is from Taiwan. Taiwan is good at hardware OEM but not software.

As a software developer from Taiwan, I know the situation here. Hardware OEM industry makes money, they can offer better for getting talents. When CS students graduate, they would rather go to OEM company (such as TSMC) than go to software/Internet company or even startups. How can they complete OEM firms in recruiting battle?

It's really a bad environment for software development. Actually, software/Internet in China is much better than Taiwan.

Just like Hauwei crushed Cisco?

Huawei and Foxconn are totally different kind of company.

Foxconn is more like a military station, while people listen to command and act as orderred. No respect from manger to normal employee.

Huawei has an atmosphere where talents are respected by others, maybe like a laboratory.

I don't think Foxconn can achieve its goal as declared.

My point was more that people wouldn't use China-made OSes or hardware because of security concerns. Even knowing what I know today, I trust US equipment and software more.

> How can you find talent with that shitty payment?

I live in Somaliland. I make less than 20k USD as a programmer. I was making under 8.8k USD at the same job a few year prior. I am not cheap labor. Well, at least not in the sense of quality.

The cost of living of where I live makes $8.8k/yr a great salary, let alone $20k/yr.

The reason that salaries are so low is probably just simple economics. I'm sure* my company can afford to pay me a salary that would be competitive in places like the U.S. or Europe but since there aren't any other companies hiring they know sub $20k/USD is good enough.

* I know this because the last time I demonstrated that I was capable of getting another job by receiving a job offer, I received an obscene raise. I also know this because I know of folks who earn what would be considered a competitive salary for programmers in the U.S.

Sorry, I didn't mean to say it is not possible to find good programmer with that price, nor programmer at that price is not good. But at Taiwan, with 8.8K USD salary, people cannot even survive in Taipei. A plumber here can make more than that.

Are you saying there are programmers in Somaliland earning $50-$100k? They must be living like kings!

I don't think you should worry that you are not earning as much as you could be in Europe or the USA. You would be spending a lot more just to survive in those countries and probably not a lot better off financially.

I am interested to know what the income tax rate is in Somalia, Somaliland and Puntland? Do you have sales tax?

> Are you saying there are programmers in Somaliland earning $50-$100k? They must be living like kings!

Yes its possible though most folks here don't flaunt wealth considering the widespread poverty.

I'm not really worried about making more. It would be nice and I certainly look out for opportunities and you're probably right about the cost of living. I literally put half my pay into saving as I have nothing to spend it on.

There's no income tax. Though I do lose a bit of my pay automatically as payroll tax but I'm pretty sure it's been reduced than the amount it was supposed to be, though I could be wrong since I've got a weird contract where a significant portion of my income isn't my salary but from other benefits.

Nobody like paying taxes since no one trusts the government (even if they voted them in) so people always look for way to avoid or reduce the amount they pay in taxes. Mostly that means just simply saying no until they accept a lower amount or finding someone you're barely related to working in government. Big part of the reason why I don't see much of a future for myself here.

There was an campaign for a sales tax. I don't think it was implemented since I didn't notice an increase in prices of stuff due to it.

All of the above was with regards to Somaliland, I don't know about the situation in Somalia and Puntland.

I might be visiting Somaliland soon on business. HN office hours is down, would you mind sending me an email, I would like to ask you some questions about your country :) Thanks!

My email is here: http://pastebin.com/HcHGetBu

I bet it is kind of wetware used as a strategy for negotiation.

A fully furnished, spacious 1 bedroom apartment int Tapei city will cost you TWD13,000 (approx $450). A similar apartment in New York City will cost you the north of $1,500.

Same can be said for the cost of food,transport and other living expenses. Expecting employees to pay the $80,000 and over they are paying to a New Yorker , which has high cost of living to a developer in Tapei city, which as relatively cheap cost of living doesn't make sense.

And by the way because they are paying a developer $20,000 doesn't mean he's a bad developer. it is reflective of the economic condition and standard of living the developer finds himself.

I can bet you there are developers earning the amount you are deriding so much that have comfortable saving account and there are $80,000 in debt (all other things being equal)

I didn't derides anyone. What I want to say is that when employers can't afford reasonable salary for developers, they cannot find any good ones, even they found ones, it's only matter of time they will leave. The problem here is more than salary, it is about attitude, employers trend to treat employees as cost rather than valuable asset. When people are treated like disposable tools, nobody would stay.

Why isn't that salary reasonable? It seems like you're being ethnocentric and judging that salary based on your own home and your own salary.

When confronted with cost of living data for Taiwan, you pivot and say that people are treated like disposable tools -- but how is this different than 90% of IT in America? Not everyone works for a progressive, modern startup, and the trenches of American Corporate IT aren't known for their mid-20 something's hipster cultures like Google et al. Very much a cold calculation where people are treated like assets.

Taiwan is as rich as Japan. I've seen a documentary on Taiwan this week and considering people's fashion style, the high-speed trains and other cultural signs, I was totally convinced that it was a documentary about Japan.

The biggest challenge will be for the HR team who needs to find 3,000 productive new employees. They're not hiring unskilled labor here. When you're hiring that many people, you need to lower your standards and you're going to wind up hiring people who will be a drain on productivity.

Please remember FoxConn has 1m+ employees.

Everything I know about data centres and SOA and uptime is laughable at google or twitter scale. Likewise, everything I know about HR and culture and hiring practises is laughable at "workforce bigger than some countries" scale.

How many of those employees are in fact biorobots?

The vast majority of that 1m+ employees are low-skilled wage laborers. Finding 3000 high-skill engineers is definitely a monstrous task. Twitter is 7+ years old and they're only at ~1600 employees about half of which are engineers.

A bizarre number considering that the total number of contributors on the Firefox OS frontend is currently 249 (https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia). No clue on which part they're gonna put these people on.

These people are probably not working on the OS, but creating Apps and UI customization.

Yeah, a good bit of internationalization and localization, I suspect, too.

The phrase "HTML5 operating systems" made my brain explode.

Somebody please send me back to 1996, when the world made sense.

WebRTC, WebGL, Web Speech et al. make today's browsers look like today's operating systems.

So stop making silly jokes and get with the program :p

Saying a web browser is an operating system is like saying a car is an engine. Sure, you could put the car on a dynamometer, convert the dyno to an electric generator and use the power to run your home entertainment system. It'd be kind of ridiculous though.

In software its all good.

And that will always be the flaw in this line of reasoning.

> On Thursday, Foxconn said it was looking to hire between 2,000 and 3,000 people in order to bolster its research into software.

Looks like those 2-3k people might be for a wider effort than just Firefox OS.

I think it is a smart move to make such a big move, as anyone wanted to get in the market needs to do so now. If they continue on their current trajectory, the market is looking very much like Windows/Apple in the 90s (except now it's Google/Apple). If Android becomes the Windows 95/XP of the smartphone world, then it will be very good for some and very bad for others - and it would become increasingly hard to break into the market.

I'm a FIRM believer in quality over quantity, and I feel this large number is just to bolster investment into Foxconn.

I really do hope that this pushes further development into Firefox OS...I remember seeing a demo of the Ubuntu Mobile OS running on an Atrix, that was everything I pictured for the future of computing.

3000 are many people, I believe that not even google has all those people working on Android.

It's not a lot if most of them will be working on apps to get the infrastructure competitive.

Here's their competition:

Google Play/Android is estimated to have 800,000 apps (Jan. 4, 2013)

Apple iOS App Store recently reported 775,000 apps (Jan. 7, 2013)

Windows Phone Marketplace is up to 125,000 apps (Oct. 25, 2012)

Blackberry World is now up to 70,000 apps (Jan. 30, 2013)

Source: http://www.pureoxygenmobile.com/how-many-apps-in-each-app-st...

3000 people on a software project scares me. That's a LOT of coordination and communication. What would Fred Brooks say?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

It might be that they will be working on different things, e.g., writing a bunch of apps for FFOS's app store.

It sure will be strange a year from now when we have Foxconn Chat, Foxconn Photos, Foxconn Search, Foxconn Social, Foxconn Racing, Foxconn Music...

Could someone please comment on Foxconn's overall strategy here?

They are trying to take on Apple AND Google/Android AND Amazon AND Microsoft?

With no previous experience in the field?

(I'm sure most of the 3000 hires are for app development - that makes much more sense.)

No previous experience, except for manufacturing the iPhone.

That and nearly every phone/computer. Anyway my guess is they will start by tackling the low end - replacing all those candybar nokia's &c that are still everywhere in Africa and Asia with a cheap, high-quality smartphone.

Not so much manufacturing - the chips/cameras/flex/cases/etc are all made somewhere else.

Foxconn is an army of cheap Chinese laborers who perform the final assembly and testing.

Does Foxconn have any similar investment in other OSes? I've never heard of Foxconn-developed apps or UIs, so I'm wondering what sort of software experience they bring to the effort.

Because if you put several thousand engineers on the project they got to do something great, isn't?

This sounds like a plugin in disguise.

I hope there won't be any suicide software engineers...

EDIT: Regarding downvotes - I didn't know so many Foxconn recruiters were sitting on HN...

Honest question: You know your comment and edit to it makes you really sound stupid right?

Honest reply: You think it is stupid to remember foxconn employees who committed suicide. What do you think you are after this?

So any time any company is mentioned we'll dig up the worst piece of controversy they courted in their past? Or is there a specific reason you're doing so now?

Sounds aside. You know your "honest" question shows you're an idiot, right?

They employ a million people. The Foxconn suicide rate is around 7-14% the national average at 1.5 per 100,000 employees per year. Taking on 3,000 extra employees means that statistically they'd see an additional death over a 20 year period.

For a reference point heart disease kills around 800 per 100,000 in the US per year.

It is not about statistics. It is about the _reason_. We know that suicides were committed _because_ of the employment conditions at foxconn. Numbers are irrelevant in this case.

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