shanwang

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.

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...

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.

Sounds like the script of a Black Mirror episode.

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.

so what are those numbers look like in Scandinavia

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.

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

Good article, but why people are calling Software Engineers Hackers these days?

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.

dare i say the phone looks underwhelming?

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.

Agree.

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.

I'm not surprised that MOOCs are a big factor, people like me who have left school years ago have forgotten how to write a BFS, we need something to brush up those knowledge.

If you run statistics against using sites like careercup, you may find that being the top factor.

On their website they have pictures of both the prototype and other manufacturers' cars. it makes a lot of sense to just sell the driving system, like the android model. But I assume they designed the prototype to capture the public's attention. I just don't know why they can't spend a bit more effort to make it look desirable.

If their target is to sell tickets for a self driving fleet, I guess that makes sense.

Looking at it, I'm thinking google hasn't learnt anything about the failure of google glass, who wants to buy a car like that?

A car is more than a commuting tool, it really matters how it looks.

Renting is about the only thing SV is significantly more expensive than London. Quick Google shows me this: https://www.numbeo.com/cost--living/compare_cities.jsp?count...

The cost of living in SF is 1.4 times higher but the wage is 1.75 times higher. Note this number is assuming you are renting, and not considering electronics which is a lot cheaper in the US.

The house price in London is still more expensive, and if you are a senior developer in your 30s that's probably more relevant than renting price.

Factor those in, as a software developer, in SV you are easily 30-50% better off than London, the best paid city in Europe. The pay gap between Europe and US do exist, Silicon Valley is the technology centre of the world, Europe isn't.

I was talking about mid-level engineers in startups, not senior engineers in banks, if you want to compare big employers, £80-£120k is nothing compared with $250-300k you get as senior developer in Silicon Valley.

that's partially true, but you forget european countries usually have higher tax than US (not only income tax, but also VAT, fuel tax, etc).

here in London a mid-level engineer, which I assume is the bottom half of senior software engineers, are typically paid £50-£60k/year in startups, which usually have poor pension schemes. £50k is about $60k and you already start paying for 40% tax for the top £10k of your salary.

You can get more if you go to big companies but then so can you in the US.

I guess the salary figures are largely influenced by US figures, $101k-$150k for mid-level engineer is definitely not the norm in europe.

You misread the OP, he's talking to 6 dev people, not 6 taxi drivers. I'd be surprised if anyone without a uni degree can find a dev job in a foreign company in Beijing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not pro censorship. But you and many in the west assume people in China are all brain washed and incapable of seeing their own history. Sure, a large part of the population can't be bothered, but I'd bet it's not 95% as you assumed, and they have increasingly less influence in today's China.

And speaking of which, you don't think the west is ruled by 2% of elites and manipulate the media to tame the rest?

True, but try talking to a Japanese about WWII, and you'll be surprised how little they know about what happened, it's NOT taught in school, not all the facts.

Government brainwash is not exclusive to communist countries.

As a Chinese I have to say it's hard to believe “Not one of the six Chinese devs had ever seen that photo or had any knowledge of what happened there”, it's more likely they don't want to tell you what they really think.

When I was in Uni, the Tiananmen square videos are all over the university intranet, including the documentary shot by Hongkong journalist and some shorter documentaries made by the west in later times. Everyone in my class has watched them and we all know what happened on 04/06/1989.

The censorship power of chinese government has been greatly over estimated.

I doubt the EU has any plan of anything. With rise of nationalism and protectionism, the EU is fighting for its own existence.

China was never a equal trade partner to the west. In fact, I don't think any of the developing countries can be equal trade partners to the developed countries. When you are weak, open your market completely to western multinational companies with huge capital and technology advantage is economical suicide, and it will benefit no one but the rich and powerful at the very top on both sides.

Of course, almost all of the roads and railways are to extract resources, not to help locals in any way.

That's a very sinister comment, when China builds a road, it's all about grabbing resources and can not help the locals in anyway? Are the locals banned from using these roads? Are there no jobs created in those country because of these projects?

I'm in London too, $120K job in today's London market (£100K) only exists in some banks, hedge fund and HFT companies, and you'll definitely need 10year+ experience to get those jobs.

I think the salary gap between US and UK programmers in the last decade has definitely increased.

One reason is exchange rate, only a few years ago GBP/USD is 1.5x, now it's 1.2x.

Another reason is that tech sector boomed in the US, big companies like google and Facebook are doing really well, there are also more successful small companies, fuelled by VC money. together they drive programmer salary up.

However, the UK economy is totally dominated by finance. And the banks are not doing particularly good after 2007.

It's not about top-down disallow, it's just restrictive for many reasons. To use a programming language to build a system within a company, I need not only the approval of my boss but also other developers in my team to know that language or at least eager to learn, that's not always possible.

I started web development by learning Angular 1, maybe I'm the minority, but I actually liked it in the beginning, and only grow to dislike after dived deep into it.

I was a web newbie but experienced developer in other field. The attraction of a framework like angular is it lets you write relatively large chunk of 'flat' code without having to worry about the structure of your code. So for a newbie it's easy to get started, of course you'll eventually face the dark side. But then you have to make a choice to either abandon angular and go for something else, or keep on going and make yourself good at angular.

Another thing is, there are plenty of good resources for learning frameworks like angular and react. Can anyone point to me some good up to date resources of building a functioning website from scratch by using purely jQuery?

I'm trying to do the same. But after spending the last few months building my own product, I feel like I'm not ready yet. The mistake I made in my career so far was not knowing enough about one industry, it's very difficult to think of a profitable idea if there isn't an industry you know inside out. So I'm considering going back to full time employment, pick an area that I'm really interested and learn that market well.