> Even now, engineers are not held in anywhere near the same regard in China as they are in the West.
I have to respectfully disagree with the author on the esteem of engineers in China versus the West. I am not Chinese, nor an expert on their culture, but I do live in the West so I understand half of the equation.
Current President of China, Xi Jinping was educated as a chemical engineer[1]. His predecessor Hu Jintao was a hydroelectric engineer[2]. His predecessor Jiang Zemin was an electrical engineer[3].
Compare that with recent American presidents like Obama (JD), Bush(MBA), Clinton(JD), Bush Sr(BA in Econ), Reagan (BA in Econ). These are only a few points, but seems to me it is in China where engineers rise to the highest echelons of power. We have lawyers.
They were not elected for being engineers, but because of their careers in the party (just as Angela Merkel wasn't elected because of her PhD, politics don't work like that). Article, at least as I understood it, is about the respect that society gives to an ordinary engineer. Is it considered prestigious to be engineer by common people or they view it as just a little better than being a technician or factory worker. I'm not very familiar with China, but I live in an ex-communist country and this resonates with me a lot. Here, back in time of socialism, your mom wouldn't impress any of her friends with your engineering diploma, but for instance if you were a doctor that was a big deal, you were a respected member of society. Have no idea why, I guess it has to do something with the whole "working class" idea of communism that insists on all workers being treated as equal.
AFAIK in the USSR attractiveness of a profession was largely determined by two factors. First, is it possible to take bribes. Second, can one get hands on products that are in short supply. Doctors fall into the first category. Shop workers and sailors (two highly desirable professions in the USSR!) fall into the second. Engineers seem to fall into neither.
That's what they were educated as, but unless I'm mistaken they didn't practice those fields for very long.
To end up as president, you have to go through many promotions in the government bureaucracy. Probably stop actually doing engineering work (or whatever) pretty early on. Similar to rising through management ranks in a company.
So the author's point could still stand in the context she present it in: where you are not the boss.
This is because China is not a democracy. In a democracy, someone who speaks well is likely to win - and lawyers by definition must be able to speak very well. In China there is a merit-based system which as every merit-based system, has a lot of flaws - so someone able to work through the top of it must be a real hacker. Engineers win hands down over lawyers.
What? Communist party power dynamics are similar to ones in a gang - i.e. you have someone from the party who managed to seize power and lots of other top party members silently forming cliques and waiting for you to slip, so that they can deliver the blow. The country's people are only chips in the game, if that (often, rulers are toppled not over their policy but over some bullshit doctrinal dispute).
More or less; but I think the point is, that by denying the power-struggle dynamic and punishing people who talk about it, communist structures in fact amplify it.
So in a democracy, there's all that behind the scenes tussel, but there's also an important aspect of public advocacy and decision testing. None of that in China; the politburo says what it's going to say, and then does what it's going to do.
> None of that in China; the politburo says what it's going to say, and then does what it's going to do.
Thats not what happened in China. In China government invest heavily in propaganda and mind manipulation, they do not automatically push anything and everyone just follow blindly.
Yes, but at the end of the day it's the voters that decide whether you get actual power or not. Imagine if it was the Republican National Committee that appointed the President of the United States. Not just now, but always.
> Electoral system and people's representatives are about the same level.
Actually everyone got to vote for people's representatives. Of cuz, no one cars that much, like many people were not bother to vote, so DNC thought their presidency is already in bag, then many decided to actually vote.
Couldn't it just reflect the base rates? I wonder if the explanation could be found from making a comparison of the statistics from when the respective presidents entered university on how many people in upwardly mobile families studied to become engineers / lawyers in China vs Western countries. I suspect in China 20 to 30 years ago engineering was seen as the route to success because of booming manufacturing industry whereas in the US service industry has been taking over for decades. I don't know the statistics for China 20 or 30 years ago but I hire from top graduate schools in India today which is like China around year 2000 in many respects. Most of the students I see studied engineering at undergraduate level.
Lawyers are advantaged in a democracy where you rise by convincing people. Engineers are advantaged in a meritocracy or in a system that sees itself as a meritocracy as we are probably better at optimizing for an important metric.
If you think the communist party doesn't have politics, you are gravely mistaken. Lest we forget the rapid rise and fall of Bo Xilai, or the purging of Zhao Ziyang, or hell even the Gang Of Four and it's on-again-off-again relationship with Deng Xiaoping.
It's the technocracy! I also think that's what Americans didn't like about Hillary Clinton (among other things). She seems to look at governing much more like an engineer.
Deeply deeply disagree (and my background is CS/Software Engineering+Public Policy).
She has way more attention to minute policy detail than anyone who has been elected president in the past few decades. And the knowledge of detail is a double edged sword, because it's hard to sell what you know to be an oversimplification (which almost everyone here can relate to).
She was the furthest from an engineer except for all the other candidates in the field. As I remember, our "real engineer" presidents were Carter and Hoover, both famously ineffectual politicians. So, yeah, I think it's safe to infer a kind of trend.
Mr jiangzemin had a paper on the roadmap on it in 2008. In that paper he said the country should invest in GPU and ml&ai. Mr jiangzemin is a true engineer with a huge leadership vision.
Another interesting cultural bit from the same author on chinese collaboration:
> You know how overseas Chinese students in America all copy each others work to get answers? This workflow scale. How we work when older too. So if I have a question I open up QQ and have a few hundred friends. We all help each other with whatever. Many are engineers or work in factories here in Shenzhen. Most of the electronics in the world are made here and a lot of them designed and engineered here also. So easy to get very very professional help. This network has been called gongkai. Also why so many hardware startup here.
I speak a bit of Chinese and have Chinese friends who were studying in Germany and one time I got to sit in on their copying session. I was quite surprised when a lot of Chinese showed up whom I'd never seen before.
Turns out some of them were seniors who had brought their homework from previous years. It wasn't like everyone just copied the work either, there was plenty of discussion about the points they had trouble understanding. (But my Chinese wasn't quite good enough to pick up on most of it.)
So if I may generalize from my anecdote, I'd say that Chinese students colluding is special in that they form a tightly knit community abroad, helping each other out.
One of the major benefits of being in a fraternity in my university was that the fraternities and sororities all had every homework and test most of the teachers at the school had ever released. I tests on the hardest math teacher in the school going back 36 years. I got asked a question on his final that he asked on his first and didn't ask in-between.
If he had spent more time teaching instead of coming up with insanely hard test questions we wouldn't have had that huge of a back file on him.
Again, is that special to the Chinese? Isn't US history filled with examples of foreigners forming tight-knit communities based on nationality or ethnicity?
My only other experience with large groups of foreign students from the same country was when I stayed in China as an exchange student and met a lot of Pakistanis.
They definitely hung out with each other more often, but they didn't seem to actually study much together. I had a few email me with questions on the same exercise, so at least those three hadn't exchanged notes.
Of course there might have been some Pakistani-only homework sessions I was simply never invited to, but I don't think that was the case.
There's a difference between some students going that way for whatever reason -vs- copying work being absolutely normal and generally expecting that this is the way to go. There are many articles talking about it if you google. Some connect it to "you advance to a university or stay rural with your family forever" situation, some with other factors.
No, Chinese stidents, as claimed in another post, were taught to respect hierarchy. Their colluding is the result that it's a working way of game the system.
Since we are on the topic of idiom, this one rings true: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down”. Unless you’re the boss of the company you rarely stand to profit from problem solving or creative thinking — and usually speaking up will be detrimental to you in some way.
Are American companies that different? The few places I've worked software engineers didn't get bonuses, only the people in sales did. Software engineers are seen as a resource.
It may not be bonuses exactly, but pointing to initiatives you've started that were adopted by the company, or problems you've found and fixed, is good ammunition when angling for a raise or promotion in Western companies. I have a feeling the bigger problem is keeping someone up the management tree from you from stealing the credit (and depending on how many levels of management there are, at least some of that will likely happen, and that's no necessarily a bad thing, managers are judged by the accomplishments of the people under them).
This article makes it sound like China in fundamentally different in that respect.
> Are American companies that different? The few places I've worked software engineers didn't get bonuses, only the people in sales did. Software engineers are seen as a resource.
People in sales don't get a bonus because they're not viewed as a resource, they get a bonus because they hit a sales target for eg the year and their pay is often determined in part through sales goals. All employees are generally viewed as a resource by management.
It's not uncommon for software engineers to get an annual bonus, that's particularly true if things are going well and it's also commonly true for any higher value employees (software engineers commonly earn 2x to 4x the median income in the US).
There's a little more creative thinking in American companies, but people are still people. Which means you need to tread very carefully or you will quickly acquire an almost invariably fatal reputation as "not a team player".
Interesting to see the _very_ strong parallels to Japanese culture here.
For everyone arguing about whether this is true of all Chinese culture, of course there is innovative thinking in China, Wu is simply pointing out that in places where people aren't getting paid to innovate but rather are there to do a 9-5 job, there is little (and, in many cases, negative) incentive culturally to think outside the box and push the envelope. Don't expect that your contractor is going to go the extra mile for you. Getting specifications right and driving the production process are on you.
I don't think people half assing 9-5 jobs they have no interest in is unique to Chinese culture. It's actually a pretty universal thing in every country I've lived in.
> places where people aren't getting paid to innovate but rather are there to do a 9-5 job, there is little (and, in many cases, negative) incentive culturally to think outside the box and push the envelope
That's pretty much every country, including the US. Even many Silicon Valley companies are this way.
> If you’d showed your axe to Edison he’d either have stolen the design or declared it a menace and tried to run you out of business so he could sell more saws
LOL... best part of the article. Good writing in general.
On the subject of manufacturing in China, everyone seems to be saying the same thing, namely that you get exactly what you ask for, without any input or suggestion from the manufacturer, even in the presence of obvious flaws in your original design.
This hasn't been my experience. I manufacture small metal objects in China, that are not very complex (no electronics, etc.) but I get good inputs from manufacturers. For the packaging for example, we designed cases and envelopes with a manufacturer, and they came up with several ideas that we tested on prototypes -- some good, some bad, but the point is, they did have ideas and they did offer them for consideration.
More importantly, it differs from manufacturer to manufacturer. Some factories will produce garbage and then try to explain to you that there is no other way (after the fact); other factories correct mistakes before they even show you the result, because they understand what you want and they iterate autonomously, in order to get there.
What is true is that manufacturing is sloooow. The total duration quoted at the beginning of a project should be at least doubled. But this is probably not Chinese-specific.
> Thats more her style, not doing it for attracting attention, more because shes interested in modifying her body
You're probably getting downvoted for that premise. It's blatantly obvious she's using it to drive views on YouTube (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that). Even her name is intentionally pointed toward that: SexyCyborg; she's telling you right there what she's doing. It would be just as obvious if it were some hot guy that did every video of his with his shirt off. It's no different from Howard Stern shock-jocking for listeners, or the thousand times Jenna Marbles leveraged her looks to push views, or Matthew McConaughey taking his shirt off on camera. It's always obvious what they're doing and why.
Then I dont mind haha, theres more clickbaity stuff happening on my fb feeds everyday, at least she got the breasts done before the internet fame and not the other way around from how I remember it.
At the same time, there are innovations out of China (that surpass anything which may have inspired it, or which they could have started out copying). So judging by their output, whatever cultural issues surrounded:
>For Chinese, this means you think you know better than a professional, than experts. It’s the act of seeing something and saying “why don’t they do this instead?”. Traditionally, this is viewed as extremely arrogant and certainly not something to be encouraged in children or anyone else.
does not seem to extend to the whole of their ecosystem.
I realize the author calls the above a "traditional" perspective.
Could anyone here who is current with current developments of Chinese IP and innovation comment on the validity of this general characterization?
The author in the entirety of the article certainly paints the Chinese culture with a very broad brush. But as would concern readers here on HN, the only thing that matters is what engineers who might work with them think.
What do people here think of the perspective in the article? For Chinese readers, do you agree with it?
As a Chinese reader, every sentence in this article rings true, even more so in the historic perspectives.
Especially in the PRC, you're in general incentivized to be an "excellent cog in the machine", and they teach this value to you in schools. "Being unique" in your first 18 years of life is considered a bad thing, and respect for hierarchy is enforced every day.
I wouldn't write everyone in China off to the type presented in the article -- most people in China know that this is not an efficient way of approaching things. However, their hands are tied in a society that enforces hierarchy in every possible way.
Thank you. Especially since you write that "every sentence in the article rings true" for you, can you expand on this from the article:
>engineers that you know to be otherwise reasonably competent simply choosing not to bring up glaring and obvious problems.
What does it refer to? How would/should someone guard against it? Normally we are usually used to being able to receive a bit of push-back (maybe polite) if we propose something with a glaring and obvious problem. Does this mean engineers would build something that doesn't work at all? (For some reason that's completely obvious to them.) In point of fact, I'm not sure what the article refers to, as it doesn't give an example. Could you give an example of what you think they mean, and how someone might protect against this effect? Thanks.
I think "glaring and obvious" is a little hyperbole, in the sense that most of the decisions an engineer can make aren't really that influential, and more often than not if the odds are right, nothing will break.
An example would be: I know this different schedule can probably save the company $xxx money, but since it's my boss who proposed it I'll just let it pass.
It really takes a village. The culture of standing up against higer-ups is sometimes way out of the league for a single person to achieve.
Thank you for the example. I also asked how someone can protect against this effect, but you did not answer that portion of my question. By "someone" I meant, in this case the boss - how can bosses counter this effect?
For instance, to continue with your example, suppose the boss certainly would like to save $xxx with a different schedule they hadn't considered, but isn't even aware that the engineer is competent enough to propose it and knows how to do so: so in this case what could the boss have said or done differently that would have caused the engineer to propose it?
I assume ending each meeting with "We must now talk about anything that would improve the proposal just made; even if it makes me look like an idiot. Zhang Wei, do you know of any improvements?" and then going around pointing to each person and making them tell you whether they do, does not sound like it would "work". In this case Zhang Wei would say "no", as would the rest of the engineers... so how can the manager learn that an alternative schedule which Zhang Wei can propose could save them $xxx? (And maybe even complete production sooner, etc.) Any concrete suggestions here?
Maybe anonymity would help? The problem there is that people won't have as much incentive to propose improvements, as they won't be recognized if their proposals end up being good.
It just has to be ingrained in the company culture I guess. You'd really need to emphasize, whenever possible, that improvements and suggestions and corrections are welcome. You're fighting against upbringing.
Wow, we really must be living in parallel universes. Are you sure “revolution” is encouraged in China? In fact, are you sure revolution is encouraged in any country?
> The only century routinely teach her citizen about how to do revolution, and is called to respect hierarchy
> Sure, but you learn that in a country you described as teaching to respect hierarchy, did you not find the contradictory?
I'm not sure where the contradictory is, because I certainly don't feel that overthrowing your superiors is an acceptable thing during my education, and this discussion is getting more political than I'm comfortable with on HN.
It doesn't take too much effort to acknowledge that China, or more so the entire eastern Asia's culture, favors respecting hierarchy, and I'm not sure why we're even debating this. I'm also not sure what about my statement is fabricated. You literally cannot fabricate an opinion.
I'll say this though: things are moving in the right direction, and I'm seeing the culture moving away from respecting hierarchy in all conditions. But you really can't fix the problem without acknowledging it.
1. I am not talking about politics, please do not label or imply whatn I stated. Chinese textbook devote significant part on history from 1840 to recent years. Those are a history of revolutions.
2. Chinese are not particularly taught to respect hierarchy or particularly really respect hierarchy. Most nations respect their own hierarchy. There is no special in China, and there is no special in Chinese education.
3. I am not debating if China respecting hierarchy, I am pointing out that your baseless claim of China being educating or particularly educating her citizens to respect hierarchy, that's not true and I showed the fact.
4. Respecting hierarchy is not a problem itself. Organized system, be it human or machine, needs hierarchy to function. Your premise of moving away from hierarchy is GOOD, itself is another unbased claim, AGAIN.
Chinese reader here. It's a very valid characterization of the culture. Respect is much more important. Less anti-intellectualism when compared to the West. Much more communal than individual, in all aspects.
But there's definitely change going on in China. Juxtapose all of that with increased Western exposure, and increased sense of Chinese pride. More individualism. More "We're Chinese, we can do better!" attitudes.
In many ways China has been playing catch-up and still is - it's only been in a position to innovate and lead in very recent times. I mention this as a rebuttal to accusations of China being uninventive.
Could some of this also result from the contractual nature of using Chinese suppliers? I know that from my own experience with contracting, that proposing an improvement can be difficult if you also want to attach a fee to the improvement. How do you say, "I think your proposal is flawed, this way is better, but it will cost you $X more" in a way that doesn't feel like a money grab or an insult? It can be in your best interest to allow the flaw to stand, let the client notice and propose the improvement during the next round of contract negotiations. And so the only improvements a contractor can propose are those that do not cost substantially more then the established price.
Of course this is more for fixed price for fixed work contracting. Contracts with more variable pricing my be better. Maybe other contacting setups can alleviate this issue, but I haven't seen many that could work and that clients are willing to sign.
> Even now, engineers are not held in anywhere near the same regard in China as they are in the West.
what a joke. Three Chinese Presidents in a row all had engineering background, yet this is still not enough?
President Jiang Zemin was an engineer for decades.
President Hu Jintao was an engineer for almost a decade.
President Xi Jinping majored in chemical engineering from Tsinghua.
Then you look at property prices in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, it almost got a point that you can't afford to buy a home unless you work for some Internet companies or some banks. That is still not enough? How about the fact that most Software engineers got paid far more than lawyers and doctors/dentists?
> For Chinese, this means you think you know better than a professional, than experts. It’s the act of seeing something and saying “why don’t they do this instead?”. Traditionally, this is viewed as extremely arrogant and certainly not something to be encouraged in children or anyone else.
> Simply put, in a strictly hierarchical society, proposing a solution missed by your superiors is at the very least perceived as arrogant. You’re just as likely to be penalized in some way for making whoever is responsible for the current solution lose face as you are to benefit in any way from proposing a better way.
Is this generally true in other industries as well? How do Chinese companies try to be innovative, if people are discouraged from suggesting ideas?
Surely it's not true everywhere. Most of us have known plenty of Chinese engineers who are unafraid to report bugs and suggest solutions.
But in the broad sense you mean: yeah, kinda. Chinese companies (in the PRC in particular of course, but also outfits the stem from Hong Kong and Taiwan) tend not to be particularly innovative. It's a lagging market, filled with well-implemented but fundamentally cloned products first pioneered elsewhere. China has products that can compete well against, say, Google and Samsung's offerings, but there are no chinese Googles or Samsungs.
Samsung is a strange choice of example. It also mostly follows a "well made clone" business model and Korean work culture isn't much different from Chinese.
That used be the case. But now you have companies like DJI and others that have learned the pages out of the Western playbook and now out-innovate everyone.
To be honest I am surprised WeChat is even allowed in the iOS app store with its all-in-one multi app experience, since app experiences of that type are explicitly called out as disallowed in the app store guidelines section 2.5.8 - https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
(Actually, I'm not that surprised, they're probably too big to fail and Apple really wants to sell iOS devices in China)
I guess. There's no one app, but nothing that WeChat does is serving a market that didn't exist in the west first. It's a triumph of integration, not so much innovation.
So... sure. In some sense that makes it an exception that proves the rule. If China can be successful with WeChat where is its Tesla or Pfizer or Intel or Fujitsu or...
I mean, there are times where a single counterexample can disprove a point. I don't know that this is one of them.
Oh come on. I said it was good. It's just... not exactly the planar transistor or a CRISPR-CAS editing therapy, or even Android or iOS. It's a good company doing important but fundamentally simple stuff really well.
Facebook arguably attempts to. The markets are different, and people prefer separate apps, rather than using facebook apps in the facebook app, but facebook still does the core part of all the different things.
People outside of mainland china (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) still prefer separate apps, and WeChat has been unable to acquire any significant marketshare outside of mainland Chinese users. Heck, even newly opened Myanmar is already dominated by google and Facebook.
The GFW has severely crippled the web, coupled with the lack of card usage, created a situation that made wechat work for mainland china and can't really be replicated anywhere else.
> The GFW has severely crippled the web, coupled with the lack of card usage, created a situation that made wechat work for mainland china and can't really be replicated anywhere else.
Wechat simply has never had to compete with worldwide services. We can say it beat Facebook and google, but that would be stupid because both of those are blocked and have been for a long time. The fact that Chinese internet services are spurned in China's own backyard is telling.
Which is surprising. There's DoCoMo in Japan, but they're a phone company. WeChat didn't have that edge. Facebook could go that way if they wanted, but they haven't.
That's reductionist to the point of absurdity. WeChat does far more than WhatsApp. I'd say it certainly started off aping others, but WeChat has now grown into a substantially more innovative platform.
You are absolutely correct - WeChat is what it is because of the great firewall. It's not that China blocked other messaging apps (though they do now), it's that China crippled the web and as a result users have been driven into these apps.
You can see it in other ways as well - In the US people generally shop on the web, but in China people shop in an app and the web version is not as good.
I guess some might call WeChat payments and mini programs innovative, but they're not very impressive technically. Take mini programs, they are basically a web app hosted within WeChat. It's kinda cool, like Facebook apps were kinda cool, but neither holds a candle to the power of a real browser. So Facebook apps were kind of a fad and then we got bored and went back to the open web. But Chinese people can't do that. It's not that they can't have web browsers, it's that they don't have any web innovation. It's not surprising, the web is so locked down with license requirements to even put up a simple web site. And so there's no good hosting options, which in turn makes it more productive just to stay on WeChat and sell your wares though Alibaba.
> For instance, I don't really see a need to have the same app do chat and payment (in fact, I'd prefer if they didn't).
You not seeing a need and them meeting one that clearly exists have nothing to do with each other.
> What about WeChat is particularly innovative, other than just bundling a lot of different functionality into one big app?
Making it actually work well enough for millions of people to use it. I can't think of anyone else who's succeeded at that and there are plenty that failed miserably to build that type of "kitchen sink" platform.
I used it quite a bit when I was in China for things other than messaging. Have to say it was a great experience, it works with literally EVERYTHING. You walk on the street - bam the bagger is using wechat QR code to ask for donation. A large number of normal people I encountered don't even use their wallets anymore - menu on wechat, mobile payment on wechat, taxi on wechat, utility on wechat. It's something that after using it, you know there's no way back.
WeChat is deeply integrated, the UI is excellent, it's fast and responsive even on low-end handsets. It's a 40MB APK that could well be the only app you need. WeChat is incredibly feature-dense, but it's also slick, efficient and highly usable. I don't like the monolithic app model, but WeChat have implemented it extraordinarily well.
Tencent are a phenomenal company that deserve far more respect in the west. The Chinese market may be distinctive, but WeChat's dominance of the Chinese market has come through innovation, clever design and good engineering.
We are discussing innovation and if you look at how much money change hands inside WeChat it is clear that it is getting ahead of whatsapp and facebook messenger by leaps and bounds.
> Few Chinese companies promote engineering staff internally or even compensate them particularly well, so there’s little incentive to put an idea forward that may result in additional work and time away from their families.
Too much forced analogy. This one is just plain out of context. Even people dont want to be educated in public, that does not translate who do the job doesn't get paid.
Yeah...Baidu/Tencent/Alibaba pays engineers REALLY WELL, comparing to the local standard.
Software engineering are already the best paid job category[1], outpacing finance, for Chinese university graduates, as the best profession to go to. I would say that is not the case here in US, where engineers are well paid, but the still far from the envy of everyone, which would be lawyers and doctors.
Side notes: It is pretty interesting to read those articles try to analyze Chinese or East Asian people in general as they are machines from the same factory tagged with serial number. I cannot see how that could give you really insightful conclusions that generalize to 1.4 Billion people.
the "community" on hacker news has said limor (ladyada) fried is not a "real engineer" or she has help and doesn't really do engineering, or she is not a real person, or she is just a marketer, or it's not really her code, amongst other attacks anytime her work appears here on hacker news.
the same attacks on hacker news on naomi wu have been said to other women who make things, share their projects, and are online, including limor, on hacker news.
before you hit "add comment" - what is the goal here hacker news community?
The last time I made the front page under my real name,[0] I got a very encouraging comment about how it was nice that I had just started programming and was already thinking of hard problems.
Thankfully, it's simple enough to add an nginx rule to bounce anyone from news.ycombinator.com right back to where they came from.
--
[0] For some reason HN comments are much more respectful when I use a pseudonym. I must have a silly name or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Avoiding the sentiment of the other comments here (which are not completely confusing, but nonetheless a little over my head), I have a practical question:
How does one relate to and incentivize the Chinese people, then? Where are good places to start learning more?
Context/example:
I'm tentatively interested in approaching China from a "hobbyist with a tiny bit of money" standpoint. I want to do limited runs (3 to 4 zeros, or if circumstances allow, less!) of small handheld electronic devices - PCB, thin removable enclosure, possibly some buttons/keys on the front.
Plastic caps directly over tactile buttons is cheap and compact, but rubber-dome systems seem to have a higher-quality finish. The challenge here is that rubber-dome "mats" are likely expensive to tool for, while sticking the dome under a plastic cap means extra thickness. I'd need to find out what my options are here (if I could achieve making a small keyboard, with full key-click - like the Psion Series 5 or HP palmtops - that would be amazing).
As a separate thing, I'm also really fascinated by the chip-on-board techniques used to manufacture credit-card-thin solar calculators. It would be amazingly fun to be able to play with those manufacturing techniques, but going on the cheapness and sheer numbers of devices like this out in the wild (and the fact that I'm seeing the same designs on eBay as I saw in electronics catalogues from 1999!), it seems reasonable to think that the tooling to make these is probably eye-watering, sadly. But I don't know.
I'm not asking for solutions or answers to these problems/questions here (although if anyone wants to comment...); they're just for context. My point is that I have no idea how or where to start in terms of contacting people and going through all the machinery; I know the volume I can promise is effectively nil, and I read this article from the standpoint of knowing I have an extra job of convincing to do because of that.
I also recently read https://lwn.net/Articles/504865/ (found in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15138028; replies say the main focus of the (2012) article is outdated; I'm curious if the bits I'm quoting are relevant). It's a transcript of a talk about some teething problems with trying to do runs of hardware to run KDE on. It reads
> ... the manufacturers are "all about volume" ...
and
> Because the volume of devices that [Make Play Live] could promise to sell was fairly low, the manufacturer had little interest in consulting or even notifying the company about the changes.
and
> In the Q&A session, Seigo further explained some of the problems that MPL had run into. Unless it can promise a quarter of a million (or some other six-digit number) of units, MPL won't be able to get any input into the process.
This info will likely be old hat to some. But I begin to wonder that whoever agrees to do small production runs will just be amusedly humoring me - because if the speaker of the transcripted talk linked above said '"Our order is a rounding error"'... what does that make my run? (Would it even need a receipt? :P)
So I'm interested to understand Chinese culture more - particularly with manufacturing, and in terms of learning more about the tech scene - so I know how and where and the best place(s) to jump in.
> ... [T]he most impressive I've seen were some calculators I saw in Shenzhen a few years ago which looked like simple solar-powered 4-function ones, but were actually programmable and had several tens of KB of memory. Trying to use that functionality with a 8-digit 7-segment display, however, was quite challenging.
That's awesome. That's the sort of thing I mean by "scene" and what I want to learn tons more about.
"I know the volume I can promise is effectively nil, and I read this article from the standpoint of knowing I have an extra job of convincing to do because of that."
Convincing of what - people to work for effectively nothing? Because according to your logic, that is what you are trying to accomplish. Convincing people to work for nothing. But it's not just you, it is the majority, dare I say nearly everyone, that comes to China. Nearly everyone is trying to get something for nothing. People just seem to lose their ability to comprehend that people in China have the same constraints on time, and particularly the value time, as everyone else outside of China.
I own a factory in China and I see this all too often. For example, people come to us with complicated electromechanical projects with half-baked designs. Designs that would require at least 3 additional months of prototyping before we'd even be ready for tooling. That means we are very likely going to spend 6-12 months working on your project. Too often, they don't have a dedicated engineering staff so there are a lot of gaps we must cover. Verification and validation of designs. Resultant CAD changes. Circuit design changes. Prototyping. Strategic sourcing. Lifecycle testing. Safety and agency. Packaging, packout and shipping. More, much more. It can easily consume 1000+ man-hours even 2000+ man-hours from a team of 8-10 professionals working on it. And then, lets say I quote $35,000 USD nonrefundable engineering fees or labor and overheads for 1000+ manhours. That's about the cost of a secretary with an associates degree from my home state in WV. What do I usually hear? Crickets. I hear nothing back because people are too busy expecting that they are going to work with a factory here in China and get something for nothing.
And in the end, they are all wondering "why didn't I get what I tried to buy from China?"
> Convincing of what - people to work for effectively nothing?
Not quite. Things cost money; trying to get something for less than it honestly costs is delusional, disrespectful, wastes everyone's time, etc. I don't want to do that. (I'll admit I didn't convey the sentiment I was getting at in my last message particularly well.)
Rather, it seems that there are few options if want to make something that isn't going to be superscalar in terms of volume demand. Instead of "we need ten production samples of this design to judge tolerance, and then our plans are to do a volume order of xxx,xxx items"; I want to do the minimum order possible (for reasonable and non-irritating (!) values of "minimum").
Essentially I'm in the same part of the spectrum typically catered to by hobbyist 3D printing, but I'm trying to do things that are tricky to manage with just a 3D printer. I mentioned keyboards before as an example; I've wondered about how much it would cost to tool for custom keyboards for a while.
> People just seem to lose their ability to comprehend that people in China have the same constraints on time, and particularly the value time, as everyone else outside of China.
FWIW, I think this is because China is viewed as a kind of magical place that makes so much of everything with such amazing prices that there must be some superhuman magic in there somewhere. :P So all reason and logic kind of goes out the window. Somehow stuff is being made for impossibly cheap, so surely that must mean that the actual manufacturing cost is cheap too, right? (It would seem that these people don't comprehend economies of scale. I get the impression that the reason that (for example) a given cheap toy is only ~a dollar is because some super-wholesaler did an order for ~a million and paid ~$8xx,xxx (?), and then forwarded their costs on to a bunch of toy stores.)
> I own a factory in China and I see this all too often. For example, people come to us with complicated electromechanical projects with half-baked designs. Designs that would require at least 3 additional months of prototyping before we'd even be ready for tooling. That means we are very likely going to spend 6-12 months working on your project. Too often, they don't have a dedicated engineering staff so there are a lot of gaps we must cover. Verification and validation of designs. Resultant CAD changes. Circuit design changes. Prototyping. Strategic sourcing. Lifecycle testing. Safety and agency. Packaging, packout and shipping. More, much more. It can easily consume 1000+ man-hours even 2000+ man-hours from a team of 8-10 professionals working on it. And then, lets say I quote $35,000 USD nonrefundable engineering fees or labor and overheads for 1000+ manhours. That's about the cost of a secretary with an associates degree from my home state in WV. What do I usually hear? Crickets. I hear nothing back because people are too busy expecting that they are going to work with a factory here in China and get something for nothing.
I see I have a lot to learn about. (I'm very curious where I should start. On the one hand I'm yet another confused tangle of dime-a-dozen ideas, but on the other hand I do think I have the patience and determination to manage a couple of them down the track a bit.)
Reading this makes me think of the line "Reproduced by (...) from camera-ready copy supplied by the authors." at the front of one of the textbooks I have upstairs. It sounds like I could eliminate significant cost by applying similar diligence and aiming to deliver complete specifications that are immediately usable. I presume it's possible to request that mistakes be pointed out so I can do the work to correct them on my end. That said, I say this 100% naively; I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually infeasible :)
> And in the end, they are all wondering "why didn't I get what I tried to buy from China?"
I remember having a brief conversation with someone selling kitchen supplies at a kiosk in a local mall (IIRC) many years ago about manufacturing arbitrary things in China versus elsewhere. That's when I learned that the main reason "Made in China" has such a bad reputation is because it's the customers on the non-China end that are always trying to "optimize" their costs - and that end quality was judged acceptable by sampling at the receiving end, not the source.
That's kinda saddening, but it seems that the prices people expect to pay for different things have been pretty much been locked-in since the manufacturing boom of the ~60s-80s, so anybody who wants to pay the factories a tiny bit more for better output quality is going to have a very hard time competing.
The angle I've been coming from here is biased a bit towards manufacturing in general - I've mentioned toys, everyday objects, etc, as I have little awareness of the technical/industrial side of manufacturing at this point.
I spent a reasonably significant amount of time figuring out the Psion series 5 LCD and Keyboard interface. I built my own controller for the keyboard, and interfaced the display to a Gumstix. That was many years ago...
I've also done some prototyping in Shenzhen. CNC and 3D printed parts are cheap. If you've modeled it, everything apart from the membrane itself should be straightforward (and cheap in small quantities, <100USD). DirtySLA and itead provided cheap SLA printing options.
The membrane itself is likely more problematic. But you can make FPCBs, flexible circuit boards. In small quantities and at relatively low cost. Because the membrane is quite large I'd guess maybe 500USD? Getting domes in it probably is harder. I wonder if you can deform Polymide in some kind of jig. Alternatively could add a thin, 3d printed spacer perhaps?
If you really wanted to do it properly, I don't think that would be massively expensive either. Having a prototype might help. There are a bunch of companies that /do/ agree to do small runs. And I know many people how have done this. Often you end up having to visit the factory a bunch to push them to do what you want, and have occasional failures. But it's often still far easier than it might be elsewhere.
Wow, you figured the LCD out. I'm very curious how the LCD actually works - how is it updated? Through some kind of serial protocol? I get the impression it's pretty fast - I made a program in OPL a while ago that created a borderless window a metric stupid number of pixels high and EPOC was able to scroll it up the screen remarkably quickly (I was trying to see whether it could do haptic scrolling, it definitely could). It also seemed that I could drag windows around the screen faster than the liquid crystals could keep up - there was no choppiness here, it was rather an organic problem, so the LCD controller bandwidth/implementation seemed really good.
Flexible circuit boards are such a cool technology. To clarify, though, you're saying the Psion's keyboard is large? I presume the $500 is for initial tooling and that individual membranes will be a couple of dollars to run.
Another keyboard approach I think is really cool is that found in the original BlackBerry 850/950. I've admittedly only seen pictures of these but it looks quite usable.
> If you really wanted to do it properly, I don't think that would be massively expensive either.
That's incredibly encouraging, thanks.
> Having a prototype might help. There are a bunch of companies that /do/ agree to do small runs.
Oh okay, cool to know.
> And I know many people how have done this.
:D
> Often you end up having to visit the factory a bunch to push them to do what you want, and have occasional failures.
Hmm, plane tickets...
> But it's often still far easier than it might be elsewhere.
Older LCDs have a lower level interface. From memory, there's a pixel clock, line clock and frame clock. Then a parallel bus with the pixel value. The cirrus logic ARM SoC in the Psion 5mx interfaces with the LCD directly. You also need to supply it with some weird voltages (+/- 15V?). When I was doing that I found that part more difficult, I think I'd find it easier now...
The interface is pretty standard, so the gumstix (TI OMAP3something) can also drive it.
The keyboard is pretty big for a FPCB. I'm just guess 500USD, for maybe 10 pieces. Because that's the prototype level pricing I've seen before (check itead.cc or Seeed, they both do FPCB now I believe).
The process they actual use in membrane keyboards is different, I don't know what that process is called.
Hmm. When you say "talks to the LCD directly", there's still a tiny low-level controller attached to the LCD, right?
While highly nonstandard, but I want to see how feasible it is to truly drive an LCD directly. To me that sounds like a) huge pin count, b) "fun" prototyping costs, and c) difficult conversations with manufacturers who don't want to explain how their controllers work (and I guess d) a lot of work on my end to support all the different LCDs I'll use). My motivation is to see whether it's possible to control an LCD and touch panel or keyboard from a single chip.
> The interface is pretty standard, so the gumstix (TI OMAP3something) can also drive it.
Good to know.
> The keyboard is pretty big for a FPCB. I'm just guess 500USD, for maybe 10 pieces. Because that's the prototype level pricing I've seen before (check itead.cc or Seeed, they both do FPCB now I believe).
Oh okay, so $50ea for prototyping. Cool.
> The process they actual use in membrane keyboards is different, I don't know what that process is called.
I was curious about integrating LCD control into a single processor because the security implications are really interesting. Just an idea at this point though.
I remember looking inside cheap electronic organizers and seeing a lone blob on the PCB. So I know managing simple LCDs is doable.
Just so everyone is aware, the argument that blog post makes is extremely tenuous at best, and blatant disinformation at its worst. The argument is, basically, 'someone on reddit was doing stuff in China, then stopped a few years ago. A few years ago, Naomi Wu a.k.a SexyCyborg started using reddit.'
Here's that same argument again: Isaac Asimov wrote a lot of stuff, then he stopped. Around the same time he stopped, I started writing a lot of stuff. Therefore...
To the more pointed criticisms given by 'Brianna Wu' or Timaz or whoever, I'm just going to disclose I'm an editor for Hackaday, I know Naomi, and all that entails. So:
"The grammar and formatting are well beyond a lot of even native English speakers" -- Yes, because we edit her posts (top link to this submission and [0]). Additionally, Naomi has said she has a team (maybe of expats?) that edit her work for grammar and idioms. Also, if you follow her twitter, she's really locked in on Internet culture, which would give her a leg up on the memes and idioms.
"While we are talking about China. The Chinese government blocks sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram." -- Yes, and the Chinese government also blocks Hackaday. Luckily, our readers in China are the type who know how to get around that. Which gets into the next point...
"Strange that she doesn't have the same online presence in her home country as she does in the West. " -- I'd keep a low profile in my home country if I were her.
"How much do you think this stuff cost? RE: her lab" -- it's actually pretty cheap. Her lab is in Shenzhen, so I'm assuming the price for tools would be even cheaper than what Harbor Freight is selling them for. Additionally, it's not that much gear. It's a 3D printer, and I think a miter saw. Not expensive equipment, even in the US. And especially attainable if you're working remote, which Naomi is.
I'm just going to tell you, OP, and everyone who agrees with you right now: fuck off. There's nothing inexplicable about a woman being able to use tools. The fact that your comment was voted up to the top in this Hacker News submission says a lot about Hacker News itself. Go feel shame, because you deserve it.
Christ, none of the issue is with women using tools. It's everything but that. The blog post's focus is clearly that someone as apparently young and busy as this isn't merely a jack of all trades, but a master. Gender isn't what is making people stop and think here.
>I'm just going to tell you, OP, and everyone who agrees with you right now: fuck off.
This kind of debate shutdown is better suited to Facebook political groups, not HN.
Ever meet Jeri Ellsworth? She's usually in Silicon Valley and fairly visible. She can do both software and hardware. She made money selling a box with a joystick that connected to a TV and all the Commodore-64 games in it. She built race cars as a teenager. She's now working on augmented reality, while fooling around with ham radio.
Jeri is one of those rare people who thinks things through from first principles. She does mods few people would think to try - changing the frequencies of crystals through vapor deposition, spin-coating her own wafers, and converting a satellite receiver to a radar transmitter by reversing a transistor in the low-noise amp.
I have, along with several members of her entourage. She seemed like a genuinely nice and generous person (on top of being an extraordinarily talented and productive engineer), who has surrounded herself with other awesome people.
Her work is more geared towards education, and Naomi's is more geared toward entertainment. I think there's a place for both.
How is she a master? She looks like an amateur hobbyist, the main positive she has is that she looks fairly active and she's actually building stuff. Looking at her youtube I saw 3d printed bikini cups, what looked like her putting together some shelves and a skirt with lights under it. That's not masterful, but it does take a little dedication and maybe some nights or weekends.
I don't know why you think that Hackaday is blocked in China, since I read the article just fine on a filtered connection. (As opposed to the Blogspot post, which I won't bother firing up a VPN for.)
Of course the blocks don't always stay the same, and sometimes they depend on your internet provider, but from my point of view, it seems like you haven't stirred the ire of the regime yet.
> "The grammar and formatting are well beyond a lot of even native English speakers" -- Yes, because we edit her posts (top link to this submission and [0]). Additionally, Naomi has said she has a team (maybe of expats?) that edit her work for grammar and idioms. Also, if you follow her twitter, she's really locked in on Internet culture, which would give her a leg up on the memes and idioms.
I can echo this. Over the years i have been taken as being American because of how i write. But back in school my english grades sucked.
It was only after got online and thus had to regularly practice that my writing picked up. But if i have to try to speak the language, i will butcher it in a myriad of ways.
> I'm just going to tell you, OP, and everyone who agrees with you right now: fuck off. There's nothing inexplicable about a woman being able to use tools. The fact that your comment was voted up to the top in this Hacker News submission says a lot about Hacker News itself. Go feel shame, because you deserve it.
Regardless of what your opinion is of anyone on this forum, using profanity is inappropriate and uncalled for.
Profanity is not synonymous with abuse. People use profanity all the time here. Similarly, the mods will still take a dim view of you if you keep it clean while abusing someone.
My comment doesn't imply that profanity and abuse are synonymous. The HN guidelines state clearly that you should be civil in your contributions. The OP's comment, profanity or not, was not.
From the guidelines:
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
There's nothing inexplicable about a woman using tools.
The main thing I take issue with is someone literally parading a girl around in less-than-underwear for their own profit.
Low profile in their home country.. like showing your face and naughty bits on camera and attending conventions?
Like I said, this really makes no sense when you add things up.
Tools are cheap in China for the Westerner, but not for the average Chinese person (much less that of a girl). Do you know how much a "good" job makes in China? Someone working in a government position with a pension and all makes maybe less than $1000 USD a month.
And a flat in ShenZhen of that size? Also really expensive for the average Chinese to afford.
Edit: I'd love to be proven wrong on this by the way. Bucking this stereotype of Chinese girls all being face-deep in WeChat and food pictures is what China needs.
I don't understand your problem with someone having a mentor. I've been a sysadmin for approaching a decade now and I have a mentor, and no-one's ever called me a fraud at any stage. So what if she has help from someone more skilled than her? She clearly does at least some of the work herself, from her time-lapse videos.
Why is it that women in tech aren't allowed to have intermediate technical skills without copping shit for it? "What, you had help? Such a fraud!"
> Bucking this stereotype... is what China needs
Perhaps one way to buck it is to not try on every little excuse you can find to discredit someone, birther-style?
>She clearly does at least some of the work herself, from her time-lapse videos.
I do ALL of my builds myself and keep cameras running from beginning to end to prove it. What other technical help I get is always disclosed in the presentation and build log.
There is no proof I can offer that will be accepted and he harder I work, the more evidence I offer, the more I study and try, the angrier they get. Now this shit- I write a reasonable article and they jump in to try and discredit builds that are not even relevant to the discussion.
The article you linked to certainly raises an eyebrow, but it is far from a definite proof that her persona is fake... And it uses a bit too much slut-shaming in it (maybe not by puritan standards?).
And if I promote myself as a Star Trek fan to bring attention to my engineering work, nerd-shaming is also in scope. Or a body-builder programmer shamed for being a "bro" by us nerds. Why do we need to shame each other about our quirks? (as long as those quirks do no harm, but as far as I know, Sexy Cyborg does not flaunt herself around kindergartens)
Is this your blog or is it a coincidence that your hn username is the same as the 'chinese 3d-printing expert' from the article?
It's not really that unbelievable that there's a woman who's capable of using tools and building the things that she wears...
Whoever wrote this blog is either really close to the subject or has a very unhealthy obsession.
The blog post doesn’t provide concrete evidence... but I did checkout some videos and in some of the non-scripted dialog her Ad-lib English skills (grammar) definitely don’t match the writing. That being said you do have much more time to correct writing and people can edit it for you...
She admits to getting help with english editing here:
> *As always when my English gets native I had help proofreading and editing. This applies and yes I get frustrated sometimes. Words are still mine. Lots and lots of people have met me in person and verified I am me.
She also admits to needing a lot of technical help from other people:
> You know how overseas Chinese students in America all copy each others work to get answers? This workflow scale. How we work when older too. So if I have a question I open up QQ and have a few hundred friends. We all help each other with whatever. Many are engineers or work in factories here in Shenzhen. Most of the electronics in the world are made here and a lot of them designed and engineered here also. So easy to get very very professional help. This network has been called gongkai. Also why so many hardware startup here.
But I think it's just an interesting cultural difference. It's not really "cheating" to ask for help. I don't know if we want to start calling everyone using stackoverflow merely "mascots" or "ghost writers".
It's interesting how people would rather dream up a conspiracy theory rather than believe that a woman can accomplish something technical.
I would say the much more likely scenario is that she's not necessarily some wholly engineered creation like Lonelygirl15 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonelygirl15) but rather just someone fully taking advantage of her sexuality and getting a lot of help from people.
pretty sure hn user timaz != reddit user timaz. I'd bet hn user timaz is the author of the blog post ("Brianna Wu").
I don't really care about the provenance of the work; it's a well-written article on tech in China. If it's a team of a western engineer and a local Chinese person (who happens to be far more attractive/better presenter, probably), I'm fine with that.
I'm ok with the article being presented better, but I do think profiting off it bears ill-will. One of my favourite benefits of the internet is the ability to hide yourself. Pretending to be someone else more attractive and making up a story crosses the line for me.
It's just branding and packaging. If people like buying stuff from a pretty female face, it's not the engineer's sin to satisfy the bias of the customer.
I have to respectfully disagree with the author on the esteem of engineers in China versus the West. I am not Chinese, nor an expert on their culture, but I do live in the West so I understand half of the equation.
Current President of China, Xi Jinping was educated as a chemical engineer[1]. His predecessor Hu Jintao was a hydroelectric engineer[2]. His predecessor Jiang Zemin was an electrical engineer[3].
Compare that with recent American presidents like Obama (JD), Bush(MBA), Clinton(JD), Bush Sr(BA in Econ), Reagan (BA in Econ). These are only a few points, but seems to me it is in China where engineers rise to the highest echelons of power. We have lawyers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping#Early_life_and_educ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Jintao#Early_life
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Zemin#Background_and_asc...