Good luck in your search for good software guys. Having a Java / C++ / C / C# background, I hope you can turn things around for HK. It really needs something more innovative than finance and real estate to remain competitive.
Good luck in your search for good software guys. Having a Java / C++ / C / C# background, I hope you can turn things around for HK. It really needs something more innovative than finance and real estate to remain competitive.
@philospherjohn
Very interested in hearing more. PM me.
I agree with others' assessments, though. HK's software sector is anemic and focused on finance, real estate, and mobile phones.
Thanks for all your feedback. Interviewing software development candidates all over China in the last few weeks has reinforced my opinion: although there's not a huge I.T. workforce in Hong Kong, the talent that is here is in a different league from that of Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc. in terms of Creativity and the ability to understand requirements from a business perspective and actually create something that is *new*.
Plus, we can back them up with a scalable workforce of Junior coders across the border. I think a hybrid model of Hong Kong Architects/Development Leads, backed up by a team in Shenzhen for more well-defined and routine tasks, will work well.
I find the creativity of HK software engineers to be quite limited. We could never use them on pure R&D projects, where the requirement is quite open ended.
That was the reason why I got my first job back in 2000 here. The company at that time couldn't find someone locally to do their MP3 player's interface for the PC in Delphi.. They liked my software/hardware interfacing experience, so I got the job without even coming to HK for an interview
Hi guys,
Perhaps we should start a new tech group but one that uses English. I would be up for that - would be nice to be able to talk pure tech :-)
Btw, although I think I already know the answer to this does anyone know if the UK qualification 'Chartered IT Professional' counts for anything in HK?
Cheers,
Pete
English speaking tech group sounds like a cool idea. Any techie activity recommendation that would get people interested?
Hrm. Hey there.
I'm probably one of the 'junior' (2-3 years work exp) programmers you speak of here in HK. I was born and raised in Canada, went to uni there and have a degree etc etc..
Upon coming to HK though, I've found that the level of their understanding/application of programming concepts and standards is almost non-existent.
Being on the frontlines myself, I can tell you that sure, HK is full of people who do 'IT', but I would say a minuscule subset are true geeks. I've encountered a few 'local' geeks in my work in HK, but they are few and far in between. For the most part, the majority has lazy, uninspired, inefficient code that most of the time leverages a brute strength method of getting anything done.
For that reason, I pretty much refuse to ever 'pick up' anyone else's project. More often than not, it is a undocumented, unmaintainable clusterfudge procedural wall of text that I could rewrite faster than understand what the variables var1,var2,var3..var913 represent.
I've seen the opposite as well, naming conventions like varIntThatHoldsTheValueOfSomeArbitraryFunction = 0;, broken into 4 million classes to a granularity that even a sandy beach pales in comparison to.
Sigh. I tried to maintain constructive but this just turned into a rant. Please send us some more hardcore geeks.
Sincerely,
elsdon
This new Facebook-based group is probably a pretty good place to start. It's rather aimed at web people at the moment, but it's very explicitly meant as an English-speaking techies group...