China is on course to have its own commercial airliner soon [2]
[1] https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/news/en/2018/09/airbus--chin...
I add (first) because I've read about the C919 elsewhere.
The subcontractor did this entirely willingly and I don't blame them, given that Airbus treated them like sh*. Sure they were not the absolute cutting edge business, but they do a solid job and have a strong engineering background (from the times of MBB, DASA & Co. - their IT in the eng department was horrible). And yet when negotiating a contract for a new test (volume of the contract similar to price of the very specialized equipment necessary), Airbus haggled and put taking it inhouse on the table (they could certainly do that, but as the history of german industry shows, this is just an intimidation tactic for mooore profit).
So the management started to sell to COMAC (basically acting as an intermediary for another not as well-connected german supplier, which also likes to sell to China but can't get around export regulations...), which is basically a sell out, but apparently we want it that way given the protection politics give those predatory bit companies around here (never hear anyone calling Airbus for fair treatment of their supply chain)
... and that's just airline related tech stuff I have passively become aware of within 50km of my office in the last 12 months.
Let's be honest here. Everyone has an incentive to gain insight into what everyone else is doing.
Everyone is spying on everyone else.
I don't know a company that doesn't. How far would they go? That depends. Sometimes governments help...
Lots of companies don't pay attention to their competitors aside from just passing glances. Sometimes your competitions action is not in any way visible to you, for instance when trying to win top secret gov design contracts. When you are on the bleeding edge or the only one working on something, there is just no need. I could come up with a lot of reasons why spying is useless(not saying it doesn't have a use, just not useful in every case as you propose)... but i guess i am confident in things, rather than paranoid. Worrying about what someone else is doing is just wasting time, unless they are coming for you.
There is never a single company working on the bleeding edge. Those who are take a lot of precautions to keep their secrets and are keen to learn their competitors' secrets.
If you work on the cutting edge in tech just send your CV to your company's main competitor. They'll be quick to invite you for interview... To buy your competitor's product to take it apart and study it is also a time-honoured classic. These are just basic examples.
Actually, they have a narrowbody competitor set to enter production: https://airlinegeeks.com/2018/03/17/20567/
Also:
> Boeing has built a B737 finishing factory and Airbus has a final A320 final assembly plant in China, with Airbus planning on building a wide-body jet plant in the country as well.
China doesn't make internationally competitive aircraft because making internationally competitive aircraft is very hard.
“That’s only a part of what we do in the production of airplanes,” he said."
I've seen absolutely zero evidence for your view that "a generation" of Chinese students has graduated with "weak understanding of the fundamentals" compared to Americans.
I'm happy to discuss further (surely my interviews are imperfect tests and the samples are biased in some ways), but let's ground the discussion in evidence. Where did you get this idea?
I would like to point you to (and encourage a search of your questions or your company): https://www.1point3acres.com/bbs/ . This is probably the largest board out there that shares interview questions (and answers!), techniques, approaches, etc... including leaks of questions, "help" from insiders at large companies, and more. If you seem to suspect that there is some sort of nation-based component to your Chinese interviewees doing quite well, I suspect you may find your study is poisoned and I recommend a redo. As an American, I have not found something similar to 1p3a in terms of the wealth of information available for getting recruited at large companies.
1p3a isn't the only one out there either. There are many more. This is just the one I've been able to hear coworkers and students when I was in undergrad talk about a lot.
I hadn't heard about that specific board, but I'm certainly aware that students frequently collaborate in various public and private ways. It's definitely true that my company would be a prominent target, so we take various measures to try to defend against preparation like this.
For clarity, I didn't mean to imply that I had done a formal study. I'm just reporting my personal experience.
Editing to add: I'm really interested in other people's experience, too! I'm honestly curious how this person got the idea that the college grads do not know the fundamentals well. Maybe they're testing fundamentals in a way I'm not and I can learn.
Technical interviews are manufactured tests that can be easily gamed. The idea that any valuable insight can be drawn from them is naïve at best. Further, the post was specifically about innovation -- given this constraint, technical interviews are notoriously bad at separating the wheat from the chaff (e.g. product questions are non-existent in technical interviews).
"Fundamentals" can mean different things to different people, but let's not pretend technical interviews are a reliable signal.
The parent's anecdotal experience is still a valuable datapoint in the face of two baseless stereotypes:
1. Chinese educated people lack fundamentals and are ill equipped for innovation
2. Technical interviews are at best a naive mechanism for evaluating candidates
Because I have plenty of evidence for all of the above, and the fact that technical hiring is profoundly broken is discussed ad nauseam on HN.
However, an academic culture that doesn't see anything wrong with cheating will mean their average cohort of students have a much weaker understanding of fundamentals compared to average students from a country that doesn't tolerate that.
There is some truth in that, but it's quite exaggerated and sounds like a conclusion someone without deeper understanding of China AND US would make.
If someone only learned about US education system via news sources, the picture being drawn is gonna be quite bleak, sex, drugs, anti-intellectual, bribery for admission, racism, classism, etc. ...while in reality, it's mostly working pretty well, but nobody is getting views by writing about smart and hard working students doing well in school.
Already debunked in this thread.
> Even their university culture practically encourages cheating
It is not like we'd not have this in western culture. They use the same metres we do: titles and names of educational institutions attended. As with every metric. those who understand it exploit it to cheat those who apply it.
> An economic model where American/European/Japanese/Korean tech is stolen and then friends of politicians are gifted CEO positions of companies that clone that stolen tech...not sustainable at all.
With a billion people behind it, it is actually pretty easy - you just outlive competitors while you pay for the losses out of pocket. And that is what western companies have been championing: If compliance says "we accept the risk", we take the risk.
> When robotic manufacturing eventually becomes cheaper and faster than manufacturing in China, meaning they'll no longer have IP to steal, they are in huge trouble.
So are we. Who is going to be able to afford the products if we all are replaced by robots in the workplace?
!=
> When robotic manufacturing eventually becomes cheaper and faster than manufacturing in China
That is a straw man argument. Manufacturing is one of the leading frontiers in automation. It's going to be cheaper to manufacture things outside of China due to automation long before a significant enough portion of the workforce is out of work due to automation and unable to afford the manufactured goods.
>Already debunked in this thread.
Seems to be true, although they're only manufacturing interior parts. Certainly nothing high tech.
Anecdotally, the strongest student grade wise I've seen in college was a Chinese one. I don't think she managed to cheat there.
https://qz.com/1497137/boeings-china-plant-delivers-first-je...
Awareness of a risk isn't very helpful if it doesn't come with an understanding of the odds and the costs and benefits involved.
Clearly you have a different understanding than Elon.
End of humanity is in the grand scheme of things something trivial. It's just happens and then nobody suffers. so there must be a probability low enough to balance it out.
Airbus has been building aircrafts at a Final Assembly Line in Tianjin since 2009. And many Airbus/Boeing suppliers have formed joint-ventures with Chinese companies to bid on contracts for the C919.
You might be right that predictions of China's rise is overblown, but we forget how crappy Korean technology was just a couple of decades ago, and there's no reason it can't happen again.
Regarding the Ma/Musk debate, that seems like a strawman argument. Ma studied English in college and his strengths are his business and political accumen, not technical ability. There's plenty of people in China with a better understanding of the AI landscape.
I have no idea if Jack Ma knows about the ML landscape or not. But it's clear just by taking an anti-alarmist stance he's correct.
I think it's an odd mix of self superiority/discrimination that actually lets the US sit back too relaxed and not competing on difficult and often costly, but fundamental investments (not just in silicon, but other industrial areas too). And too often there is too little coercion needed for US companies when they do make investments, siting manufacturing capacity in other nations while chasing lowest cost labor.
But USSR also maintained multiple closed cities which would contain the smartest people they had in the whole of the union. I am certain if you picked a few people from there they would be of a completely different opinion of what USSR was at the time as well.
So I am wondering if modern-day China has those, too. They might not be bringing huge industries to fruition based on their research - but on the other hand they might be working on strategic projects such as submarines, etc that are hard to clearly see behind the usual commercial noise.
I don't like a certain conflation of terms in discussions like these - merging together creative thinking and business. The two things are only vaguely related. To overuse a tired term, inventing a better mousetrap spring != designing a better mousetrap != being able to make that better mousetrap a commercial success. The last part involves a lot of work that isn't creative, and that benefits from business-friendly conditions, which are not necessary for the creative work itself.
> I wouldn't think USSR was that great at creative thinking, either (on a bigger scale).
True, especially in the later years of the USSR. But they did launch a satellite into space before anyone else. At some point they were creative thinkers, at least.
We underestimate China to our own peril.
I want to emphasize that there are tons of incredibly brilliant minds in China working on amazing things. It's their government system that makes it so that rather than incentivizing innovation, they've focused on building the most efficient IP theft system the world has ever seen.
See e.g. some of the stuff Bunnie wrote here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20, starting with: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107.
Just a replay of history with the country name replaced.
Please don't do that. The site guidelines specifically ask you not to:
[1]:https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1974986...
If anything, it says a lot about you that you associated everything I said with their ethnicity rather than the government itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
The idea of Chinese companies/universities/etc. being uncreative and over-reliant on imitation and industrial espionage is quite obviously a somewhat tired cliché. I'm certain it makes an appearance in almost every single front page comment threat on the Chinese economy of the last five years or so.
There might even be a kernel of truth. But, as others have pointed out, the same was said of Japan and Taiwan before. In such a situation, you should be wary of repeating such stereotypes if you don't have first-hand experience, which I doubt many of those regurgitating that trope have.
Nobody is making any claim whatsoever about the behavior of Chinese-Americans or Chinese-Europeans. That would be racist.
Goes to show that without easy access to product blueprints/IP at the factories, China is very slow to actually innovate on their own. Hence why I feel the "China will outpace everyone in tech and take over the world" is super overblown.
Even their university culture practically encourages cheating in classes to pass, so you have generations of students graduating with weak understanding of the fundamentals. The US is obviously not a perfect meritocracy, but China is super far from that.
An economic model where American/European/Japanese/Korean tech is stolen and then friends of politicians are gifted CEO positions of companies that clone that stolen tech...not sustainable at all. If you want a painful example of what I'm talking about, watch the AI debate between Jack Ma and Elon Musk. It's so clear that Ma has an absolutely minuscule understanding of the AI landscape.
When robotic manufacturing eventually becomes cheaper and faster than manufacturing in China, meaning they'll no longer have IP to steal, they are in huge trouble.