Re:Ask HN: What is it like working in tech internationally?
by muzani on Thursday August 12, 2021 @11:47PM
(#28165200)
Malaysia is a great place to be. Software is probably around the top 5% of salaries; many people in gov will never make as much money as a "senior developer", and even accountants get paid half as much.
Tech in SE Asia is very exciting, probably similar to the 17th century colonialism. You have three major powers: US, China, and Germany who are all competing for the local market.
US tech seems isolated; even Amazon hasn't stepped far outside its borders. But the tech reaches here, especially Google, Microsoft, 500 Startups. Americans seem to come in with this impression that America is the best, which may be true from a salary standpoint, but not technologically.
China is extremely hard working and tries to get into everything. Companies like Huawei, Alibaba, and ZTE try to dig themselves deep like Oracle does, but they have the innovation rates of Google.
Germany/Rocket Internet goes into markets before other companies can. Companies like Lazada grow 10%/week (even when valued at $1B). They get acquired by companies like Alibaba who look to expand but don't want to deal with shit like building infrastructure from scratch in a place that doesn't have full roads or use credit cards. Those companies just want to hire 5000 people a billion dollars. German startups are risky and die often, so you'll often see a lot of Germans from these dead startups doing their own or bouncing around other SE Asian startups and consultants. They're probably the best in the world at execution, but in terms of customer discovery, America still wins hands down.
There are some interesting other "colonists" like UK, Korea and Japan. Korea has solved many of its own problems and SE Asia is a really large consumer market. Japan and UK are also developed in that internal investments will probably bring minimal returns, so a lot of funding these past few weeks have been coming in for "emerging markets" like SEA.
Tech level is surprisingly not terrible... I think Malaysia is technologically a little ahead of Portugal and Australia, even though the Australian education system is a lot better and salaries are 3 times higher.
Tech in SE Asia is very exciting, probably similar to the 17th century colonialism. You have three major powers: US, China, and Germany who are all competing for the local market.
US tech seems isolated; even Amazon hasn't stepped far outside its borders. But the tech reaches here, especially Google, Microsoft, 500 Startups. Americans seem to come in with this impression that America is the best, which may be true from a salary standpoint, but not technologically.
China is extremely hard working and tries to get into everything. Companies like Huawei, Alibaba, and ZTE try to dig themselves deep like Oracle does, but they have the innovation rates of Google.
Germany/Rocket Internet goes into markets before other companies can. Companies like Lazada grow 10%/week (even when valued at $1B). They get acquired by companies like Alibaba who look to expand but don't want to deal with shit like building infrastructure from scratch in a place that doesn't have full roads or use credit cards. Those companies just want to hire 5000 people a billion dollars. German startups are risky and die often, so you'll often see a lot of Germans from these dead startups doing their own or bouncing around other SE Asian startups and consultants. They're probably the best in the world at execution, but in terms of customer discovery, America still wins hands down.
There are some interesting other "colonists" like UK, Korea and Japan. Korea has solved many of its own problems and SE Asia is a really large consumer market. Japan and UK are also developed in that internal investments will probably bring minimal returns, so a lot of funding these past few weeks have been coming in for "emerging markets" like SEA.
Tech level is surprisingly not terrible... I think Malaysia is technologically a little ahead of Portugal and Australia, even though the Australian education system is a lot better and salaries are 3 times higher.