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What you describe reminds me of the peer review system in place at a previous company I worked at. The review period was every 6 months. The way it worked was that as an individual you'd rank (and comment on) everyone you had worked with the previous 6 months based on your perception of how much value they added to the company over those previous 6 months. It could be based on some project they delivered, or them simply always answering your questions about something you needed to know to move your own projects forward, or them participating thoughtfully in company wide discussions. Once everyone had submitted their rankings, an algo would figure out everyone's final rank. The various pay level cutoffs would then be decided by eng management.

It so happens that at that company everyone's title was simply 'Software Engineer'. There was no ego bs so it was a great place to work. I think how helpful you were to others being part of the review is another reason for that. There was a way to see some people's 'rank' by looking at the org chart if you really wanted to. In general swe and senior swe would be under an eng manager, if someone was directly under a director that told you something, and if someone was directly under a vp that also told you something.

I agree, I don't think they'll gain much traction in the west. However, they'll still have access to, and be competitive in, the massive markets of China (of course), south east Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Combined that's over 3.5B+ people.

A 3rd platform will likely come from Huawei. They have the resources and the incentives.

Canada also has a telecom cartel. The CRTC, which is the gov't regulatory body (and which is controlled by the telecoms), limits access to the market.

If you work in tech writing software or building hardware this has no impact on you at all. You can still do the exact same stuff, you just can't have 'Engineer' in your title. This stuff only really comes into play for say civil engineers signing off on the final design of a project or a chemical engineer doing the same for some plant.

The graph seems to indicate that rich countries are spending a lot on R&D as a % of GDP. $ per person would be great though.

Edit: What's interesting to me is just how dominant business R&D spending is for the larger economies. The top spenders in nominal terms are all large diverse economies. The main industry that came to mind for me is the auto industry. The top countries all have massive auto industries.