It's definitely getting closer to that point - for example winnie the pooh is a popular meme used to make fun of uncle Xi but it's hard to police given that it's a children's cartoon. It hasn't stopped the aggressive censoring of pictures of winnie the pooh (no joke) but it has definitely presented a challenge. Using vague historical anecdotes and rarely used imagery is a traditional Chinese mode of communication - in modern days you can see it in action via the aggressively close reading people do of CCP mouthpiece newspapers - the use of certain terms signal a greater ideological shift which people will then try to adapt to/guess at. Personally I'm curious about how this mode of communication will evolve given the current development of automated policing algorithms which will undoubtedly take context into account.
Bravo Stripe! I work for a company that allows me to work remotely pretty much whenever and it has done wonders for my productivity(no interruptions to flow) and overall happiness level. The 2 hours/ day of time I used to spend commuting are now spent cooking/going to the gym/home improvement/gardening. I save tons of money and have never been healthier or happier. As long as I stay a software engineer I don't think I'll ever take another role that doesn't let me work remotely. Of course I am strict with myself about working during work hours and have good rapport/trust w/ management. Just my 2c
my impression is that unless you're in a super high-demand and high-level role (ie. Andrew Ng), it's still not that appealing compared to the US. For engineering roles, you're going to be worked harder and for lower pay than in the US. As an engineer with a degree in Chinese, I originally planned on working in China but found much better options stateside. Some of my colleagues have been successful in getting decent business-side tech jobs in China, or doing supply side stuff for businesses based outside of China.
While I agree with you about the money and work-ethic, I think some aspects can be far more rewarding than in the US. In China, you're not making an absurd of money for it to only go to taxes and COL. Instead, you make a comfortable amount (comparably) and can still live a good life. I also haven't found it particularly difficult to get good offers. Quality systems engineers and architects are in high demand in China (due to both the ML boom but also low quality of this particular aspect of CS education there) and so if you find the right company you can be making just as much as in the US if not more (speaking from experience).
Assuming living in a Tier-1 where the tech-hubs are (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen), rents for a 2/3 bedroom apartment somewhat centralish (these are vastly larger, more populous, and higher density than most American or European cities) will be at least USD 2000, possibly 4000 depending on taste (apartment, not house). Pension may need to be privately paid, and tax-band will be above 40% for anything that can support the above. Purchasing equivalent consumables like food and eating out western-style will be the same or double than the cost in most of the USA. If with kids then international schools are pretty expensive in China, over USD 20k per kid per year. International driving license not hard but car questionable as the above Tier-1 cities have restrictions / waiting lists / lotteries on license plates.
Cost-of-living adjustment is only relevant if: no kids, no pension, able to adapt to eat locally (quite hard for a lot of people especially when hitting the ground with a full time job), don't mind a 30-60+ minute subway commute (cheaper rents).
It sounds like you never really tried to integrate, so here’s my experience living in Shanghai, the most expensive mainland city - eating mostly Chinese food I would eat stuff like jianbing with chicken and pork for breakfast for about $0.80, lived in a studio apt in a shikumen building 5 mins walk from IAPM/陕西南路站 (I would consider, quite central) for about $400/mo that I actually found on Airbnb, not even using local apt finding services (bc I was there relatively short term, 4 months, and didn’t want to sign a lease) where I could have found one even cheaper probably, and was eating out for dinner at an average cost of maybe $5 to $7 per meal, or around $20-$30 if I wanted to splurge.
Then again, I took time to learn Mandarin against the advising of expats who reassured me that I’d never get any good and therefore should just not try, so maybe that’s where my perspective differs.
Sounds like your problem is trying to replicate western lifestyle in China, if you do that everyone sniffs the blood and will find ways to rip you off on everything. Though yeah, schooling probably would be a pretty big expense - no way I’d send my kid to Chinese schools either.
+1 to this. If you try to live the same way as you did in the States, without trying any of the more hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and only go to like, Pizza Hut (which is considered a decent mid-end fine-dining restaurant), for sure you will spend 100 RMB+ per meal. But getting buns, dumplings, beef noodles for 10-30 RMB is in no way a remote possibility, but they definitely don't look Western.
COL is a little better, but far closer than people think.
Real Estate prices in the best areas of Beijing can easily top $1,000 a sq. foot to buy an apartment (though there may be an inversion in rent). Comparable cars are more expensive. Consumer goods are about par. Education for kids can be expensive.
Food can be cheaper in China. But a western quality life in a first tier city will not be all that cheap.
Anecdata; I live in berlin and get about the same salary as my uni friends who stayed in Paris.
I live in the city center 5 min away from my office and can eat every single meal in a restaurant + go out every other night for a couple of drinks without even having to look at my bank account.
I'd be bankrupt in two weeks if I had the same lifestyle in Paris. Sure iphones and vacations cost the same, but restraining your day to day life (aka 95% of your life) to get the next apple gadget or plan your next vacation seems like a pretty bleak life plan.
So you've chosen the right place to live. As an engineer who changed the country and got salary adjusted, it's just bad economical life choice. It's better to earn more, your options are just so much wider. You can save money, invest etc.
Before I could buy iPhone for less than 10% of monthly salary, now it would be more like one monthly salary.
I use iPhone as the example, but the life for me is not 10x cheaper, maybe 2-3x.
Therefore, unless you have some other reasons, choose place with highest salaries or companies which don't adjust or work remotely.
Directives like "v-if" and "v-model" are core to Vue and used regularly in every Vue project I've seen. What's your reasoning for avoiding them and what would you use instead?
Ah, let me clarify. I meant creating new directives. Using the core directives is needed the best use of Vue directives. Creating new ones should be used sparsely as it obfuscates your code.
We have 1 directive in our entire application and it's pretty complicated however the use of it is pretty amazing it allows our app to have a straight forward approach to permission allowing to hide/disable elements with good performance.
Honestly I must be super tired since I just re-read it and I see that it's using existing directives instead of creating new ones...
I work in midtown NYC near a Chick-fil-a location. Used to be a line down the block, went with a friend yesterday thinking we caught the line at a short time but turns out they were using smiley employees with ipads coordinating orders and that they were serving arguably more people than before. Very impressed with how seamlessly they've integrated tech in their brick and mortars in contrast with the countless "cashless" restaurants that just add cruft, inefficiency, and customer resentment.
I have a friend who used to be a shift manager at Chick-fil-A. I can't remember exactly what he called that process... It was like meet and greet or walk and talk, but it's surprisingly efficient for the drive thru. He said it cuts down the average wait time for customers around 15% at his location.
I don't know what it would be like at NYC since it's not a drive thru.
It's crazy efficient. When you walk in someone with a tablet takes your order, and by the time you get to the cash register your food is ready. Works so well because the employees are able to catch customers at the end of the line.
Slightly off-topic, but what's the reason that Americans all tend to line-up at the drive thru? I was in LA, there was a huge line at the drive thru, so we parked, went inside and got our orders really quickly.
The comfort of still being in your own space. For example, listening to your own music, no excursion for your kids to belabor, precisely don't have to park and get out.
Yeah, I think I would rather wait 10 minutes in my car than 5 minutes in line. I'm sure other people may feel differently. And something about the drive-thru still "feels" faster, even if it's not. I think it's just the idea that you get to pull out and be on your way after you've gotten your food.
At McDonald's at least the drive through is prioritised over walk ins. That said if the queue is still long it might be quicker to walk in. But inside if orders come at the same time they do the drive through order first.
I guess it also stops people from leaving. Since once you made an order you're more invested to stay and pay for it. But if you were in a long line you might get fed up and go somewhere else (or get a phonecall to do something etc).
True, but I've generally found the line moves fast even when the line is out the door. The main bottleneck in most fast food places are putting your order in at the cash register so if that's removed it speeds things up a lot.
Chick-fil-a does not run the iPad software but it does integrate with their systems. The same company who sells their POS software runs the iPad software and I believe the Chick-fil-a One app.
For sure. Meant it more as a response to contents of the article that they've managed to break down their business processes into a subset of (dare I say) microservices that have allowed them to pinpoint weaknesses in efficiency and improve upon them - ie. the waffle fries example mentioned.
Why do you consider the cook "a poor sod"? Because he/she is working a job and making a living? I imagine you didn't mean much by it but understand that just because everyone isn't employed in what many consider desirable professions doesn't mean their work is not important or that they don't take pride in what they do.
Not meant to be a rant, just wanted to make the point.
I actually interpreted the comment a bit differently. I read it that the employee who used to have some autonomy on when to make adjustments is now doing it because the computer, which they (perhaps) have no control or insight into, is telling them to. I'm sure there's more nuance and people who would view that instruction differently. But to the comments direction, I'd assumed it was alluding to a dystopia of sorts where we do more and more things "because Computer™ said so".
In hindsight, “sod” wasn’t the right term to use (that’s what you get for posting at midnight) but the point I wanted to make was the removal of meaning, autonomy and human interaction when not only are you doing a repetitive job, but how you’re doing it is dictated by a machine. The movie Brazil came to mind, although I’m sure there are better parallels to make.
You'd be amazed how much satisfaction you can get out of learning to keep a steady stream of perfectly-crispy fries going. It's quite fun on a busy day - hectic, but strategic, and rewarding when you can stay on top of things _and_ produce minimal waste in the process.
In some sense, the automation of demand prediction takes some of the fun out of gaining that intuition yourself. On the other hand, it is nice not to be the queue blocker with orders piling up behind you because you weren't prepared for a sudden burst of traffic...
There’s a short-order chef game my kids play on the iPad, you can practically see the endorphins pumping when they manage to serve all the customers in time.
The human brain is definitely wired for this sort of thing.
From my days in those kinds of jobs I'd welcome it. I won't have to go count how much we have on hand. I just drop whats listed and move on to something else. My problems would usually come from "a system" that were missing large steps or prerequisites. "Start frying 1 batch of fries and other in 4 minutes" except the fries weren't cut the night before so both fries wont go in for another 20m. Or the food in the fridge is no longer fresh enough to serve, so we're down some food for the dinner rush.
What!? I LOVED my fast food job as a high schooler. It was fast-paced, and good work. I likely would have enjoyed getting instructions from a computer, lol. I certainly wasn't some poor sod.
That is strange to have a cashless restaurant. If anything cash is preferred. I know of a few places that only accept cash. And in the last week my debit card chip has been malfunctioning so I have to pay cash for everything until my new one arrives. I even attempted to use nfc today. That is a shit technology and was a waste of time. The POS terminals simply don't work.
I used to take it one stop uptown in the mornings - often several downtown trains would come and go before one going in my direction would arrive. Incredibly annoying.
As someone who has built with both professionally, I'd say you're spot on. Vue has been great to work with because its readability and low-barrier to get started, but nothing beats writing plain-old JavaScript with some JSX. Not to mention, Vue can get really hairy with something as simple as passing props between components while React makes that a breeze.
Also curious about why someone would choose Vue/JSX over React. My argument is essentially in favor of JSX, if Vue or something else uses JSX in a more interesting way or creates something better than JSX, that's cool.
- Not all features (e.g. most built in directives) work in JSX, and some 3rd party libs didn't work at all as JSX components.
- The JSX isn't a direct mapping to the object properties in `createElement`, which is how (almost?) every other flavor of JSX works. This means you don't just have to learn the the low-level `createElement` API, you also have to learn how that API maps to JSX. [1]
For example, you can't do `<div domProps={{ innerHTML: 'foobar' }} />`, which you might expect if you just read the `createElement` docs. Instead, you have to use `<div domPropsInnerHTML="foobar" />` (but note that not all `domProps` actually need the prefix [2]). Likewise, event handlers use an `onEvent` camel case convention that maps to the `on` property in `createElement`, which is kinda nice because that's how you add event handlers in other JSX flavors. However, it also means that if a Vue component accepts an `onSomething` prop, you actually have to do something like `propsOnSomething` [3] in JSX, because passing just `onSomething` would convert it to `on: { something: ... }` instead of `props: { onSomething: ... }`.
Overall, when I was trying to use JSX with Vue, it very much felt like a second-class feature, tacked on primarily (if not exclusively) to help convert people from React. However, Vue's flavor of JSX doesn't seem to appreciate that the simplicity of how React maps JSX to `React.createElement` is a large part of its brilliance.
In other words, I think that Vue's flavor of JSX introduces just enough magic to make it confusing. It sacrifices consistency for haphazard ergonomics, making the experience frustrating for someone used to JSX being just an XML-like alternative syntax for `createElement` (or `h` or `m`). I think Vue's JSX would be much better if it didn't try to do any magic, and just forced people to write stuff like `<button on={{ click: () => {} }} />` instead.
In the end, I gave up on using JSX with Vue, tried templates for a bit, didn't like them, and moved away from Vue altogether.
Caveat lector: Things might be a lot better now. I tried to read up a bit to see, but I didn't dig very deeply.
He was living in Beijing. As a Chinese-speaking westerner who lived there for a year, I can tell you the air pollution alone is enough to do it. While reports seem mixed on whether he loved his gig like you did, I imagine his family's culture shock was probably creating a great deal of stress as well similar to how you described.
