> s. pokta wrote:
> this is kinda embarassing, i m 40min away from the border but i m not exactly updated on IT labour cost there. (my current biz isnt IT) I think US $500 /mth is possible in beijing and some some mid-size (cost) cities. more expensive in ShangHai and ShenZhen (my guess 700-1000). probably $300 in cities like XiAn.
>

My friends dev center was in Beijing - I was surprised $500 a month got such quality people - this was around 2001 - 2003. In the end his company went bankrupt after blowing through close to $75 million. The never got to receive their last $25 million installment.

Again, great idea, but do you really need 150 employees (90 of which are engineers) and locations in San Jose, Tokyo, Beijing, Germany, Korea and Switzerland before you have a truly saleable product?

i think that rate was about right (2001-2003). it should be at most $600 now. i went to BeiJing last yr and went to ShangHai and GuangZhou in May. ShangHai is most expensive. prob less desireable for IT. BeiJing has had a famous "IT park" for a while..

there is an additional consideration, greenspan (US gov) has been pressing china to float (or appreciate ) RMB. it looks like the yuan will hv to go up in the near future. that will increase cost for outsourcing to china.

>Experience is a little hard to assess sometimes. I usually start by comparing fresh grad from Uni. For US 10K a year, i am sure you can get top student (fresh grad again) from any top university in China. at that rate, u can expect someone with decent english fundamentals.
>

Can you please list some of the top Chinese Uni's?
Also, how is mainland Chinese or "domestic" Chinese attitude towards stock options? The HKers and Taiwanese I know all love them but maybe because they were acculturated in US? I think HK has a very saavy entrepreneurial population and attitude and people there "get" business.

The top 2 Us in China are BeiJing U (Harvard equi) and QingHua U(like MIT)  -- both are in BeiJing, and they are opp to each other too. US grad schools are fighting for students from there. There is an IT park near to the Us, the name is "Zhong Guan Cun" (Cun = village) www.zhongguancun.com.cn   this place has become pretty famous. i heard beijing is only liveable in may and oct, it has arizona summer but minnesota winter. :) 2 trips a year doesnt sound excessive :)

I heard there are a few other pretty famous colleges in BeiJing, sorry i dunno their names. Fudan U and JiaoTong U in ShangHai are very famous (they are prob like UCB or Rice) too.  A few more in places i dunno. XiaMen U (Fujian province) is prob ok and ZhongShan U in GuangZhou (Canton province)  should be pretty good ( like UCLA or something). For IT, Zhong Guan Cun is very famous now but there is another cluster in GuangZhou which i am more interested. cuz i m only 3 hours away by land.

sorry, i cant provide more, i know US colleges better. :))

nope, HKers don like stock options (it was desirable for only a short time during the dot com boom). works much better for tech companies in Taiwan. mainland Chinese like cash :) or something to improve their career prospect like exp in a foreign company (as you hv mentioned). yes, HKers are very entrepreneurialimistic. :))))). and calculative, stock options arent doing well in the stk mkt recently. actually, stk options still work well for the minority high level management, not for mid-low level sweaters.

>if you are setting up in south china (like GuangZhou or ShenZhen) many companies hire a project manager from HK and make him lead/coordinate a team in china. dont be surprise ppl in hk are not tht fluent in english (much more manageable compare to china though).
>

Interesting.

>when i post my interest in China, i was hoping to know more from other ppl about china. if u guys are interested, i'll post when i find out more.
>
>i think communication prob can be overcome if u dont go too far outta major cities. i see lots of westerners in china now. also, unlike other fields (with hardware burden), i m not worried about politicial issues and stuff. if you are in IT and esp in development stage, you can easily pack your company in a harddisk and carrry it to another country.
>

All problems are surmountable it just depends on how much you want to invest in planning and of course doing due diligence, etc.

Some months back we all say the horror story where a US startup just threw a development project over to India and didn't check up for like 6 months and then almost a year later flew over and found the entire dev staff was working on a competitors product - in other words, the mgmt team has to be smart, pro-active, communicative, set expectations and have an arsenal of countermeasures in stock to address principal threats and risks.
 

YES, i recall reading tht too. personally i m not too thrilled about going to (setting up operation) India until i need a scale of 200 ppl. and the need of good english is essential. for programmers, i don think english is the most important thing. Many of my classmates from ucsd who were very strong in programming skill had really bad english. Sometimes they called me and said "sorry man, call u late, becall i wing the wong number just now"  i heard a few wings and wongs are in the valley now :))) ... i am sure you know better.

But in my experience, most people are doing that or talking about it - based on what I see in newspaper quoting VCs, top Silicon Valley execs, etc. - they just see cost savings and say, "Hey they speak English, they are Americans" and they just throw a project over the wall and wait for the results to come back over the same wall.

well, like you said before, many ppl (including the VCs) are chasing hype or following trends blindly. depending on the job, some are more suitable but not all. Call centers with a scale of 100 or more is very suitable for india (also philippine), i think. very stupid to do that in China. As for IT, i think there might b a little too much hype for india. China is not too bad, slightly shorter in flight time compare to india for californian companies.   btw, i don think they teach students to hate US in school. as a matter of fact, they admire US. sometimes there is some pride thing and bitterness in political issues, i usually ignore tht.

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