When talking about a feature, am I doing basically high level system design? Similar to what a senior engineer does (aka this should be a cache, it’s best to change this to streaming so let’s remove the audit db, etc) or is it even more high level than that?

Also lol at the last line, never heard that but I can see why people might make the assumption.

No, you aren't doing that kind of high-level design. For example, I was the PM for the "connect to Wi-Fi via a QR code" feature in Windows (you're welcome!). As PM, my job was to :

- demonstrate that this was "thing" people would want to do - demonstrate that it slotted into the existing feature set (the existing Windows camera already reads QR codes, so we just had to use their existing hoooks) - do a quick evaluation of the WIFI: protocol (which, BTW, sucks; it's one of the worst standards I've ever seen) - do an evaluation of the overall market (like, what do other operating systems do)

There was also some discussions with the Windows Wi-Fi team for how to store the connection data since it wasn't a perfect fit for the our existing connection store, plus a security evaluation. You won't do anything about caches or streaming except that they will naturally fall out of your spec.

You'll learn a ton about writing convincing documents, how to find users and partners, tracking schedules, and stuff

Unless you’re a machine learning engineer with something to share, our current models are not even close to general AGI, and won’t make it.

My understanding (as just an engineer) is that LLMs continue to improve at crazy rates, but it’s clear this is not the answer for AGI.

But if we're being honest, frontier LLMs are effectively more intelligent than a non-negligible proportion of the population (for example, at pretty much all white collar IC work, pattern matching, problem solving, etc.). And in the ways that most people are still smarter (having sentience/emotions/desires that drive us to take initiative toward meaningful goals), I think it's great that AI does not match us there, but also doesn't disqualify it from being intelligent. The harness can bridge the gap there.

Surely that’s easy for Iran to hear about.

It seems weird to know the attack was coming and yet their leader still gets killed.

Is this 80% listening, 20% active using a good way to do it?

I was embarrassed how little I could say after countless hours of flash cards and other methods. I'd literally just comprehend nothing if someone talked to me. But after a few months of just listening it became much easier. I've thrown all the Anki cards away afterwards, it was just a waste of time.

Could I speak Japanese at that point? No not really… I even had a Japanese spouse! But we spoke mostly English at home. I could read quite well, but conversation was very challenging.

Then we moved to Japan. Despite not having a job that requires me to speak Japanese, I got enough live exposure just from chatting with people at the gym or in social activities that now, a few years later, I’ve backfilled all that conversational fluency that was missing. No special extra effort required, just living in an environment where I used the language reasonably often.

Anyways, the point is that all the time spent in Anki laid a rock-solid foundation that merely needed activation in the right environment for active fluency to emerge. Of course I no longer do my daily flashcard drills (and I’ve forgotten how to write quite a few kanji as a result) but the work paid off.

I have learned a lot of languages, and the method that worked best for me was to read books in which I was interested and to watch movies spoken in that language that were interesting, with the periodic help of a grammar and a dictionary.

Traditional language handbooks or other simplified sources have not been as useful as being exposed to a great amount of non-simplified language, which I reread and rewatched until I understood it perfectly.

It was essential for the books that I read and the movies that I watched to be good enough, so that I really wanted to understand what was written or said.

Even in the beginning, I did not use the grammar and the dictionary very frequently, especially with movies, but I attempted to guess the meaning of the unknown words and move forward with the reading or watching, without interruptions. Only later I confirmed or rejected my guesses with the grammar and dictionary.

For luxury car owners or people who want the statement, subscriptions are good way to capture additional payment. Since if customers wanted to pick the cheapest option, they would have already picked something else.

What if we trim even further, to just the ASCII control codes? My newline characters make the computer perform a special action to generate formatted output. Is that programming?

An empty file was an IOCCC winner: https://www.ioccc.org/1994/smr/ but you need to interpret that empty file as C source in order to reasonably claim to have programmed the computer.

My reasoning comes more from the other direction: someone who writes HTML is programming therefore HTML is a programming language.

Your earlier definition talked about giving the computer a capability, but that capability just seemed to be displaying a specific file?

Where is the cutoff on the line from HTML to markdown to ASCII? (noting that ASCII uses control codes that trigger special behavior)

I've created any number of empty files in my lifetime, and I wouldn't say that more than a couple of them were programming, but I don't think it's controversial to claim that the IOCCC submission I linked up-thread definitely was programming, and (maybe slightly more controversial) that my deliberate replication of the program when I first heard about it $mumble years ago was also programming?

In your specific example, if someone constructed an ASCII file which made use of the control codes to do something interesting (or even something boring!) then wouldn't that be programming? While typing ASCII into this text field isn't programming because the value of the information is in the human interpretation of the content rather than the machine having interpreted the content as code.

But the part that "does something" is the display-txt or display-html command that already exists.

I'd say that even something as small as setting up an alias for "display-txt your_file.txt" can be programming. But I don't see the act of writing your_file.txt as programming.

I don't think the exact example of feeding an empty file to a compiler is programming, even if you think it definitely is. It's playing around with commands to see what they do. It's like buying a box of lego, opening the box and seeing if any are connected already, and then walking away; you didn't build any lego today, you were so close but you didn't. Nothing about an empty file makes it "written in C", even if the intent is throwing a C compiler at it, and you need to be writing C in this situation if you want to say you're programming.

> In your specific example, if someone constructed an ASCII file which made use of the control codes to do something interesting (or even something boring!) then wouldn't that be programming? While typing ASCII into this text field isn't programming because the value of the information is in the human interpretation of the content rather than the machine having interpreted the content as code.

I need an example here.

ASCII art isn't programming.

If you tossed in something to reset your cursor position and made animated ASCII art, I still wouldn't call that a program, I would call that a weirdly formatted video file. And that's really cool but it's cool in a different way. And the value is still in the human interpretation.

If you're going to feed it into python.exe then it's probably code, but that's why originally talking about "programming languages" is a lot clearer. Your programming language in that situation is python. You are not using plain text as a programming language.

If you noticed BEL makes a beep and you use that to make noise or somehow music when the file is dumped to console, I'm not going to say you're using a programming language there either.

I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.

If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent. The US still has that advantage even if it has less of it, unless I am mistaken.

I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.

Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a foreigner. And having to memorize the tones is brutal.

Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. You're just drawing a bunch of symbols on a paper in geometrical arrangements. Which is beautiful but difficult if you're used to being able to spell words based on how they sound.

Unless, of course, you're typing on a computer. In that case you must type the latinised spelling of the characters without tones, then scroll through all the homonyms that match the spelling. Which is still extremely difficult because the consonants don't match Latin languages. And you must still learn the characters to know which one to pick.

Once you get through that, every sentence structure is different as well. Instead of "whose book is this", you say 这本书是谁的 which is like saying "this book is his" but you replace "his/他" with a generic word who/谁 representing that you want to know the person the pronoun was referring to. I can even write 这个什么是谁的 where I have replaced the word "book/书" with "what/什么", meaning I am simultaneously asking what the object is and who it belongs to.

You can effectively do this with any sentence or object. It's a much better designed language since sentences don't magically change the order of everything but it means I cannot think words in English and translate them piecemeal to Chinese. I have to know the whole sentence immediately.

Of course, once you learn this, you have to learn the Chinese idioms. And then everything gets worse because there's so many homonyms everything's a pun, which is why I'm stuck. According to Deepseek, 这个什么是谁的 actually means "what is this thing" and you don't care what the thing is, so it's not really the question. You have to reorder it and ask 这是谁的什么 which glosses as "this is whose what" which is a compound question that's grammatically impossible.

Also, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. Otherwise I'd do it anyways.

The characters are indeed a nuisance, but can be overcome with Anki/SRS. Chinese learners struggle with its tonal nature due to a lack of exposure to speaking/listening because they have no experience with tones. English speakers always decry Chinese tones as insurmountable as if it’s the only tonal language, but half of all languages are tonal, so it’s doable with practice.

In fact, Chinese has become more similar to Indo-European languages over the past century. Chinese now has an odd form of hypotaxis (think: conjugation, inflection, etc.), whereas it previously only had parataxis (combine two characters to generate something new). For example, 药性 (medicinal) is OG Chinese (ish), but now you have words like 科学性 and 简化, which make a lot more sense to an English speaker because they were noun-ified. Modern Chinese does this (literally) everywhere: all you see is 是, 性, 化, 的, 被. This makes the language much more amicable to an Indo-European native speaker.

Perhaps your difficulty is due to modern Chinese’s verbose (almost bureaucratic) syntax? These examples you gave make sense to me if you follow their literal reading. They sound stupid if translated to English, but not necessarily nonsensical.

> Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language.

It is much easier for me, as a Canadian, to move to basically any European country and learn the language there than to move to China. I would also earn more money than in China. This is true for much of the world.

Chinese is a better language to learn initially but that's like APL being better than ALGOL. Most of the world doesn't want to learn "{⍵[⍋⍵]}X" to sort an array "X". The network effects are key.

I'm still learning Chinese because it is obvious that with the demographic crunch there will be heavy incentives to migrate in the near future. I also have to work with Chinese suppliers and colleagues on a regular basis; it is rapidly growing in %age of workforce.

But I'd have to earn American salaries to move there, because otherwise I would just move to the USA and speak English, a language I already know and can be highly productive in.

China is terrible at diversity. They don't look like it because they don't have a history of foreign colonialism or slavery like the West. It's not based on greed/hate. But look at how they treat indigenous minorities (Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols). Banning minority language instruction, banning religious texts, mass surveillance, etc. They have a very hard time even integrating their own rural Han population (hukou system)!

In the CCP's worldview, diversity is not a strength. Historically to them, diversity=fragmentation=weakness (Warlord Era, Century of Humiliation). In contrast, Unity+Homogeneity is real strength. They want everyone moving to the exact same beat. (And maybe they're right, what the fuck do I know about running a population of 1.4B people)

In much of America and Europe especially the large cities you can become a citizen, because that's a legal construct. In China you'll never become Chinese. Look at how Africans were targeted in Guangzhou during the early stages of Covid, regardless of visa status. Evicted from apartments/hotels/restaurants, etc.

They have the hardest permanent residency system in the world. Between 2004 and 2013, they issued only ~7000 green cards total (the US issuing ~1M per year!)

>>> CCP's worldview, diversity is not a strength

These two sentences are contradicting each other.

i can speak the language just enough to get by but once you get into technical terms, i'm once again completely lost. Unless they do a Singapore or Dubai and make business in English, i dont see any chance of them attracting talent

They don't do naturalisation of foreigners, that's true. You can only give that to your children.

Tech people need to reduce complexity to make it computable, that's our job. Our strong points are the weak points too. Again: no blame or shame. Just wanted to point out we are susceptible in these matters.

I would think for most people, you care about whether you can fit economically before you consider something that is unlikely to matter.

Obviously don't go and try to immigrate to China if you are planning to be a political commentator.

But for most people in most places, what will you notice? Are there jobs, how is tax, are the streets clean, are there homeless people, can I see a doctor, is there a lot of paperwork? Will I find friends?

I seem to recall that is a problem with Switzerland too; people can be refused citizenship by bureaucracy at the local level. Yet people still flock there (perhaps because of the money).

This creates real difficulties in daily life. Today, almost all routine activities—online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing—are conducted through smartphone apps. If you can’t read Chinese, even basic tasks become complicated. In recent years, the number of foreigners living in China has declined compared to a decade ago. While political and economic factors clearly play a role, I suspect that the language barrier has also become a more significant obstacle.

Many Chinese people, especially younger generations, can speak some basic English, since it is a mandatory subject in school. As a result, interpersonal communication is usually manageable, and traveling in China is relatively easy. However, living there long-term is a very different experience from visiting as a tourist.

> online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing

Surely pre-smartphone, all the offline equivalents of these were also Chinese-language only? Especially in that era, effectively no taxi drivers or shop assistants would've known English, and you didn't have a phone to translate for you.

Whenever I get lunch or dinner north of Toronto with colleagues, the restaurant has no English signage. But because the Chinese restaurants have no waiter and all orders are through a website I can translate the ordering interface on my phone.

  > Chinese is too difficult of a language.
  > I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
  > Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. 

Do I wish I spoke English natively? Not really, but these anecdotals are... interesting.

Oh, just like English!

/s sorry I'm only half-joking but written English makes no sense

Or they write words incorrectly because it doesn't even closely match the pronunciation.

I never said English was a superbly designed language, just that it does make sense when you look at the entire history and etymology. But yeah, it's a heavily-kludged mess, though it is pretty good at being accessible for new learners just because it's flexible and has a relatively simple grammar.

But I also spent over a decade learning Mandarin and am still trying to maintain it... the characters are just another level. My son at least can take a stab at reading words he hasn't seen before; having to look up basically every new character is quite a grind.

They put more emphasis on the meaning of the word than reading itself. As opposed to French where you know how to read it instantly–but you don't necessarily understand it.

In English, I realized that there are words I mispronounced/misread my entire life before hearing a native person say it outloud. That's because I only ever encountered the word in its written form.

I was driven to the store, so I drove to the store. The store drove me there.

My passenger was driven to the store so he asked me to drive him to the store. So since the store was driving us to the store, I drove us to the store. We've become good friends since he was driven to the store. I'm glad the store drove us to the store.

Even though I usually prefer to drive cattle.

I have openly stated that it is a strictly less technical language and often draws teams in to vague specifications and much more verbose language to find specificity. I have billions of dollars in progress to back that up.

There is a lot about Chinese and American culture that will surprise you when the rubber meets the road.

So how is the language "strictly less technical and specific"? Can you give specific and technical examples?

Rote Surgery is not a good example compared to say writing a PRD about an unknown feature.

I am in no way saying Chinese people cannot do these things. I am saying in mandarin it is less specific and more circumspect ways of getting there.

I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.

I'm not sure why you're getting so defensive; I indeed don't speak Chinese, hence why I'm asking a question.

A claim like "Chinese as a language is less technical and specific than English and slows progress" seems pretty grand; and if Chinese people failed to launch satellites in orbit or do brain surgery you could point to that; but they don't seem to be held back by their language when it comes to making specific, technical achievements, so I'm curious to hear actual, concrete details or examples about what makes Chinese a "less technical and specific" language.

It sounds like your answer is "it simply just is, because it's a courtly language" - which is not a very satisfying answer, intellectually speaking.

English has 26 characters you can put in a buttoned keyboard. You recurse upon these letters to create new words & meanings. Chinese has what, a thousand? And you'd have to create a stroke system first if you don't have hanyu pinyin. Recursing Chinese characters has problems too, the chinese word for 'good', when split to it's sub-characters represent different meanings.

There were also some Chinese historians that specifically pointed out the chinese language was part of the cause of their worst slices of history despite the chinese having invented gunpowder and whatnot first. They also noted chinese was confined to the elite, who made the language even more complex (in contrast to other civilizations), during certain dynastic periods. Today, the chinese government are trying to simplify the language.

I get that there is pride in people's native languages, but they'll repeat the same mistakes if they don't recognize the weaknesses. It's a bitter pill to swallow.

Was that Chinese text actually being ambiguous, or was that translations you were given being nonsensical/having so much context errors? The latter is kind of an expected behavior for translated technical texts, and that has nothing to do with whether Chinese are illogical bunches(why even bother contacting if that were ever the case...)

Chinese textbooks for University quantum physics are written in Chinese. They don't like, switch to English after high school or something. And they do in fact do brain surgeries and fly manned rockets. The language is obviously fine as it is.

The likely core of the problem you had encountered is that, languages are algorithms of thoughts, contrary to whatever Chomsky guy might have told you, and a language is only coherent within itself, and you weren't aware of that. A piece of Chinese text taken out of context and words displaced with that English used in similar manners, don't necessarily make sense. Rest assured you'd be far from alone with conflating lack of coherency of someone not from US trying to speak English with their lack of IQ, that's a common sight, but that doesn't mean a language you don't speak is inferior to yours.

Chinese is different, more contextual and metaphorical, requiring more 'fuzzy' linguistics to say the same thing.

Thats its... thats all. And I challenge anyone who works across china and US like I do to not agree. Beyond that you're just going off on your own made up missions of stupidity. Really re-read your train of thought and think about how wandering nonsense it becomes with assumed things I didn't say.

Language specificity and cultural encoding in those languages can have a pretty major impact on its clarity, especially in critical situation. Speaking a secondary language instead can avoid that sort of thing simply because being a non-native speaker, you'll be a good deal more blunt in that language.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801

English is the language of aviation because in 1951 the countries with the most living pilots and aircraft spoke English. It is not because of any trait particular to English.

There are few recordings of aircraft emergencies over Japan on YouTube. Two obvious things in those recordings are that local pilots drop pretense of speaking Engurish in almost any non-normal conditions, and that local ATCs are dangerously useless outside of normal conditions. There's nothing visibly helpful from using English in there.

My favourite example is Arabic, which is both an old and hard to extend language.

In Arabic you would have a hard time to express the concept of „a foreigner who is citizen but resides out of state“.

Not that we often speak about this concept in English, but the word used to refer to „citizens“ carries the connotation of „nation“ and the alternative word used for „inhabitants“ carries the connotation of being on site.

Speaking of a Yemeni citizen and than meeting an Asian person, would surprise people even if they new that the person they were meeting was named „Ho“.

Loan words do not easily slide into this. New words are less easily made up than e.g. in German, where you can just concatenate.

Lots of words have been around for a long time, since quranic Arabic influences the language still, and as a result have layers of meaning.

So identical to French then!

Nobody has any delusional ideas about it- xenophobia is a luxury the country cannot afford.

At this point in time, I don't think people are lining up to get K visa to go live in China. But if the current trajectory continues in the US, who knows how things will be in 5 years?

[1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-entry-exit-k-visa...

Say what you want about ICE, but the reason they wear masks is that the US citizenry still holds power (explicitly with firearms, implicitly with voting, and legally via the judicial system).

In China, they don't have to wear masks.

(And then a U-turn where anyone that doesn't wear a mask [even for participating volleyball matches or flute concerts] is an enemy of the state. And if you are a disabled elderly and lockdown yourself, refusing the state-mandated tests, you are an enemy of the state. And they knock down your apartment doors to gas your cats and dogs.)

I really hope the red necks tearing down the procedural system of justice, as well as the left network hosts that got bedazzeled just after a trip to china know what they're asking for. Beware the wishes you make.

As compared to that Irish guy who has been in the US concentration camp for 5 months now, the court ordered his release which ICE just ignored and they won't deport him either. Yeah, definitely sounds much better than what China is doing.

Concentration camps have a long history (you can start with the Wikipedia article on the topic). Nazi concentration camps in 30s and 40s, and the holocaust that they are linked to, happened over a relatively short time period in that history that continued even after. So Godwin's law indeed, brought about by yourself.

What the US does is bad, but somehow Americans think that means everywhere else is better.

Illegal immigration really isn’t a thing in China beyond a few North Koreans in Dongbei and a few Laotians in Yunnan. So they just won’t assume you are an illegal immigrant.

That does not seem to be all that related to the original post I was answering to. An average person / citizen / visitor has way less to worry about around (trained) Chinese police than they have to worry about around an (gangster) American ICE agent.

The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.

Nobody sane is going to believe rhetoric claiming that the US is somehow worse than a country that keeps 1.5 million people in concentration camps, and where people work 70 hours per week, no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.

I have about a dozen friends spread across 8 different mid-to-high level universities around the country in biomed. Europe and Canada are definitely a preference but China is entering conversation and has been for the last few years.

The alternative is to abandon an entire career or field of interest because the funding is held up by irrational national political policy.

As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation. 10 years ago, if you were someone, you wanted to come to the US. The best students in the world came and stayed.

Things are radically different now. Much of the best talent no longer comes and when they do come they leave. It's night and day.

It's not a binary choice. It's not the US or China. It's the US or Canada/EU/etc. And if you're from China, you used to stay, now you leave.

This isn't reddit. I saw this first hand.

This discussion thread is very specifically about the US vs China, however.

Whatever makes you sleep at night.

> no matter how many times Reddit tells them so.

Oh god, are we still stuck in that "Reddit is a niche US nerd cave" mindset? In most countries where the youth speaks good English you'll see more under 30s on Reddit than on Facebook or Twitter.

On both counts, you're too stuck in your ways. Times have changed, gotta keep up.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/facebook-...

Reddit has far fewer users in most countries outside the US than facebook.

Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.

> Also, I don’t like the current US administration, but you cannot make the claim somehow China is better, especially to minorities.

Luckily I didn't make such a claim, instead just rejecting the premise that "The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.". That global reputational advantage has been cratering with no signs of stopping, and is indeed on pace to run out long before "decades".

I don't think this is the case at all.

Do you want to go be an immigrant to a country where the media shows masked agents rounding up suspected immigrants to disappear them in vans?

Do you want to depend on research grants in a country where scientific institutions are being dismantled? Where the administration openly opposes established science? (Medicine, carbon, etc).

Consider for example having the capacities to produce your own energy (food and electricity/heat) - these are core expenditures for most people besides a place to live. All these are direct consequences of productive land control (you can even live on the land you grow food and have solar panels on).

So if one owns and develops an environment to supply their fundamental needs autonomously and near-automatically - that would seem to be a deep value store that is about as long term as the environment can hold up.

Edit P.S. we've observed what industry has accomplished with vertical integration... why not apply it to our inputs, to increase autonomy of abundance in outputs?

Only if you ignore everything the US has done to the rest of the world.

The car that's actually been super-popular outside its own national borders for a long time now is the Toyota, not anything from the US. BYD is indeed changing this.

To put it bluntly, China quite literally doesn't need (nor wants) the average software dev on HN. The immigrants they would likely want are those with expertise in much harder technical disciplines (semiconductor R&D etc.)

China is working multiple technologies hard.

Taiwan doesn't have the people to match that breadth.

India isn't matching that investment.

But the flip side of that is that China’s talent pool is a lot smaller, in practice, than 1.4 billion. Because vast swaths of the country are still basically the third world. Tellingly, China does not participate in the international PISA assessment across the whole country: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... It released scores for four wealthy provinces back in 2018. They were very high, but there’s obviously a reason China doesn’t test and publish scores for the whole country.

Income disparities may have some impact on teacher quality, but the difference is often less significant than people assume. Broad access to education tends to matter more than whether a particular middle-school teacher is exceptional. In fact, students in some inland provinces frequently achieve very high scores on the national college entrance examination, driven in part by strong incentives to gain admission to top universities and pursue opportunities in more economically developed regions.

Among younger generations, illiteracy is virtually nonexistent. With nine years of compulsory education mandated nationwide, basic literacy rates are effectively at 100 percent.

So quantitatively, China’s pool is still very strong.

Having the people is important, the IS needed immigrants to have people, china already has enough people, it just needs to bring them up to par, which will only taoe a generation or two, and china is patient

But PRC's actual talent pool is their 20 year back log of 10-15m per year births (100m+) that hasn't gone through tertiary, i.e. about another 40m+ STEM assuming they don't increase tertiary enrollment (currently 60%) or tertiary (40%). The worse case scenario for PRC is they will have ~OCED combined in STEM (not including other tiers of technical talent), or 3x+ more than US, assuming US pre Trump immigration patterns.

E: sentence meant 60% tertiary enrollment of which 40% is STEM... aka they're "only" throwing 1/4 of cohort into STEM with 2 denominators to raise.

I wouldn't go that far, Chinese espionage is a very real thing, with industry secrets being some of the top targets.

Learning mandarin is the major blocker imo, more people would move if the language was easier.

But then, learning to read and write requires enormous additional effort. When I learned in Beijing, I'd spend a couple hours a day working on grammar/speaking/listening - and then like 6 hours a day of rote practice to get familiar with characters.

I moved to Singapore although it had nothing to do with my language skills.

All over? No. But I know several software engineers who went to China to work in tech and they can't stop raving about how good they have it there - one came back to work for a US company(remotely from his EU country) and is now desperate to find some more work in China again, he liked it that much. The language barrier is a problem sure, but then again I also know software engineers who went to work in Germany and after years they don't speak a lick of German. It's not an insurmountable problem.

You can ask Google for metrics:

- China produces about over 1.3 to 1.6 million new engineering graduates per year.

- The USA produces about 130,000–200,000, or about 1/10 of China, but has a population of about 1/4.

- Europe is hard to measure, but USA plus Europe combined is almost certainly less than China by a significant margin.