Thursday, April 28, 2005

Human Resource_Who will you recruit?

When Marshall from Fast Company Now wrote about the difference in recruiting Chinese and American, I got surprised.

"I have met 28 year olds in India, China and Eastern Europe with IQs of 150, MBA degrees (as good as ours), an 80 hour per week work schedule and a salary of $20,000 per year. In the US for $20,000 you can get a bag boy with an attitude problem."


I believe that's the reason why many US investors rush to China, and why many Chinese elites stay in US.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a good catch

Anonymous said...

Can you please explain your logic?

I don't follow your sense of logic.

Doug Crets

Anonymous said...

I think tax, or the social welfare system to be precise, also plays an important role in this example.

Amy Gu said...

yes, exactly. but if you are the boss of a company, what will you do? Do you want to make the advantage of the cheaper labor? In other hand, if you are a smart people in a nation with lower-paid salary, would you tend to go to a higher-paid country?

Anonymous said...

Sure enough, there are smart people in China who get paid less, and work harder. Likewise there are plenty of clever programmers in India who can turn out good software at a very low price. (To be honest, this should be no big deal to anyone in China or India, although everyone knows that there are still things to be learned on both sides.)

But I think it's a bit silly to think we can compare one to the other. Someone who has lived in China for most of his or her life is going to find it harder to understand business in the USA, for example. Likewise we can expect people from the US to make mistakes doing business in China. (Although it's not mentioned as often that plenty of Chinese people make the same mistakes as well.) You can't just replace US MBA graduates with Chinese MBA graduates.

Amy, you're definitely right about people moving from lower to higher cost of labour countries (I made that move about eight months ago), but it looks like the possibility of making more money through stock options and owning your own business is still attractive to many people who return to China.

It's all about trading off a really good likelihood of being fairly wealth against a smaller chance of being very rich...

Dave

Amy Gu said...

Hi, Dave, your point is great. I, myself, has faced the choice between a good likelihood of being fairly wealthy and a smaller chance of being very rich. BTW, from where you move to where eight months ago?

Anonymous said...

I didn't actually move that far (well, 3 hours by plane is not far where I come from.) I moved to Sydney from Auckland, in New Zealand (although in my case it didn't get me much of a pay rise, I just got to live somewhere with a higher cost of living and more taxes.)

Amy Gu said...

hoho, that's interesting. I had friends in NZ, who are tired of life there and trying other places.

Anonymous said...

I was talking to a German workmate today. He was complaining that he had to work in Melbourne (it's a one hour flight). I had to explain to him that for people like me, a three hour flight is short (we think of a long flight as 10-12 hours.)

New Zealand is a fun place, but the things you can do there are different to other places. It's a good place for surfers (who can handle cool weather!)

Amy Gu said...

hoho, are you surfing?