i've been in Hong Kong for 6.5 years already. Worked in small consultancies, large logistics company, and local startup.
PROS:
a) Salary is high, especially if you get to work in finance/insurance/luxury retail fields
b) disposable income (aka savings) is extremely high as income tax is low, no more than 17%, also, no capital gains tax!
c) great hub to work and explore Asia
CONS:
a) IT jobs (development mainly) aren't that exciting as they are mostly outsourced to cheaper countries so you ended up being a lonely team member in HK or in management type of jobs. There's always exceptions to this (Credit Suisse, Lalamove, Chengbao to name a few)
b) tech is lagging behind in all aspects, from testing to devops. For example; Continuous Integration I'm yet to see a team in mid to large companies effectively having and respecting the build. This can be seen as an opportunity if you are willing to try.
c) You work longer hours, more stress and generally fewer vacation days
However, if you come here to work as a founder to be closer to Shenzhen (factories), you also reap the benefits of an established legal system in Hong Kong. Plenty of highly motivated fresh graduates as well.
Not to discount the value of your experience in HK, but I feel compelled to point out that in all practical aspects (legal, fiscal, market, visas, business culture, transport, food, education, medical, etc.), certainly for anyone who has spent time in the mainland, Hong Kong isn't even remotely the same as living and working in China.
high as in I usually have 50% of my income available after paying rent/food/transportation and other costs. Rent is high if you keep "western" standards for your living space, likewise for food.
That's a great point about access to Shenzhen from HK. How's the language barrier been? Have you had to learn both Canto and Mando and read both simplified and traditional? Is there a distinct advantage to living on one side of the border over the other?
The hard part living in HK for a lot of people is real estate price. It's extremely expensive either to rent or buy apartments. Lot of people live in apartments less than 200 sqr feet, and the average living space per person is less than 100 sqr feet.
Moreover, Shenzhen is one of China's tech capitals while HK is mostly finance.
HK has uncensored and fast internet. The language barrier can be a issue but English is still widely spoken, even in remote areas of HK like where I live. I know enough Canto for numbers, food and the rare times I get a taxi. I can't ready anything though. There's a big question mark as 2047 looms closer, which is till when China promised to keep HK the way it is now (capitalism, different currency, open, legal system and so on).
> There's a big question mark as 2047 looms closer, which is till when China promised to keep HK the way it is now (capitalism, different currency, open, legal system and so on).
Some elementary schools also have a non-trivial number of mainland children who cross the border every day for school. Birth tourism for mainlanders was big in HK (they've cracked down on it now) because Chinese born in HK automatically get HK permanent residence.
It sounded like you lament transition the from Cantonese to Mandarin and you make it seem like a bad thing, near equivalent to the loss of rights and freedoms. I don't feel that way.
Sarcasm aside, Spanish is not easier for Chinese people since barely anyone speaks it in Asia other than nouns in the Philippines. Mandarin is easier because it's already the primary language for most Chinese people and not just the mainland. It's also generally easier to speak and understand compared to Cantonese. Having one standard language is an advantage vs having a million "dialects".
There are many bad things about the HK handover. Standardizing on Mandarin is not one of them.
TOTO has been researching and improving toilets for many years. I've been to their Toilet museum in Kitakyushu, Japan and it's just amazing the research they put into it, specially in water savings measures. What's missing for them, it's to make them more affordable to everyone.
Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Sony, Nintendo, Canon, Suzuki, Yamaha, Panasonic, Toshiba, etc. are household names. I'd say that the Japanese have plenty of internationally-savvy brands, I wouldn't pity them :p
For sure. The thing is, Japan is very industrious and innovative in certain areas, it could have many more international players if it would push more abroad. Much of their services sector for example is almost purely concentrated on domestic market. Same goes for heavy industries, household devices and media industries, with some exceptions in gaming. Toto is a perfect example - they were 20+ years early in washlet innovation but never marketed them much abroad. There's a tendency of giving up after just timid marketing campaigns abroad I think. The most successful examples are mainly where they've built up foreign subsidiaries with a certain amount of autonomy, such as Honda & Toyota in US and Europe.
The problem is that there is no way to make toilets "affordable" for people who really need it. These people who live in 3rd world countries barely manage to put up a roof on their head out of whatever material they can gather around. Their lives often run in debts with zero money to spare on anything. They often don't have money for two proper meals a day. The only "affordable" way for them to have toilet is if you built one for them for free.
There are 892 million people without toilet as per Wikipedia. Assuming 10 people sharing toilet, cost of building one toilet is $500 (assuming government gives land for free), solving this problem will require ~$50B investment world wide. This is about half of own money Gates foundation can possibly donate. Also, critical part is ongoing maintenance. So self-maintaining toilets that is very cheap to setup is very critical research to solve this problem.
Toilets can be cheaper than you expect - in some places cultural barriers may be the main problem. Here's an extract from an excellent book called Poor Economics [1]:
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The conventional wisdom is that today, at $20 per household per month, providing piped water and sanitation is too expensive for the budget of most developing countries. The experience of Gram Vikas, an NGO that works in Orissa, India, shows, however, that it is possible to do it much more cheaply. Its CEO, Joe Madiath, a man with a self-deprecating sense of humor who attends the annual meeting of the worlds rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in outfits made from homespun cotton, is used to doing things differently. Madiaths career as an activist started early: He was twelve when he first got into troublefor organizing the labor on the plantation that his father owned. He came to Orissa in the early 1970s with a group of left-wing students to help out after a devastating cyclone. After the immediate relief work was over, he decided to stay and see if he could find some more permanent ways to help the poor Oriya villagers. He eventually settled on water and sanitation. What attracted him to the issue was that it was simultaneously a daily challenge and an opportunity to initiate long-term social change. He explained to us that in Orissa, water and sanitation are social issues. Madiath insists that every single household in the villages where Gram Vikas operates should be connected to the same water mains: Water is piped to each house, which contains a toilet, a tap, and a bathing room, all connected to the same system. For the high-caste households, this means sharing water with low-caste households, which, for many in Orissa, was unacceptable when first proposed. It takes the NGO a while to get the agreement of the whole village and some villages eventually refuse, but it has always stuck to the principle that it would not start its work in a village until everyone there agreed to participate. When agreement is finally reached, it is often the first time that some of the upper-caste households participate in a project that involves the rest of the community.
Once a village agrees to work with Gram Vikas, the building work starts and continues for one to two years. Only after every single house has received its tap and toilet is the system turned on. In the meantime, Gram Vikas collects data every month on who has gone to the health center to get treated for malaria or diarrhea. We can thus directly observe what happens in a village as soon as the water starts flowing. The effects are remarkable: Almost overnight, and for years into the future, the number of severe diarrhea cases falls by one-half, and the number of malaria cases falls by one-third. The monthly cost of the system for each household, including maintenance, is 190 rupees, or $4 per household (in current USD), only 20 percent of what is conventionally assumed to be the cost of such a system.
I don't know if it's in this book, but I remember reading that apparently there's also a "class shaming" effect that can also help: if you can get the poorest members of a group to do something which is perceived as advanced and ultimately beneficial, everyone does it, eventually, out of shame of being "outwitted" by the poor.
This is the seminal book on marketing, social cognition, innovation, etc. It blew my mind. Mostly that we've known this stuff for so long, but apparently must keep rediscovering it.
Coursera advising and/or helping sanctioned individuals sounds like the kind of thing that would blow up in their faces and make the overall situation worse, not better.
PROS: a) Salary is high, especially if you get to work in finance/insurance/luxury retail fields b) disposable income (aka savings) is extremely high as income tax is low, no more than 17%, also, no capital gains tax! c) great hub to work and explore Asia
CONS: a) IT jobs (development mainly) aren't that exciting as they are mostly outsourced to cheaper countries so you ended up being a lonely team member in HK or in management type of jobs. There's always exceptions to this (Credit Suisse, Lalamove, Chengbao to name a few) b) tech is lagging behind in all aspects, from testing to devops. For example; Continuous Integration I'm yet to see a team in mid to large companies effectively having and respecting the build. This can be seen as an opportunity if you are willing to try. c) You work longer hours, more stress and generally fewer vacation days
However, if you come here to work as a founder to be closer to Shenzhen (factories), you also reap the benefits of an established legal system in Hong Kong. Plenty of highly motivated fresh graduates as well.