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China Programming Software Transportation Technology

VW Says China To Become Global Software Development Hub For Autonomous Tech (reuters.com) 186

Volkswagen will use Chinese software developers to help design a global autonomous vehicle architecture thanks to the prevalence of qualified programmers which carmakers are struggling to hire elsewhere, senior executives said on Monday. Reuters reports: As carmakers scramble to develop advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving functions, carmakers are struggling to find qualified engineers to build the software algorithms needed to teach cars the right reflexes. Volkswagen has 4,000 engineers in China, with an average age of 29, spread over five research and development sites and a rapidly growing number of software engineers. "In a short period from now they will be able to do 15 to 20 million lines of programming code on an annual basis," Volkswagen China's passenger cars chief Stephan Woellenstein said in Shanghai on Monday.

The prevalence of software engineers, combined with the country's willingness to roll out the infrastructure for connected and self-driving cars, will make China one of the first markets in which autonomous cars gain widespread acceptance, VW managers said. As a result, Chinese suppliers will help Volkswagen Group to design a global autonomous vehicle architecture, he said.

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VW Says China To Become Global Software Development Hub For Autonomous Tech

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  • by melted ( 227442 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @02:04AM (#58447688) Homepage

    Don't think I'd trust the software developed under a sweatshop-like 12 hours a day 6 days a week regime, sorry VW. Software made in the us by foremost experts in the field is bad enough to run into firetrucks as it is, this shit will explode when you press the engine start button.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      " thanks to the prevalence of qualified programmers which carmakers are struggling to hire elsewhere" is the key phrase.

      • by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @03:02AM (#58447778)

        " thanks to the prevalence of qualified programmers which carmakers are struggling to hire elsewhere" is the key phrase.

        This shortage is thanks to a long sequence of governments in the US and Europe who have put in tireless work over several decades to disassemble their education systems and stultify their populations so that they'll cheer when the money previously spent on educating them is spent to tax breaks to finance stock buybacks and CEO bonuses. You get what you vote for, especially if you allow yourself to be distracted from what really matters by non issues like immigrant caravans/flotillas supposedly coming to destroy your christian conservative civilisation. Meanwhile the Chinese put tons of money into universities and incentives for young people to go there. Is anybody surprised that their method worked better than the asinine political circus we are currently obsessing over at the expense of everything else except tax breaks for the fabulously rich?

        • by gtall ( 79522 )

          While I agree with what you said, I do not have a high opinion of the Chinese education system. My experience is that the product that system produces is big on replication, not education. I wouldn't trust software produced by that lot.

          • by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @06:27AM (#58448156)

            I work at a chinese owned car company, a big one, but we don't yet have a sales presence in the US.

            we have thousands in china and a few hundred in the bay area.

            I often can see the difference in approach and code quality between east and west.

            all I will say is: code and design from china mostly sucks. they are STILL windows-based (in thoughts and machinery) and while e-cars are all going qnx and linux (and android), the windows people still are the majority of the so-called programmers over there.

            they can throw 10x as many people at a project and it will still suck.

            there is a REASON software is done here in the US, for complex projects. china simply cannot do it; if they could, they would not ALL have local bay area offices where the real design is done.

            the bay area engineers are more skilled and experienced, but being a chinese owned company, we are a little too, uhm, 'thrifty' and this is going to hurt us, long-term.

            we also don't pay for performance and we don't reward top performers. the china way is: burn people out and hope they leave on their own, soon.

            this is NO WAY to do business. but sadly, its how it is, right now.

            (perhaps hold off buying chinese-made cars for a while, is my advice)

          • While I agree with what you said, I do not have a high opinion of the Chinese education system. My experience is that the product that system produces is big on replication, not education. I wouldn't trust software produced by that lot.

            It is just a different (extreme) way of teaching education. In western countries, schools tend to teach kids to be more expressive of what they think. These kids will try to broad their knowledge but at the same time rarely want to dig very deep in a certain area. Furthermore, teachers are more like friends to them due to the laws and their parents' involvements, so some kids have no respect to their teachers at all.

            On the other hand, Asian countries (not only China) tend to teach their kids to dig deep int

            • by e3m4n ( 947977 )

              from what I've read, S Korea is the exception. They are starting to get a large problem of teens/young adults that are so addicted to their online lives they forget to do things like -- feed their baby for 6 days. Sadly I am starting to see some of those coming out of highschool going down this path as well. Throwing their lives away just to jack into the matrix.

        • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

          by Cederic ( 9623 )

          Oh please. China has a higher population than North America and Europe combined.

          When you're looking for cheap programmers it's hardly a fucking surprise that you'll find some there.

          Chinese put tons of money into universities and incentives for young people to go there

          ..and yet despite the higher population China has less than 4/5 the number of students at university that America and the EU have, even without counting the rest of North America and Europe.

          Is anybody surprised that their method worked better than the asinine political circus we are currently obsessing over at the expense of everything else except tax breaks for the fabulously rich?

          Yes, I'm completely fucking amazed you claim their method worked better.

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by Freischutz ( 4776131 )

            Oh please. China has a higher population than North America and Europe combined.

            When you're looking for cheap programmers it's hardly a fucking surprise that you'll find some there.

            Chinese put tons of money into universities and incentives for young people to go there

            ..and yet despite the higher population China has less than 4/5 the number of students at university that America and the EU have, even without counting the rest of North America and Europe.

            Is anybody surprised that their method worked better than the asinine political circus we are currently obsessing over at the expense of everything else except tax breaks for the fabulously rich?

            Yes, I'm completely fucking amazed you claim their method worked better.

            They have an adequate supply of qualified developers and engineers, the EU and US in particular don't. That speaks louder than any words and has so far resulted in Huawei managing to research their way to owning 1529 "standard-essential" 5G patents, the most of any company, and Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, and VIVO lead the list after Samsung and Apple on the list over the biggest smartphone manufacturers. Underestimating your opponent is the mother of all defeats.

            P.S. Inserting a colloquial term for sexual in

            • by Cederic ( 9623 )

              They have an adequate supply of qualified developers and engineers, the EU and US in particular don't

              That's got fuck all to do with investment in education and far more to do with Europe and the US outsourcing much of their IT to low cost locations.

              Like China.

              Underestimating your opponent is the mother of all defeats.

              Being pragmatic and realistic about China's position in the world doesn't require underestimating them. It's actually possible to acknowledge their progress without attacking the education system in other countries.

              You should try it.

              PS: There's nowt wrong w' fucking

              • They have an adequate supply of qualified developers and engineers, the EU and US in particular don't

                That's got fuck all to do with investment in education and far more to do with Europe and the US outsourcing much of their IT to low cost locations.

                Like China.

                Underestimating your opponent is the mother of all defeats.

                Being pragmatic and realistic about China's position in the world doesn't require underestimating them. It's actually possible to acknowledge their progress without attacking the education system in other countries.

                You should try it.

                PS: There's nowt wrong w' fucking

                Automation has killed way more jobs than outsourcing has. In a world where automation is everywhere you need a high level of education in your workforce. The cleaning lady of the future is probably going to be a women running a fleet of cleaning robots with an tablet computer. You don't get there with a workforce trained in schools where the teachers are massively underpaid and there isn't even enough money to buy textbooks or put doors on the toilets. People were 'pragmatic' and 'realistic' about China (r

                • Give the Chinese another 20 years of reform and a sensible education policy and they'll surpass the US on every level.
                  China basically already has surpassed the US on every level. They only lack carriers.
                  I don't agree with the argument that their education system is not good. But I have no deep insights. China sends many students to study in Europe. My town Karlsruhe is full with Chinese students.
                  Yes full! You are in the queue for the cashier in a supermarket and you always see one or ore in your queue.

                  P.S.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          US schools have long been a destination for international students. Those students don't come here because our universities stink.

          I have a CS degree and have been involved in IT/Technology for over 20 years. During that 20 years, IT jobs have become far less desirable than they used to be. Long hours and the fear of being replaced by foreign labor has made a new generation of kids look elsewhere for career paths.

          During my time in school, anyone with a brain went into STEM. Now that I have kids, I see th

        • please, the chinese education system is hot garbage. source, my chinese wife, who went through it.
        • by e3m4n ( 947977 )

          You forgot to add political correctness in education. We don’t wanna hurt any feelings so we strive for mediocrity that way people don’t feel bad when somebody else does exemplary. Everybody gets a fucking metal for merely showing up. We no longer have contest to decide a winner, unless it’s sports. Some schools are even giving out the perfect attendance award even if the kid missed a day or two for a medical appointment or something along those lines. When you water down your reward s

        • Perhaps it’s also due to how engineering careers are perceived here. In countries like China or India, engineers are (somewhat) respected and engineering is perceived as a good and profitable career path. Over here, engineering is perceived as a long and difficult study with an iffy and poorly paid career at the end of it. “You could have been an engineer”, said no dad to his son in any movie, ever. The line is: “You could have been a doctor or a lawyer”. Science and engineerin
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          This shortage is thanks to a long sequence of governments in the US and Europe who have put in tireless work over several decades to disassemble their education systems

          Not in the UK.

          During the last Labour government a lot of money was put into education, and results improved quite a lot. The problem is that tech is very broad and while there are plenty of Javascript developers there are not many with more specialist skills, and companies are unwilling to train them.

          If you have those skills you can see that there definitely is a shortage - high salaries, recruiting overseas, all the usual signs... Except for training. Companies aren't willing to take someone and invest in

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • by dryeo ( 100693 )

            Not many True Americans left after close to 500 years of immigrants doing genocide on them.

        • Yet the actual data says the number of computer science graduates in the US is higher than its ever been. (Though it did dip for a decade following the dot-com bubble).

          https://docs.google.com/spread... [google.com]
          Source: NCES

        • by e3m4n ( 947977 )

          I should caution that throwing money at the problem doesn't solve it. Yes spending is needed, but spending wisely is needed more. I got really tired of reading /. articles about decade ago where high schools in california were installing $5k cappuccino machines for the spoiled little snowflakes. Buying a $5k cappuccino machine is not a wise expense. China has a cultural problem they are struggling to overcome. On my last cruise I met, at one of those veteran meet-and-greets, a couple that became professors

          • Buying a $5k cappuccino machine is not a wise expense.
            So you would rather buy every 2 years one for $500?

            Your interesting calculation of teachers pay clearly shows: they are under paid. No idea why you disagree.

            6h teaching per day is still an +8h day, or do you think they do classes "unprepared", never correct tests etc.?

            • by e3m4n ( 947977 )

              their salary for only working 187 days per year is significantly higher than average for my area. Thats why I gave a comparison. To pay a teacher with only 10yrs experience $59k, only work 187 days (ok add at MOST 15 more days) instead of the 250 work days out of the year the average person works. The University here puts out want ads for jobs. They want someone with a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering and they are only willing to pay $58k a year; and that job expects, at a minimum, a 60hr week commi

              • Your salary is probably not ok, too.

                But hacking on teachers, is probably the worst thing to do.

                60h per week are illegal in Europe, illegal as in jail time for the boss. Especially if a worker has an accident to or from work. The boss is basically already in jail in such a case.

                Less than 28 (depending of country) paid holiday are illegal, too.

                You are not fixing your society by letting teachers work more in your eyes. In most eyes they are overworked, regardless how you see it.

                • by e3m4n ( 947977 )

                  here in the US there have been nurses who have been sued for malpractice and thrown under the bus by the hospital for making a mistake after being made to work back-to-back 12hr shifts. Another thing about vacation time here, is something called PTO (paid time off) and they give you a bank of days (sometimes 16) where both vacation and sick time is deducted from. If your sick more than 5 or 6 days in a year that can really trash your vacation time.

                  They just recently passed a law for overime compensation fo

        • especially if you allow yourself to be distracted from what really matters by non issues like immigrant caravans/flotillas supposedly coming to destroy your christian conservative civilisation.

          I like your projection: totally original; not at all derived from echo-chamber talking points...

        • by melted ( 227442 )

          Tax breaks? In Europe? Please.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'd never trust yank software developed under sweatshop-like 12 hours a day 6 days a week regime, with no universal healthcare or workers rights, sorry Boeing.

      Also your "engineers" crashed that Mars orbiter because you couldn't tell inches in cm.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @03:00AM (#58447774) Homepage Journal

      Don't think I'd trust the software developed under a sweatshop-like 12 hours a day 6 days a week regime, sorry VW.

      Are you talking about China or a Silicon Valley startup?

      Besides, that ship sales long ago. Geely and Tata software is already in millions of cars, many of them old Western brands that they bought up.

    • 15 to 25 million lines of it.
      Are we sure proper thought is being given to the bugs, in particular security on these?
    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      That's how crunch has worked since I can remember it. If that's your criteria for not trusting software, no major software package in existence can be trusted.

    • Don't think I'd trust the software developed under a sweatshop-like 12 hours a day 6 days a week regime, sorry VW. Software made in the us by foremost experts in the field is bad enough to run into firetrucks as it is, this shit will explode when you press the engine start button.

      That is what I was thinking. Lack of qualified developers, or lack of developers willing to sacrifice quality for cost and time?

    • Have you looked into the working conditions of Silicon Valley?

    • Never mind the concern about lousy sweatshop quality; we should worry more about the security of software from a country that is known to participate in state-sponsored hacking. It's like hiring the Taliban to build a Baptist church.
    • by balbeir ( 557475 )
      From what I learned from being exposed to software written in China is that they don't seem to have a lot of good devs out there.

      Rampant amateurism and all comments and debug statements are in Chinese.

  • be for use in cars in China.
    Then for use in cars that China will export.
    German brands are tolerated for the crypto keys to EU academic support.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Beware chinaman bearing gifts. He clean out IP while you no looking.

  • Who'd want to live there :| Sry
  • by Anonymous Coward

    After all these years, nay, decades of writing software, after all the evidence to the fact that the number of lines of code have absolutely no positive correlation to the software's quality (on the contrary) they still use it as a metric. metric of what? their ability to hit the keyboard?

  • Can't find devs? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @03:56AM (#58447874) Homepage

    I wonder why. Speaking as someone who keeps getting turned down for embedded dev jobs despite having PIC and arduino programming experience along with my 20+ years of system level C,C++ and x86 assembler programming, I suspect its the usual case of a company wanting high grade skills but only wanting to pay low grade wages.

    • I wonder why. Speaking as someone who keeps getting turned down for embedded dev jobs despite having PIC and arduino programming experience along with my 20+ years of system level C,C++ and x86 assembler programming, I suspect its the usual case of a company wanting high grade skills but only wanting to pay low grade wages.

      FYI, if you are applying for a serious embedded dev job NEVER say you have Arduino experience. To an embedded dev an Ardiuno is a hobbyist kit stuck on top of an Atmel AVR (which itself is a very dated chip now). My advice would be to get an STM32 dev kit and learn how to build a program for the platform and run a few peripherals (without the libraries). An embedded dev who hasn't dipped into the world of ARM Cortex by now is looking pretty dated these days, which is fine if you have huge amounts of experie

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        8 bit is still huge and very well paid if you have real skills (not Arduino), because it's still unbeatable for some applications (low power being a big one).

        ARM is often using an RTOS and the peripheral libraries so it's opened up to many more developers who can't handle hitting the hardware directly. Often ARM is selected because it makes the developers cheaper, and facilitates the use of contractors to write individual tasks.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Might be worth taking Arduino off your CV and replacing it with AVR, and making sure you have some sample code showing you can do low level work. Unfortunately when trying to recruit embedded developers you get a lot of people who played with an Arduino and think they can do the job (not saying you can't), and it's got to the point where having it on your CV is a warning sign.

      Also a lot of automotive stuff is ARM based and they will want experience of RTOS. FreeRTOS and CMSIS are popular. It sounds like you

  • Now that the war is over and we at Volkswagen don't have a sufficient supply of slave labor we're packing up and going someplace that does
  • by monkeyxpress ( 4016725 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @06:04AM (#58448090)

    As an engineer this stuff makes me a bit concerned. I don't really see any reason why China is not going to take the bulk of the engineering jobs from western countries over the next ten years in the same way they took all the manufacturing jobs. I work a lot with Chinese suppliers. Over the last 10 years there has been a real shift. Sure you can still get your 'classic chinese experience' in Shenzhen, where you rock on up, expect to beat every supplier into the ground with cheap prices, then struggle with quality issues for the next 12 months. But if you go there and pay reasonable prices for stuff, then you get great service, great quality and good support. This part of the market seems to be growing rapidly over there.

    The chinese understand quality as well as most western people. It is just that many companies only go to china for cost reasons, so the chinese attempt to meet those cost expectations by cutting corners. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. If you go to the cheapest car repair shop you should expect that it is more likely they will try to rip you off.

    The trouble is that the Chinese have all the supply chain at the moment and this gives them a foot in the door of western companies. I know of a number of companies here in the UK where manufacturing was moved to china, and the chinese contractor offered to do the mech design on the company's next product for free. They did a good job and soon enough management was downsizing the engineering department and shipping that work offshore.

    They can do good mech engineering now, and electronics design, so why does anyone believe they won't be able to do software as well? I think it is just a matter of time.

    The problem for western countries is that their governments still believe they have some sort of inherent superiority; that just because they are 'developed' they will always be rich. So rather than taking china head on by investing in modern manufacturing and STEMS they invest in financial innovations that will apparently make us all rich despite producing no real value. It is a dangerous game, and in my opinion, at some point all this financial innovation will be show to be the fraud that it is, and the west will quickly discover that a bunch of engineers (or construction grunts for that matter) in a room is much more useful that a stadium full of lawyers when the real world infrastructure that supports western standards of living has fallen apart.

    Realistically the best hope for the west is that China gets taken over by lawyers and bean counters as well. What a sad state of affairs.

    • > Realistically the best hope for the west is that China gets taken over by lawyers and bean counters as well.

      So you are saying there is nothing to worry about?

      (And labor aint that cheap any more in China. And certainly for India, there are some very good S/W engineers, but they aint cheap. And the cheap ones are terrible.)

    • their educations is rote memorization trash. their companies only succeed because they steal from the west and block the west from competing. they are a no face country, and will be so until they remove their oligarchs.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      For services China has some big issues. The timezone difference between China and Europe/America is one. Language and culture are another. Japanese companies often open local subsidiaries with local staff running them for that reason.

      The company I work for uses an electronics designer in Germany. He flies over a couple of times a year for face-to-face discussions. He's very good, he responds to email fast, and we have a great working relationship. Doubtless we could get the same work done in China much chea

  • by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @06:54AM (#58448240)

    VW owners have been complaining that when they are in their car and make negative comments about various members of government, the vehicle abruptly changes course and drives them to the nearest police station while requesting intervention by the assigned political officer.

  • The prevalence of software engineers, combined with the country's willingness to roll out the infrastructure for connected and self-driving cars, will make China one of the first markets in which autonomous cars gain widespread acceptance, VW managers said.

    Also, China's blatant disregard for individual well-being will help with the roll out. If a few people get killed during testing, no biggie.

  • Small wonder (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @08:30AM (#58448588)

    "thanks to the prevalence of qualified programmers which carmakers are struggling to hire elsewhere, "

    VW's software developer were (are?) busy developing cheating software to get around the emission laws, thereby accepting willingly the death of additional thousands of people just for greed.

  • I didn't want to have anything to do with so-called 'autonomous cars' before, and I sure as fuck won't want to have anything to do with it if one of the biggest enemies of the West is going to have this much to do with it. I sure hope for Volkswagens' sake they audit every single line of code that comes out of China.
  • It actually makes sense to develop these cars in China. It's not that there are more qualified software developers in China, more than say in India, the US, or Europe. Part of the reason is that the wages are lower, although not lower than in other countries. The main reason is that China will be the largest market for autonomous vehicles due to several reasons. There is a push to electrify cars, which means new a lot of new cars bought in the future. There are huge emerging classes of workers will hav

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