> will shoot you an email if you do not mind

please do, always happy to get mail from fellow HN'ers

> Initially Huawei had that reputation of stealing back in the days when they were caught reverse engineering Cisco router OS code

agree, they did that :( What always puzzles me is how the West keeps underestimating Asian countries / societies abilities to outperform them. They did not see this coming after the lesson from Japan (e.g. Toyota) establishing a beach-head in the West and by initially copying them, later they move to upmarket by perfecting what they have and beat them with confidence. My uncle bought a Mazda in the 80ies and he was ridiculed for buying such a cheap-ass car. (iirc the word "rice bowl" was used to make fun of the quality). When it comes to telcos/tech it seems that we are witnessing the same thing again. When I remember the outcries over moving sites to China and giving them access to our repos - with the only promise in return "that the market will eventually be opened to them", it seems obvious that the established NEV's made huge mistakes here. People in the lower ranks have been vocal over this but their cries were drowned out by those pushing for cost-reduction at all cost (since it meant short term gains in their balance sheet which the mgmt could cash in on). Especially in this field which is all carved up by big players and no room for small innovators the strategy has always been short-sighted. I could go on and on, ... Now they're all crying and pointing fingers at the Chinese boogie man when the root cause of this is their own incompetence. When it comes to vulns CISCO is probably an interesting case. They literally sold countless backdoors as undocumented features over the years. I don't know of any company that violated basic security principles as much as them.

> -NEV is a tough space, margin rates are so low yet your hip phone manufacturers are making bank $

it's really hard for NEVs and has been for years because operators are reduced to utilities. (the phrase "dumb pipes" has been thrown around in the industry ever since youtube/streaming took off). And they're all pushed to reduce costs while at the same time innovating. Within the NEV's the mergers were always justified with "Huawei is on the rise and this is the only way to compete". It started with the Alcatel + Lucent merger and the rest is history. Now it seems NEV's don't even think about organic innovation anymore and only view it through the angle of merge with the second largest to stay ahead of Huawei. There is very little IP that is created these days internally. At least when you compare their core R&D headcount to patents it's quite a joke. :-/

Getting back into this game today should nevertheless be much easier than it was when you were working on 2/3G. I had no knowledge of the stack yet they were somehow convinced they wanted to hire me. It was weird. I didn't have any connections either. It dawned on my only later that the move from CS to PS networks meant that my skills suddenly became interesting to them (before I did systems & security development for web companies). And with PS came the people who brought the agile mindset ... low and behold everyone in Telco now talks about virtualization, CI/CD and stuff you never heard the old guys talk about. In a similar way the Automotive landscape was transformed a decade later (a sim-card with wheels that is using Ethernet instead of CAN). @pmarca was right when he said SW is eating the world

I'd imagine it would be difficult finding a spot with the big ones, mentioned in this thread. They often have a hiring stop in many Western countries which forces them to outsource good jobs to external "suppliers". If you get a gig like this it is usually great money provided that you land in a department with a cool boss (always a gamble in these bureaucracies). Also being geographically flexible helps especially when you want to carve out your niche as a consultant. When they do eventually hire for internal jobs then they usually look to convert these "externals" into "internals" before they even announce it.

Another route is to closely follow a hot topic that you are passionate about at ETSI. (avoid anything that smells like Enterprise vaporware like their TLS middlebox clusterfudge and you should be good). At ETSI you can find small companies that are still innovating in areas which aren't considered the core-business of the big guys (public safety comes to mind). Also the good news is that the topics here (https://www.etsi.org/technologies) are widely applicable across industry silos. If you just focus on telco you might lock yourself in too much which defeats the effort (of doing the legwork required to penetrate these fields). In any case play the long-game otherwise there is no point (imvho).

EDIT: another thing ofc is virtualization. SDN, SD-WAN, and all that. If you're into this kind of turtles all the way down complexity it's a great selling point: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9446-sd-wan_a_new_hop ... other areas I could think of is security and further automating delivery pipelines. I have so far not seen any web based (or even automotive) company that puts as much money into CI/CD as the big telcos do. Fines for downtime of a eNodeB are in the millions/day so the quality/automation angle always sells well. Reducing the time that it takes to map responsibility between a trace/bug-report to an actual developer/tester to look at the problem is real $ saved.

> What always puzzles me is how the West keeps underestimating Asian countries / societies abilities to outperform them.

The same smug condescension is frequently on HN; the third comment right now reads in part ...this lack of value around creativity and direct inventorship makes the Chinese a super formidable second place in many arenas but without the skills or cultural DNA to actually take the lead or be the expeditionary force... If I were China, I'd encourage this attitude until I was good and ready - a little paranoia and an assumption of competence would help (come to think of it; this might be the whole point of the recent flood of China stories, if one were to put on their conspiracy theory hat.)

indeed, these people need to travel more, or at least read Confucius / Sun Tzu. They all forget that they're thinking long term and not like in the West where today's short-term profit trumps all that might make sense in the long-run (not just companies but already starting from the way families work).

I'm convinced that this complacency, ignorance and attitude of superiority is also the kernel to their downfall and demise. The aging US/EU as a viable market simply is a joke when compared to the potential of the Asian markets.

I asked an Italian double Michelin star chef once where he had the best dish of authentic pasta ever. He said in Tokyo (but that it was closely followed by his mothers recipe).

Not saying that the Chinese are as quality obsessed as the Japanese, but there are countless similar points where the West just misses things because of ignorance and the Emperial feelings of superiority.