Recruiting in China

With the potential to make a lot of money as a developer, especially since it is pretty easy these days to create your own app for mobile devices, we’re sure that there are many kids out there whose dream is to one day become a developer of software and games. However in China it is a different story as developers are typically referred to as “Ma Nong”, or number crunchers if you’d rather, since their job involves very long hours and apparently very little pay. Interestingly it seems that over in China, one developer has had enough of the long hours and bad pay, and when he quit his job, he decided at the urging of his girlfriend to start selling street food known as “shaobing”, a type of flatbread.

While it was a means to an end, it turned out that his endeavor proved to be more profitable than he had imagined and according to a report on Tencent, the developer (or ex-developer) now pulls in about $3,259 a month, which is reportedly double that of what he used to make as a developer! Of course $3,259 might not seem like a lot of money stateside, but over in China it is a pretty big deal. This by no means reflects the type of pay that all developers receive, since some employers can be fair while others can be quite stingy, it is an interesting twist on things.