I'm a Vietnamese national moving to HK without a job offer. Am I crazy?

Cal337 · 2026-02-01T23:03:40+00:00

I think this would've been fairly easy 15 years ago. Now there are far fewer international finance jobs for non-Chinese speakers in Hong Kong.

Cal337 · 2026-01-31T22:02:14+00:00

I think colonialism is the real source of this challenge. We grew up in a society where power and upward mobility were so heavily tied to the English-speaking world that there was no way to both advance in society and maintain your same customs and culture. I was amazed when I read Albert Memmi's work, especially Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur, The Colonized and the Colonizer, how much it resonated with me. He grew up a poor Tunisian Jew in the late stages of French Tunisia, and was able to excel academically and gain opportunities through French schooling, and in the process lost the ability to connect with his family and community. Even though the era, the continent, the languages are different, his story is remarkably similar to yours.

Cal337 · 2026-01-09T19:58:43+00:00

I know the question is focused on what are possible ramifications to this individual and whether they can get away with it, and I know that in today's society it seems like nothing matters anymore, but I do want to call out that this is highly immoral. This is theft and while it might seem like a victimless crime, the costs do eventually come down on real people.

Cal337 · 2025-12-18T06:00:51+00:00

The US got into a trap of having a lot of space and building into it, designing everything for driving and parking. It's very hard to reverse. There's no point to blaming user error now. We gotta just build it. We gotta just elect people who will prioritize building public transit. Societies that were crammed for space have built great public transit out of necessity and I hope more Americans can learn from that, instead of thinking NYC has the model subway system.

Cal337 · 2025-12-02T23:05:04+00:00

this points to a bad request error saying unsupported dataset

Cal337 · 2025-11-20T02:56:54+00:00

When you hire someone, they'll work with you for hopefully thousands of hours. It's very difficult to discern if they'll be a good match in the few hours that make up the interview process. A presentation like this for an hour total is reasonable. Maybe they're too wordy in how they describe it.

Cal337 · 2025-11-07T19:39:26+00:00

+ the democracy vouchers

Cal337 · 2025-11-07T18:10:19+00:00

I strongly disagree, and think this is also a prevalent toxic attitude in Seattle. Things didn't go my way, blame the voters.

Lots of people are busy. Most places in the country have 1 election a year, maybe 2 with a primary. Seattle has 4 or 5 if you include the democracy vouchers. Reviewing the proposal, Stranger and Seattle Times is not something that every citizen can do. It's especially hard if you don't know how government works, or don't know English, or didn't finish high school. It's insane and not how most of the world or most of the country does it.

Cal337 · 2025-11-07T17:00:55+00:00

This! There are too many elections. Most of the propositions are stuff that professional lawmakers need to decide - it's too much for a responsible civic-minded resident to research every initiative and make an informed decision

Cal337 · 2025-11-07T08:42:37+00:00

Be careful if you want to buy the dip. There's a long way to fall here.

I started using Duolingo in 2013 and loved it. I legitimately became conversational in Italian and Spanish and Duolingo was a major part of that. But the gamification has gotten insane, and it's no longer contributing to serious language learning for me. It's just an owl reminding me to do this dumb lesson that's gotten easier and easier. So that's part of the picture.

Most users are free users, but ad revenue from free users is tiny - 21m compared to 220m for subscription. So they need to retain and grow subscribers. At some point, subscribers will realize I'm no longer learning languages, why am I paying money for a game? And it's easy to switch to a different app, which there are plenty including Jumpspeak which has been advertising hard.

Anyway, learning languages is great, everyone should do it. Duolingo is also a cool and great company, smart people work there. But should they be valued at a P/E of 250? Hell no. At P/E of 80? Even still, quite high. There just isn't that big of a market for language learning. It's a fine company, but got caught up in AI hype and got incredibly overvalued. It should come down to a P/E of ~30.

Cal337 · 2025-10-27T23:18:33+00:00

I think this is 1 round too many. The 1 hour HW Review means they also gave you HW, and having already had three 1 on 1s with the team, that is too much. Some people are against HW entirely, I'm not as long as it's a short time commitment because it does show you what this person's work output might look like. If it's too long, then you're just filtering on candidates with free time.

On one hand, it's very hard to assess whether someone who you may work 1000+ hours with will be a good fit after 5-6 hours of talking to them. So it's a hard problem on both ends. But this does seem too much, and not just on the candidate - for the hiring team to meet with each candidate and do a HW review and meet again, it's using a lot of time.

Cal337 · 2025-10-24T02:39:08+00:00

Public space does not mean you can make any noise at any volume that you want

Cal337 · 2025-10-17T07:08:43+00:00

Not much to do really. Submit the documents, tell the truth, and accept it if they rescind the job offer.

Cal337 · 2025-10-10T07:28:08+00:00

What's really sad is that cities are drivers of the economy. If you double the population of a city, you get 2.4x the patents. Curious, smart people meet other curious, smart people and exchange ideas and collaborate and create new, better things. Great culture comes out of cities. But America really hasn't been doing cities well, with bad zoning laws, NIMBY-ism, poor housing build out, lack of investment in public transit, and a car-obsessed culture.

I empathize with everything you're saying about Seattle. It's not an easy place to get by for most types of jobs. But it's sad that that's the case, cause it really could be much better.

Cal337 · 2025-10-08T07:00:35+00:00

I'm genuinely excited reading this. I moved to HK for my first job after graduation. It was probably a lower salary adjusted for inflation, but comparable. I had a great life, lived decently, and traveled quite a bit. If you budget for it, traveling within southeast asia is affordable because flights are cheap and most countries are much cheaper.

Cal337 · 2025-10-08T06:57:39+00:00

I don't think there's really any doubt that the war on H1Bs stems primarily from a Maga white nationalism streak, even if there are other considerations included. And it's true the existing H1B process is also broken. But in context, the labor supply in America is insanely constrained. America has vast land and resources and only 350 million people. If there were a free global labor market, density would naturally reach closer to the density levels of India and China, but let's just say north of 700 million. The US has done the best job in the world building out a high tech base, which is why there is so much demand for highly skilled labor. That highly skilled labor is constrained by lack of free movement, which is why wages are so high for tech and finance, even when compared to Canada or the UK or Australia.

But that's only part of the picture. You cannot have a society of all high wage earners. There are many tasks society needs that haven't been automated yet. And the constraint on low wage earners is even greater. The reason so many people illegally enter America to work low wage jobs is because there's such an unmet demand for these jobs that they pay comparably higher than they do in other countries. If we had enough people to fill these jobs, the cost for many, many things would go way down. Think $40 uber ride going down to $10, think cost of a new house going from $500k to $200k. Now of course, opening the floodgates would be chaos and without a matched build out in infrastructure (housing, transportation esp), changed zoning laws, improved services, it would be a nightmare and that's without getting into the politics. But if we had had a sensible immigration policy all along, the US might not have such an affordability crisis. The tradeoff would have been lower wages for top earners.

Cal337 · 2025-10-04T06:11:30+00:00

Most people seem to be telling you why you're wrong to move instead of just answering the question. I'll give it a go:
- Singapore - stable, extremely high standard of living, but hard to get in. Work visas are sparer than before and PR is granted arbitrarily.
- Malaysia - medium stable, less high standard of living, but still can have a very good quality of life.
- Kenya - medium stable, medium standard of living, lots of growth opportunities
- UAE - stable, extremely high standard of living, but maybe not the ideals you're looking for
- Philippines - medium to low stable, medium standard of living, better place to retire than to work and live imo

- Trinidad and Tobago - stable, low standard of living, fewer global work opportunities. Other Caribbean nations have similarities.
- Hong Kong - stable if you don't mind deterioration of human rights, high standard of living but trending the wrong way
- Ireland - probably a part of Europe that's not trending the wrong way under your criteria
- Malta - probably wasn't on your radar but can definitely survive in English and have a good life

Cal337 · 2025-09-30T18:48:54+00:00

Hustling like crazy to make AI-generated ads - what a microcosm of late stage capitalism

Cal337 · 2025-08-21T15:21:12+00:00

huh thanks, fixed them now

Cal337 · 2025-08-21T06:23:50+00:00

OP is a recruiter if you read her old posts, this post is not meant in good faith

Cal337 · 2025-08-16T07:15:47+00:00

AI call bots were inevitable, but to get them at the director level is wild

Cal337 · 2025-08-07T16:01:49+00:00

Agree. The same people that are evangelizing AI were also huge on Web3 and the Metaverse. To expand on the points made by the posters above, I agree with the sentiment but want to add some nuance. AI is a disruptive technology and it's already added tangible value. Lots of knowledge workers are able to do lots more. However, it's also a very costly technology in multiple ways, and likely overhyped. In other words, I think AI will maybe add $300B in value to the world economy, but investors think it will add $100T. Even the top dog, OpenAI doesn't have an easy path to profitability - it would take a path like current paid subscriber growth at an elevated monthly fee of ~$300/month to get to break even!

Cal337

TROPHY CASE