I worked on a Deutsche Telekom cloud project, which was somewhat internally competing with the …

I also worked on the telco side and we did dd for huawei equipment in 2010 (it was early days of IMS). They actually flew us to their hq in shenzhen and i spent weeks there. I haven’t seen anything like what you’re describing but one thing I remember is how paranoid about security (including physical security) they were always talking shit about “those thieves from zte”. I found this pretty hilarious and still do

In China, Huawei is known for offering competitive salaries but also demands a lot from its employees. Many people tolerate the toxic work environment in exchange for financial benefits, particularly as they gradually improve their family's lifestyle with their rising income. As a successful company, Huawei has also popularized the so-called "Wolf-like Spirit" among other Chinese firms. The "Wolf-like Spirit" implies an expectation to work extremely hard and do whatever is necessary to achieve the company's goals. One anecdote involves some Japanese customers who visited ZTE, a competitor of Huawei. To break the deals, Huawei allegedly sent individuals who pretended to be ZTE employees and entertained the customers with drinking and whoring for a week. No one should trust a company like Huawei. Or any companies with deep CCP connection from China.

All massively successful companies, especially starting from scratch are very demanding. That's one of the reasons European companies have faltered while Chinese ones (or American) are expanding. Can do attitude and hard work, there's no magic recipe. Work/life balance, Friday afternoons off, leave office no later than 6pm, 4 day week, etc are all very nice but then if your competition work their asses off 6-7 days a week you're going to be eaten alive.

> This one day, checking the servers in the DC, a manager-like dude was shouting at his subordinate engineer to fix things. I found it weird (and a bit unprofessional). I would call that highly unprofessional and a red flag.

Yes, that's quite typical of Chinese (and to a lesser extent Korean) work culture. Shouting orders, slogans, zealotry, fierce competition, 996.

Lol, same experience working with a big-ish Chinese game developer. The project manager I worked with for over a year had simply disappeared when I returned from a 2 week vacation, and nobody wanted to talk about what the reason was, only "oh, he doesn't work here anymore". Same but much more frequently for the regular developers, people you worked with just disappeared from one day to another with everybody pretending that nothing happened (of course I was an outsider in the company and nobody would have told me anything anyway, but usually you'd get an announcement or a good-bye-mail on the internal mailing list or Slack channel, but nothing ever, people just disappeared, and somebody else showed up to take their place after a a few days). Total clown show.

The environment you are describing is 'developing world', especially when it wants to play the catch up game. It can only get worse because they soon find out catching-up is a lot more difficult than they imagined. As a Chinese I don't want to work in Chinese companies, but I do understand why they do it.