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Comment by bgee | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's true that Zoom has its "entire dev team in China"; doing some research myself reveals Zoom definitely has engineering operations in the US[0][1].

I'm not disagreeing with you on the implications of having engineering teams in China, I think you would like to put that paragraph in your original post to give some context.

[0] Tech job postings in US: https://zoom.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Zoom/0/refreshFacet/318c8...

[1] H1b filing on engineering positions: https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Zoom+Video+Communications+...

edit: better formatting and grammar

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Thanks - I edited it to soften the language a bit.

Is it called "soften the language" to fix a 100% factual error?

Honestly I feel that if you're arguing in one direction or another and haven't checked the facts, maybe it's better not to argue about it?

The vast majority of the Zoom software development team is based out of companies in China.

They do have support people in the US and a handful of non-support engineering which is why I said thanks and immediately updated the comment to say "majority" instead of "entire" since it's more correct.

That technicality is less relevant to the main point of the argument.

They do have a large R&D presence in China.

As of January 2020, they had 2,532 full-time employees. Of those, 1,396 were in the US and 1,136 were in international locations. Within the 1,136 is "more than 700" employees in R&D in China.[1]

A LinkedIn search for "engineer" working for "Zoom Video Communications" in location "United States" shows up 558 results.[2]

Their entire management team is in the US, and of their 17 data centres, only 1 is in China.[3][4]

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1585521/0001... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetCurrent... [3] https://zoom.us/team [4] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/05/04/navigating-a-new-c...

My point was that you should check your facts before making an argument. Not exactly a crazy idea, right?

Your “point” was to be an asshole, and congratulations you’ve now succeeded twice.

I think you're just being overly sensitive to criticism. Not admitting that you're bullshitting is very weak. Maybe the two goes hand in hand.

If the original claim was "100% of the dev team is in China", and the reality is "only 80% of the dev team is in China", then that'd be a 20% factual error, mathematically speaking.

Or would it be a 25% error, i think it would make most sense to calculate the error-difference in relation to the actual value instead of in relation to the erroneous value.

Good point.

Haha. Do you also calculate levenshtein distance from true to false and say false isn't entirely false but a bit of true? And is it almost factually correct to say that 10 equals 8?

> And is it almost factually correct to say that 10 equals 8?

I mean, from a certain point of view, why not? If you're thinking in terms of 1, they're wildly different. If you're thinking in terms of 1,000,000,000,000, they might as well both equal 0.

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