[johan_larson]

I worked for Huawei in Canada for a bit less than a year before I left, because my boss insisted on assigning me work I didn't believe I could deliver on.

Of course I was only there for a short time, so I could be mistaken, but I did note that 75% of the employees in the lab (in Canada) were Chinese, as were seven of the eight first-level managers. That said, I never felt badly treated because of my ethnicity, and I never saw anyone else treated badly either. While it is possible things could have ended up this way for innocuous reasons, I would bet against it. I'm guessing some informal "good fit" discrimination is going on.

There is also an awful lot of Chinese spoken at the company. They try to run their foreign operations in English, and I have to give them credit for putting some real effort into it. But given the distribution of their staff in Canada and even more so over in China, in practice things switch over to Chinese quite frequently. It makes sense that they do this, since some of the engineers in China struggle to communicate in English, but when it happens the non-Chinese are excluded. And it's hard to object when one is the only blue-eye among a dozen Chinese.

Given what I saw, I would advise any non-Chinese engineer considering taking a job at Huawei to consider alternatives carefully, and absolutely not take the job if they do not speak Chinese and do not plan to learn it.