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I thought conventional wisdom on this subject was that Japanese culture prizes conformity, so their equivalents of Jobs, Woz, Gates, et al would have been stron
by allenbrunson 17y ago
I thought conventional wisdom on this subject was that Japanese culture prizes conformity, so their equivalents of Jobs, Woz, Gates, et al would have been strongly discouraged from doing their own thing. The other side of that coin was that they are better at commoditizing technologies first invented in the U.S., like industrial robots, and RAM production.
Does this article mean that my assumptions are out of date?
- jbm 17y agoMy sense is that the conditions at small and mid-sized Japanese companies are reminiscent of the early 20th century, and are not compatible with producing innovation at a level necessary to sustain the economy. Some things that I feel contribute (take them for what they are worth) a) I haven't met a single female Japanese employee who hasn't been the victim of power harassment or other forms of emotional abuse. I can honestly say that 80% of women I have met at 5 different companies have been on some kind of psychological medication to cope with the stress at work. (Goodbye many useful innovations from female employees.) b) I have met people who work 15 hour days; albeit where work consists of 6 hours of doing nothing, 4 hours of work, and then another 5 hours of waiting for the boss to leave. (Reasons include saving face - and poor housing conditions.) c) The best university graduates tend to go directly to big companies; they don't create their own companies, because of the number of practical difficulties. (being accepted for & paying for rental properties, getting loans, etc..) d) Everything has a big city perspective, since practically everyone has to come to Tokyo to do something important. I can go through a hundred reasons; but the idea that there is some simple cultural issue that could be chopped away like a Gordian knot to solve the problem is a bit too simplistic.
- patio11 17y agoWe should talk about hacking Japan some time. Everything insane about large Japanese corporations just spells market opportunity. (In addition to the issues in the above post -- which I partially agree with -- you could pick "Engineers are grossly underpaid relative to skill", "No socially productive work is expected by anyone below the age of about 35", "Some of the best educations in the world are wasted on undifferentiated 'office work'", etc etc.)
- allenbrunson 17y agowhat do you mean by "socially productive work?" is that opposed to, say, "company productive work," or along some other axis?
- patio11 17y agoHow to explain this... when you're in your twenties, you're expected to do a lot of work to prove your dedication to the company, but it isn't really expected that that work will be productive work. For example, I am 27. We have other 27 year old engineers who cannot, in fact, program Java above the level of a CS101 student. They majored in e.g. library sciences, not engineering. This is not considered bad because they're Japanese salarymen and as such will be at this company for the forty years. If it takes us most of a decade to get them up to speed on the whole Big Freaking Enterprise Web Apps thing, well, that's just an investment in their future worth to the company. We'll have employees senior to them review everything they do and rip out much of it. In the engineering track, we'd assume that by 30 ~ 35 you've demonstrated whether you're going to be a net-productive software engineer or whether you should be moved into e.g. requirements analysis or producing documentation. If you're net-productive, you will start making stuff which directly affects the shipping products without getting exhaustively rewritten -- hence, socially productive. But nobody calls a 27 year old flailing away at his first for-loop non-productive. Of course he is being productive: he is training up an asset that the company will be able to tap in a decade. (And if he doesn't have a for-loop to flail away on he better find something to flail away on because insufficient utilization of him would reflect poorly on his team.) I have a quirky relationship to these norms because I'm a foreigner, so if e.g. I can be reliably tasked with building a system and getting it to production without needing line-by-line guidance by my superiors, well, everyone knows foreigners are quirky.
- heresy 17y agoThat's insane. How much are you exaggerating for effect? I have a hard time believing software engineers in the mid-20s can be so unproductive, or that any culture could be so accepting of such a thing. It doesn't mesh with my foreigners take on Japan, but then I have never lived or worked there.
- phreanix 17y agoYou're going to find this an interesting, albeit long, read. http://kotaku.com/5484581/japan-its-not-funny-anymore http://kotaku.com/5484581/japan-its-not-funny-anymore
- patio11 17y agoDoes this article mean that my assumptions are out of date? That sort of implies that Japanese were once lockstep conformists. I could take issue with that, at length, but instead I'll refer you to Sugimoto's textbook "An Introduction To Japanese Society". P.S. One of my favorite Japanese engineers swears blind that the iPod is just a Walkman with a Game Boy in it. I think that is almost as unfair as "Japan just improves on technologies that were invented by white people."
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- bdr 17y agoBetter than what Bill Gates called the iPod: a hard-drive with a headphone jack.