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My 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 innov
by jbm 17y ago
My 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.
- patio11 17y agoAre you familiar with the significance of the word "FizzBuzz" as it relates to programming skill levels? Tolerating non-productive programmers for long stretches of time is not a trait unique to Japanese corporations. We expect ours to eventually grow out of it, though.
- jbm 17y agoDude, you're seriously welcome to stop by sometime and eat with me. I'm sure we'd have a million ideas. Mail me sometime (jawaad.mahmood at!_? i do.t softbank d.ot j.p) What gets to me is how there is absolutely no respect for younger workers; the idea is that they need to get calloused or be "hungry" before they have a shot. As if a clean-cut young man has never had a good idea in his life. As for engineers being underpaid; there was an article in Asahi about how engineers being paid 5 million yen in Japan go to Silicon Valley and make about 10 mil. It's nonsensical. (I'm not sure how up I am on the education system of Japan, but that probably belongs in another conversation)
- patio11 17y agoYou Tokyo engineers and your insanely high wages! Five million yen ($55k), hah. In Nagoya, the Employer Who Must Not Be Named exercises essentially monopsony on engineering labor, and they pay roughly according to the traditional yardstick: 2.X million yen for 20-somethings, 3.X million yen for 30-somethings, etc.
- jbm 17y agoIf you are in Nagoya, you have my sincere pity. I have a friend who went from Montreal to Nagoya with Ubisoft; he was telling me about the terrible conditions and the utter inability of companies to re-invest into the company itself. They wouldn't even pay for a proper screen; they were using CRTs or something like that. It's truly bullshit because you can take 100% of any money you spend on the company off your taxable income (as long as you have proper receipts). It makes no sense for a company NOT to upgrade its faculties in Japan.
- patio11 17y agoYour friend may be finding a company- or industry-specific issue there. My company has occasional frugality attacks but Nagoya is cough no stranger to capital-intensive industry cough.
- gommm 17y agoHa, A friend of mine who worked at Square soft was paid like this (his salary was his age multiplied by ten plus some bonuses and of course some extra money because he was married if I remember well). Since he was a foreigner and foreigners are supposed and allowed to be strange, he multiplied his salary by 2 by telling them that he would quit otherwise :-)
- rgrieselhuber 17y ago"Everything insane about large Japanese corporations just spells market opportunity." Exactly right. To take an example from mobile, open innovation was literally strangled for years by the carriers until the iPhone came and just started owning. Android is going to do the same thing. There is a difference between the hardware innovation that Japanese companies pride themselves on and the true, social innovation that can only exist when third-parties have a chance at changing the rules of the game. I will be shocked if most large Japanese corporations ever get this.
- petewailes 17y agoI'd be totally up for contributing to this.
- 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