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Doing Business in Japan (2014)
- biot 10y ago[2014] for those getting déjà vu.
- mrottenkolber 10y ago> The Japanese economy is roughly 1/3rd the public sector, 1/3rd low-productivity firms like restaurants or traditional craftsmen, and 1/3rd high-productivity household-name megacorps. Why are restaurants and traditional craftsmen considered “low-productivity?” That really strikes me as odd, I have the opposite connotation. I.e. the former being only sustainable as long as they serve a direct demand, while the latter spends most of the time for leviathan’s sake, and is more focused on generating demand (advertising budgets) than solving problems (leviathan can’t be sustained when there are no problems left).
- brianwawok 10y agoWell, the average McDonald's makes something like 40k profit per employee year, and Apple makes something like a million bucks per employee year... So the salary of the two tends to reflect that. (Numbers made up but I bet they Aren't that far off) That is what productivity means here. Not how hard or socially useful the product is. If we all have service jobs, we all would make the same pay. Productivity is why software developer can make good pay.
- user5994461 10y ago$1.8M per employee for Apple http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per-employee-2015-10 http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per...
- lultimouomo 10y agoThat's revenue. While Apple is hugely profitable, I'm pretty sure it has great manufacturing costs and per-employee profits are a fraction of that (the first google result says $0.4M).
- Spooky23 10y agoThat's a pretty useless comparison between sectors, as you're excluding the manufacturing workforce for Apple, but only partially excluding McDonalds (most workers are franchisee employees).
- brianwawok 10y agoOr look at a waitress in a restaurant. The math will be similar. A service job can't pay you a 6 fig salary outside of a few niche roles. That is why the "it's ok, we can all get service jobs" is a lie. That's a pretty crappy life.
- woah 10y agoWay off topic from the original article but "we can all get service jobs" implies a reality where the cost of any manufactured good and food is approaching 0. In that reality, you would only ever need to spend the money from your service job in other services.
- TulliusCicero 10y agoWell, from a programmer's perspective, a restaurant worker or craftsman has a job that does not scale at all. That's probably what he's referring to.
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- plaguuuuuu 10y agoWhat do you mean by scale in this case? One restaurant serves 100 customers per night. Ten restaurants serve 1000 customers per night.
- klodolph 10y agoThat's exactly the point, restaurants don't scale well. Ten restaurants need almost ten times as many workers as one restaurant. Apple does not need nearly ten times as many workers to sell ten times as many iPhones. If headcount grows linearly with your business size, your business has some issues with scaling that you need to solve.
- sandworm101 10y agoBecause they are not suitable for many of the tricks used in high-productivity environments. Traditional craftsmen cannot be automated, else they not be traditional craftsmen. Restaurants cannot enjoy the same economies of scale and still provide the same personalized service out of a tiny shop across from a train station. By another metric, they are low-productivity in that the require many man hours of labor per unit. One can make a carpenter more efficient, but one cannot get away from the need of a person spending hours inside someone's house nailing things together. He;ll never be as productive as an Ikea factory worker churning out flat-pack tables inside a megafactory.
- kenferry 10y agoHe's presumably using the economics definition of productivity, not the common English meaning. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/productivity.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/productivity.asp
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- stuzenz 10y agoIt is a good set of observations. A little steeped in stereotypes and I would be surprised if the numbers are right in regards to breaking the economy into rough 3rds - SMEs make up a large part of the economy - and when I say SMEs - I mean pretty small companies. I enjoyed the way he translated Japanese - it is very stiff and just about British - which goes well with Japanese formal polite language (丁寧語) which is a fair part of the business persona - depending on who you are talking to. Marries reasonably well with some of my observations and complaints I hear from mates who are Japanese salarymen.
- aaron695 10y agoNot sure if it was his point but certainly I noticed most restaurants hand washed rather than use a dishwasher and other inefficiencies. I often wonder if much of the automation that does exist in Japan is more about not dealing with people.
- nihonde 10y agoEnergy efficiency is a higher priority in Japan when it comes to dishes, laundry, etc. Why pay for electricity when you have a perfectly good pair of hands?
- princeb 10y ago> ruthlessly capitalist racists actually, these people are not racists. the racists are the ones not hiring outside their race, even if it's cheaper. the ruthlessly capitalist is an equal opportunity discriminator.
- danieltillett 10y agoI have always thought that capitalism is the grim reaper of other ism's like racism, sexism, ageism, etc. If a society underprices a group of people for irrational reasons then a capitist will recognise this and solve the problem.
- entwife 10y agoBeing that women may have a harder time adapting to salary man position, perhaps they would be better hires for Japanese startups?
- intro-b 10y agois there speculation that Japan might be, in the future few years, a promising place to establish startups and source promising talent? intuitively, i feel like there should be an amount of young engineers/designers/marketers and other professionals disinterested in typical salaryman positions at large corporations
- tomcam 10y agoUnlikely. Population is declining precipitously. The rate of reproduction has plummeted in Japan. There aren't nearly as many young people as there used to be. Why would they want to stay in a declining country rather than go to places where conformity is not prized, being an entrepreneur is prized, and there is a growing market?
- tobltobs 10y agoI met expats, immigrants, students from all over the world in Europe, but I didn't ever met one from Japan. Anecdotal, I know, but maybe Japan is so special that emigrating from there feels like leaving Earth.
- nandemo 10y agoNitpick: emigrating means moving away for good, and relatively few people from developed countries emigrate in that sense. Perhaps you mean living abroad for study or work, being an expat or something similar. I think there are 2 big reasons why you won't find many Japanese expats in Europe. One is the real or perceived language barrier. The level of English education in Japan is pretty low, and even people who speak passable English tend to be not confident about it. The other reason is outlined in the article. Going abroad for college isn't prized as it is in (say) China. You're deviating from the path that society expects you to follow. You might even get strange ideas about life/work balance. Going abroad for a "skip year" sounds even worse.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- partycoder 10y agoI had a chat with a Japanese coworker some time ago. Some of the Japanese addiction for work was to distract themselves from the destructive effects of WW2. By working, they thought they would gradually turn their homeland into a better place and become a better society. Now we can see some of the side effects of the excess work, like a reduced birth rate, increased suicide rate, growing debt, death from overwork (karoshi), people doing secret nap meetings or sleeping in their desks (inemuri), etc.
- Havoc 10y ago>people doing secret nap meetings Haha that's one way to solve the problem
- godmodus 10y agoas a 32, english bachelor holder, current CS student with mainly experience in linux and scripting, this was some of the most terrifying prose i've read. this will give me many a sleepless nights. thank you.
- aristidb 10y agoWhy will it give you sleepless nights? Are you planning on moving to Japan and you're worried about that now?
- apsdsm 10y agoIt shouldn't. As a 35 year old who never got a CS degree but currently works in a tech company in Osaka, the whole article scanned like it was mostly relevant 10 years ago to me.
- twblalock 10y agoYeah, I think the article's description of working hours is a bit extreme. In my time in Japan, I noticed two distinct rush hours on the trains and expressways in major Japanese cities: one around 8-9am, and another around 5-6pm. That seems like a pretty normal working day to me. If everyone was putting in 8 hours of overtime, the evening rush hour would start a lot later. (And it's not like the employees are going home and continuing to work for many more hours. Remote work is not common in Japan.)
- mattnumbe 10y agoI agree about the rush hour on the trains in the cities. I also live in a large city in Japan and have to battle to get on the train around 8am and 6:30pm. The guys that are working all the over time tend to work in the really big name companies (Toyota, Honda, Mitsui, etc.) which have their main working centers outside of the big cities. We have a lot of engineers who work at these locations and it seems that the minimum amount of paid overtime is 40hr/month for our employees (I have interviewed engineers here who have reported working 110hr+ of overtime in a month, which is illegal here). The problem is, these are all reported paid overtime hours for contract employees. Patrick is talking about lifetime employees of the large firms, who do a lot of service overtime, which is unreported and un-paid. When I was an English teacher I was often hired by these firms to do 6 month intensive courses for employees who were moving to an English speaking country for 3-5 years. These guys had an unbelievable amount of work for that six months and often slept at the office (which has showers and changing rooms) for their 3 or 4 hours of downtime. So I think you're right, that not everyone is doing this, but there is a certain circle where it is highly expected.
- glandium 10y agoPrevious discussion with 300+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8573992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8573992
- edpichler 10y agoThis description of how business is done on Japan makes me sad. It can't be all true, I really hope I didn't get the jokes and the author is exaggeration facts more than he described.
- sdrothrock 10y agoI've been living and working in Japan for almost a decade; if there are parts you're wondering if are exaggeration, feel free to comment here and I'll try to give you a second viewpoint. :)
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- Kenji 10y ago90+ hour weeks barely even occasion comment I don't believe it. 90+ is absolutely insane. If you are working this much, you seriously have to reevaluate your life choices - living under a bridge is probably healthier for you.
- donw 10y agoThere's a reason that Japanese has a convenient word for "working oneself to death": karoshi.
- gnipgnip 10y agoHow do the work/startup cultures in other Asian nations compare ?
- tjpnz 10y agoI work for one of Japan's largest tech companies and somewhat fit the salaryman description he provides (although I put in no where close to the hours he mentions). The bit about what happens to those who move companies stopped me cold. Is this really accurate for what might happen if somebody jumped from one of these companies to a startup?
- Question1101 10y agoI wonder: how is it being an artist in Japan? How does working part-time work? How is the culture for people working in academia?
- edpichler 10y agoThis text makes me curious about some points on Japan's economy: - How do be innovative without taking risks? Is Japan innovative? (May the answer is: they developed techniques to innovate without taking risks) - How Japan is wealthy if "risk and returns" are co-related? (May the reason is because they are the country with most robots per inhabitant what makes them very very productive and wealthy)
- kahrkunne 10y agoGee an article about Japan written by a foreigner is incredibly bigoted and factually incorrect, who would have thought?
- anonymoushn 10y agoCan you point out any specific problems?