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I would never want to work in japan. Doing business with japan is hard enough. You could create the most amazing service in the world. And it’s still inferior t

I would never want to work in japan. Doing business with japan is hard enough. You could create the most amazing service in the world. And it’s still inferior to a Japanese business on the grounds that it’s not owned by the Japanese. I love the country the culture the people. But working with Japan is the most difficult thing I’ve encounter in my career.

duxup 7y ago
Yeah a few people I know who have worked there enjoyed it but the sort of mechanics about how you have to work, traditions.... they love that in the US they can break so many "rules" and it's thought of as innovative, not the end times.
- philliphaydon 7y ago
  It's not even about the freedoms you get working in other countries. Once had a Japan client change some settings in their account which cause a different workflow to occur. I had to write an incident report for the issue. It's like "if you change A to B, B will happen instead of A... If you want A to happen, select A..." Another job we were processing the POS system records and tracking sales / inventory. The dates were converted from JST to UTC. Oneday the client rang and was raging on the phone because all the dates were wrong. Turns out they changed their setting from JST to some other time zone, so we converted from UTC to this other time zone. Incident report about why we store in UTC and why the values displayed wrong etc. Threats to drop us as a business because we "obviously don't know what we are doing"...
  - sanxiyn 7y ago
    This sounds normal and not specific to Japan.
    - philliphaydon 7y ago
      14 years in this career and Japan is the only country I've had to do this with.
      - coldtea 7y ago
        Have you changed timezone storage and displayed dates wrong (even if it was a configuration issue) in many other countries/customers?
        philliphaydon 7y ago
        All dates stored in UTC, so if any other country raised a ticket, we just told them to update their timezone in their profile, and the client was happy. Japan is the only country that this required incident reports.
        netsharc 7y ago
        Sounds like a pain in the ass. I would just build the incident report form to have the option "Date/times are all wrong", and when you see the user is from Japan and selects this drop down option, check if their timezone is set correctly, and if not, reset it to JST... Then the form would prompt them "Are you sure, please look again", and most of the time the problem will have disappeared, right?
    - duxup 7y ago
      I've worked with Japanese customers. What he described is quite unique to Japan, particularly how many completely run of the mill situations (hey how does this widget work) go on for weeks of expiation. I'm talking about even completely predictable things. Like "Hey if I turn this thing off, is it off?" will start weeks long series of questions. I don't fully understand it, but it is a Japanese thing for sure.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Yeah I've had lots of Ulta detailed report requests from Japan too. Often it is clear they don't understand but keep asking. Several had so many questions they asked for the actual code for a misc set of settings.... They were always meaningless rat hole type discussions and usually with enterprise customers. I'm not sure if they were impressing their bosses with big reports but oh man it was a pain.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 7y ago
>You could create the most amazing service in the world. And it’s still inferior to a Japanese business on the grounds that it’s not owned by the Japanese. So like US people were proud for their "Made in America" stamps?
- skohan 7y ago
  There might be a tiny group of Americans for whom something being "Made in America" would significantly impact their product decisions, but in most cases I think price and quality are the main decision making factors.
  - raducu 7y ago
    I used to work for a german web hosting company and they were able to charge double for the same service in Germany vs Spain, the only reason being germans like to buy german products.
    - skohan 7y ago
      I live in Germany now And this seems to be more true here. That’s probably part of the reason Rocket Internet can be successful. Americans don’t seem to care about it nearly as much in my experience.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Today, perhaps. Back in the 70s/80s it used to be a source of pride (plus sneer at Japanese cars, or complaints about how the Japanese ripped off US products, etc).

duxup 7y ago

Yeah a few people I know who have worked there enjoyed it but the sort of mechanics about how you have to work, traditions.... they love that in the US they can break so many "rules" and it's thought of as innovative, not the end times.

philliphaydon 7y ago
It's not even about the freedoms you get working in other countries. Once had a Japan client change some settings in their account which cause a different workflow to occur. I had to write an incident report for the issue. It's like "if you change A to B, B will happen instead of A... If you want A to happen, select A..." Another job we were processing the POS system records and tracking sales / inventory. The dates were converted from JST to UTC. Oneday the client rang and was raging on the phone because all the dates were wrong. Turns out they changed their setting from JST to some other time zone, so we converted from UTC to this other time zone. Incident report about why we store in UTC and why the values displayed wrong etc. Threats to drop us as a business because we "obviously don't know what we are doing"...
- sanxiyn 7y ago
  This sounds normal and not specific to Japan.
  - philliphaydon 7y ago
    14 years in this career and Japan is the only country I've had to do this with.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Have you changed timezone storage and displayed dates wrong (even if it was a configuration issue) in many other countries/customers?
      - philliphaydon 7y ago
        All dates stored in UTC, so if any other country raised a ticket, we just told them to update their timezone in their profile, and the client was happy. Japan is the only country that this required incident reports.
        netsharc 7y ago
        Sounds like a pain in the ass. I would just build the incident report form to have the option "Date/times are all wrong", and when you see the user is from Japan and selects this drop down option, check if their timezone is set correctly, and if not, reset it to JST... Then the form would prompt them "Are you sure, please look again", and most of the time the problem will have disappeared, right?
  - duxup 7y ago
    I've worked with Japanese customers. What he described is quite unique to Japan, particularly how many completely run of the mill situations (hey how does this widget work) go on for weeks of expiation. I'm talking about even completely predictable things. Like "Hey if I turn this thing off, is it off?" will start weeks long series of questions. I don't fully understand it, but it is a Japanese thing for sure.
- duxup 7y ago
  Yeah I've had lots of Ulta detailed report requests from Japan too. Often it is clear they don't understand but keep asking. Several had so many questions they asked for the actual code for a misc set of settings.... They were always meaningless rat hole type discussions and usually with enterprise customers. I'm not sure if they were impressing their bosses with big reports but oh man it was a pain.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

coldtea 7y ago

>You could create the most amazing service in the world. And it’s still inferior to a Japanese business on the grounds that it’s not owned by the Japanese. So like US people were proud for their "Made in America" stamps?

skohan 7y ago
There might be a tiny group of Americans for whom something being "Made in America" would significantly impact their product decisions, but in most cases I think price and quality are the main decision making factors.
- raducu 7y ago
  I used to work for a german web hosting company and they were able to charge double for the same service in Germany vs Spain, the only reason being germans like to buy german products.
  - skohan 7y ago
    I live in Germany now And this seems to be more true here. That’s probably part of the reason Rocket Internet can be successful. Americans don’t seem to care about it nearly as much in my experience.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Today, perhaps. Back in the 70s/80s it used to be a source of pride (plus sneer at Japanese cars, or complaints about how the Japanese ripped off US products, etc).