3 ms·

"I was very well mentally, but my parents pushed me the way I didn't want to go," he says. "My father is an artist and he runs his own business - he wanted me t

"I was very well mentally, but my parents pushed me the way I didn't want to go," he says. "My father is an artist and he runs his own business - he wanted me to do the same." But Matsu wanted to become a computer programmer in a large firm - one of corporate Japan's army of "salarymen. But my father said: 'In the future there won't be a society like that.' He said: 'Don't become a salaryman.'" Starting your own SaaS/app/startup isn't that common for Japanese people, but it is starting to pick up more steam over the past few years. Sounds like his father would be happy to know what he can do with his computer skills if he expands out to becoming an entrepreneur. A bit of a wasted opportunity there, that I wish someone could have explained the opportunities available to him instead of becoming hikikomori.

patio11 13y ago
I know a few people in my generation who "opted out" of The Offer (+) who eventually found themselves doing web freelancing. There are social difficulties involved in doing it, but they're successful and MUCH happier with it than they were in their brief forays to salarymandom. We'll be getting together for our college club annual reunion in September and once more trying to tell kids "Hey guys, if the salaryman thing doesn't pan out, we'll take you out to coffee and tell you about some other options." Many middle class Japanese kids have literally never heard that once in their entire lives. + Roughly 30% of Japanese society, mostly middle class and male, has this life plan in place from birth: You will study extraordinarily hard and test into a good high school. You will then study extraordinarily hard and test into a good university. You will be hired by a large Japanese megacorp along with 200 people from your university. You will then be a salaryman, owned body and soul by your company, and worked in conditions which resemble indentured servitude for roughly your first 20 to 25 years. In return, you will be promoted in lockstep with the rest of your entering class, you will never be fired, and you will be awarded social status and security with the guarantee of neither of them ever being imperiled by virtually anything.
- mathrawka 13y ago
  There are also people who accept The Offer because they feel they have no other option. And they are not so happy about their job, but they feel they cannot quit for various social reasons ("But everyone would love to have my job at MegaCorp", "If I quit, what if I fail?"). My gentle prodding to test their comfort zone sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.
  - minikomi 13y ago
    Indeed. I taught English to a mid-30s lady who worked for a subsidiary of JR. Every lesson, it was the same complaining about her job, her boss.. I suggested that she find a new job and her reaction was complete terror. "I can only imagine it will be worse than what I have now".
lsc 13y ago
>Starting your own SaaS/app/startup isn't that common for Japanese people, but it is starting to pick up more steam over the past few years. Sounds like his father would be happy to know what he can do with his computer skills if he expands out to becoming an entrepreneur. The skillsets involved in running your own company and the skillsets involved in working for someone else... are very different animals. Especially for those without social skills (or who don't particularly enjoy social interaction) being an employee can be way easier. I'm not even that introverted; compared to your average programmer/sysadmin, I might even be a little bit extroverted. But I find the level of dealmaking I have to do at my company exhausting, in a way that the technical work I have to do is not.
- da02 13y ago
  That sounds like a business idea. Create retail services in a market filled with custom dealmaking. I'm guessing that might be hard in your case since it sounds like you have to deal with huge datacenters and network providers.
  - lsc 13y ago
    edit: re-writing my post; I... somehow misread you; I thought you were suggesting creating a service to do the negotiation for you. No, you were very clearly saying: >That sounds like a business idea. Create retail services in a market filled with custom dealmaking. I'm guessing that might be hard in your case since it sounds like you have to deal with huge datacenters and network providers. And this is, essentially, what "The cloud" is, and is why "the cloud" is so popular. The pricing is right on the tin, no wasted time negotiating. I tried to do the same with raw rackspace and bandwidth, but really? re-selling rackspace when you don't own the datacenter is a really shitty business to be in. I mean, I'm not kicking off my current customers, but depending on how the data-center that my buddy will own turns out, I may or may not actually continue to sell co-location services. Also, everyone expects the negotiation. In datacenter space and small bandwidth deals? (at the low end, they are sold in a bundle) there are middlemen who can funnel customers to you... for the low fee of 10% of the revenue that customer brings /for the life of the customer) Like I said, it's a shitty business; if you are leasing racks and re-selling them, you are /really lucky/ to be getting 10% yourself. (of course, margin (and labor) go up as you lease larger chunks from your provider and sell smaller chunks to your customers... margin on my quarter rack product was rather better; rack cost $600, and if it was full I made $800. Which isn't bad, except that I've gotta fill like 10 racks just to cover getting a reasonable amount of bandwidth into the facility.) Man, I'm not very coherent tonight. But yeah, the 10% commission for the guys funneling you customers... normally? you make up for that; if someone comes in through one of the funnels, well, guess what, their final price after negotiation is just 10% higher than what you are willing to negotiate down to with someone who comes direct. (the fucked thing here is that most of those guys that will point customers at you? they have websites that make them look like they are co-location providers.)

patio11 13y ago

I know a few people in my generation who "opted out" of The Offer (+) who eventually found themselves doing web freelancing. There are social difficulties involved in doing it, but they're successful and MUCH happier with it than they were in their brief forays to salarymandom. We'll be getting together for our college club annual reunion in September and once more trying to tell kids "Hey guys, if the salaryman thing doesn't pan out, we'll take you out to coffee and tell you about some other options." Many middle class Japanese kids have literally never heard that once in their entire lives. + Roughly 30% of Japanese society, mostly middle class and male, has this life plan in place from birth: You will study extraordinarily hard and test into a good high school. You will then study extraordinarily hard and test into a good university. You will be hired by a large Japanese megacorp along with 200 people from your university. You will then be a salaryman, owned body and soul by your company, and worked in conditions which resemble indentured servitude for roughly your first 20 to 25 years. In return, you will be promoted in lockstep with the rest of your entering class, you will never be fired, and you will be awarded social status and security with the guarantee of neither of them ever being imperiled by virtually anything.

mathrawka 13y ago
There are also people who accept The Offer because they feel they have no other option. And they are not so happy about their job, but they feel they cannot quit for various social reasons ("But everyone would love to have my job at MegaCorp", "If I quit, what if I fail?"). My gentle prodding to test their comfort zone sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.
- minikomi 13y ago
  Indeed. I taught English to a mid-30s lady who worked for a subsidiary of JR. Every lesson, it was the same complaining about her job, her boss.. I suggested that she find a new job and her reaction was complete terror. "I can only imagine it will be worse than what I have now".

lsc 13y ago

>Starting your own SaaS/app/startup isn't that common for Japanese people, but it is starting to pick up more steam over the past few years. Sounds like his father would be happy to know what he can do with his computer skills if he expands out to becoming an entrepreneur. The skillsets involved in running your own company and the skillsets involved in working for someone else... are very different animals. Especially for those without social skills (or who don't particularly enjoy social interaction) being an employee can be way easier. I'm not even that introverted; compared to your average programmer/sysadmin, I might even be a little bit extroverted. But I find the level of dealmaking I have to do at my company exhausting, in a way that the technical work I have to do is not.

da02 13y ago
That sounds like a business idea. Create retail services in a market filled with custom dealmaking. I'm guessing that might be hard in your case since it sounds like you have to deal with huge datacenters and network providers.
- lsc 13y ago
  edit: re-writing my post; I... somehow misread you; I thought you were suggesting creating a service to do the negotiation for you. No, you were very clearly saying: >That sounds like a business idea. Create retail services in a market filled with custom dealmaking. I'm guessing that might be hard in your case since it sounds like you have to deal with huge datacenters and network providers. And this is, essentially, what "The cloud" is, and is why "the cloud" is so popular. The pricing is right on the tin, no wasted time negotiating. I tried to do the same with raw rackspace and bandwidth, but really? re-selling rackspace when you don't own the datacenter is a really shitty business to be in. I mean, I'm not kicking off my current customers, but depending on how the data-center that my buddy will own turns out, I may or may not actually continue to sell co-location services. Also, everyone expects the negotiation. In datacenter space and small bandwidth deals? (at the low end, they are sold in a bundle) there are middlemen who can funnel customers to you... for the low fee of 10% of the revenue that customer brings /for the life of the customer) Like I said, it's a shitty business; if you are leasing racks and re-selling them, you are /really lucky/ to be getting 10% yourself. (of course, margin (and labor) go up as you lease larger chunks from your provider and sell smaller chunks to your customers... margin on my quarter rack product was rather better; rack cost $600, and if it was full I made $800. Which isn't bad, except that I've gotta fill like 10 racks just to cover getting a reasonable amount of bandwidth into the facility.) Man, I'm not very coherent tonight. But yeah, the 10% commission for the guys funneling you customers... normally? you make up for that; if someone comes in through one of the funnels, well, guess what, their final price after negotiation is just 10% higher than what you are willing to negotiate down to with someone who comes direct. (the fucked thing here is that most of those guys that will point customers at you? they have websites that make them look like they are co-location providers.)