6 ms·

> No, really, the most formidable Japanese low-touch SaaS entrepreneur I know figured out how to sell SaaS door-to-door in Tokyo.” Seriously, from all the inef

by aragot 12y ago

> No, really, the most formidable Japanese low-touch SaaS entrepreneur I know figured out how to sell SaaS door-to-door in Tokyo.” Seriously, from all the inefficiencies pointed out in this article, how is the economy of Japan not in the verge of collapse? - They spend hours choosing the text of buttons, - they're expected to learn the Way We Do Things In This Company until their 30s, - they attend work for extended hours, - the workforce capacities are planned dozens of years in advance, - decision-making is centralized in the hands of the major companies, investments are interlocked between company-arranged rents, company-arranged investments and company-arranged paperwork, - and they have competition from foreign products which were produced by more officient economies, e.g. the iPhone I guess there are other employment markets like France and Russia which have friction too, and others like China which may lack the special salt of SV to be exactly as dominating, but how come Japan still succeeds to have major companies and keep selling products?

x0x0 12y ago
There's countervailing inefficiencies in America. Just to touch on a few: We don't train people; they're expected to self-finance virtually all training. This often leads to a severely undertrained workforce, partially masked by immigration. When potential employees self-direct training, it also leads to mismatches between employer needs and employee training. Following the lead of employers, employees have discovered theres no loyalty at all and hence treat employment as an adversarial relationship. Witness, eg, the bullshit from asshole Mark Suster. Your employer retains the right to drop you for any reason, or no reason at all, with no termination pay or help... but you better not go down the street for a better offer. Loyalty flows upwards only! It's an enormous risk to develop very deep skills in a tiny niche: that niche may go out of need, and as an employee, you're just fucked. No serious assistance retraining. Zero assurance that, after your one year of unemployment benefits are up, society won't shrug and say, "Tough fucking luck; welcome to poverty." The incredible overpriced mess that is us healthcare. We spend roughly 2x as much as anyone else in the developed world, for mostly worse outcomes. With way more friction. The debacle of US infrastructure, particularly in a place like the valley. Poor and overpriced telecommunications. Incredibly high housing costs. Terrible transportation. No real attempt to address any of the above. Endless whining that there aren't enough engineers, but an unwillingness to pay trained engineers from the midwest or west or south enough money to afford anything like an equivalent life. Contrast to tokyo: if an engineer were paid $50k to live in the valley, they'd be living in their car. In tokyo, there's developed enough transportation systems this is manageable. Lack of support for parents: from very modest time off for parents, to expensive daycare ($300-$500 per week for an under-two year old child), to a dozen other issues. One parent takes a huge productivity cut or the parents hire a nanny for $25k+/year.
- firstaccount 12y ago
  Developer in Ohio here, I feel the pain.
- pastProlog 12y ago
  > It's an enormous risk to develop very deep skills in a tiny niche: that niche may go out of need, and as an employee, you're just fucked. Not to mention if you've been at a company for a long time and they have you in charge of the legacy systems, which are moving farther and farther away from the profit center systems with all their shiny new bells and whistles. Again and again and again I have seen people punished and let go due to their "loyalty" in maintaining the legacy systems, as opposed to working on the systems with constant new features that are where the business growth and revenue is.
aomurphy 12y ago
Because there are benefits to this way of doing things, and not all of Japan is like this. As the link points out being incredibly careful with practices, and really ensuring the quality of a product is exactly the right thing in many situations. When building, say, cars. Huge amounts of training, careful procedures, and lots of time with senior engineers to help is often very useful. Further while a lot of the sales stuff seems completely ridiculous, there is benefit in having very personal interactions and understanding. Again, look at the link to see why. Japanese corporations are actually very innovative in a lot of ways, and often build extraordinarily impressive products, if often ones that are hampered by terrible design. Secondly, not all of Japan is like this. Japanese productivity is pretty weirdly bifurcated: For office work, Japan is terrible (well below the USA, Europe), for manufacturing Japan is world-class. Japanese companies build things really really well, with very few workers, quickly. They just can;t organize paperwork in any reasonable way. Here's a link to a nice brief summary of this stuff by an economist in the US whose worked on Japan before: http://neojaponisme.com/2014/01/15/japanese-economic-mythbusting/#comment-68715 http://neojaponisme.com/2014/01/15/japanese-economic-mythbus...
- vram22 12y ago
  >for manufacturing Japan is world-class. Japanese companies build things really really well, with very few workers, quickly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way I bought and read that book some years ago. Found it pretty interesting. There is a lot of detail and statistics in it, but the overall theme is of Kaizen (roughly, continuous improvement), along with muda, mura, muri (all three terms explained in the links below): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term) "In 2004, Dr. Jeffrey Liker, a University of Michigan professor of industrial engineering, published The Toyota Way. In his book Liker calls the Toyota Way "a system designed to provide the tools for people to continually improve their work." Also, see Muji :) http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2010/05/muji-simplicity-is-deceptively-complex.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2010/05/muji-simplicity-is-decepti... http://www.muji.com/ http://www.muji.com/ http://www.muji.us/about-muji/ http://www.muji.us/about-muji/
kazinator 12y ago
> They spend hours choosing the text of buttons Haha. A movie which satirizes this aspect of Japanese culture is オムライス　("Omuraisu" -- Omelette Rice: 2011 I think). In this film, the main character walks around his town (one of the purposes of his walk being to obtain ingredients for omelette rice), and responds to various odd signage. He invents stories which explain how those signs might have come to be, and those stories come alive as a sequence of disconnected, or loosely connected vignettes by various comedians. One of the vignettes revolves around a succinct sign explaining a shop's opening hours on various days. The protagonist imagines that the sign began as a slightly different sign: one with a missing dash (though this is not easy for viewers to notice, I think). In the vignette, the characters argue about how the sign is unclear and propose various changes to it which make it more and more verbose. Finally, a third guy comes along and just adds the missing dash to the original (producing the succinct sign as seen by the protagonist). Everyone is like, "whoa ...". Japanese sites don't rate this film very highly, but I liked it. It's not bad for "foreigners" interested in Japan. No subs were available, so I had to do without.
Lost_BiomedE 12y ago
'how is the economy of Japan not in the verge of collapse?' You can make a very compelling argument that it is.
mechanical_fish 12y ago
The glib response is "what 'inefficiencies'?" The U.S. version of the social contract has advantages, but "greater overall efficiency" is not one of them. U.S. employees are also trained on the job. The difference is that it's a succession of jobs, separated by job searches and interviews – an inefficient and unreliable process. Statistics show that the average U.S. worker put in 1788 hours per year in 2013. The average for Japan? 1735 hours per year. Neither of these represent world-class efficiencies: The Germans and the Dutch, for example, manage to run their modern economies on less than 1400 hours per worker. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode%3DANHRS http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode%3DANHRS The USA does have a significantly higher per-capita GDP than Japan, but the Swiss are higher still, and only work 1588 hours per week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... (These are glib analyses, of course, because averages lie in various ways. The fact that Qatar has three times the per-capita GDP of the USA should give one pause; per-capita GDP is not the same thing as "quality of life of the average resident".) The idea that iPhone manufacturing is somehow "foreign" to Japan is pretty funny. Mobile phones are international products, built with parts and machines and expertise from around the world, certainly including Japan: http://www.cnet.com/news/japan-manufacturers-said-to-gear-up-for-apple-and-iphone-6/?_escaped_fragment_= http://www.cnet.com/news/japan-manufacturers-said-to-gear-up... Yes, many phones aren't assembled in Japan these days, but they aren't assembled in the USA either. The Japanese can still field some of the greatest electronics engineers on the planet, but they work on higher-leverage problems than final packaging and assembly.
- patio11 12y ago
  The biggest part of the reaction to the iPhone among domestic engineers is "#()(#%0) Why, why, why?! We had the screens and the capacitors and the CPUs and the memory and the buttons. Why isn't the iPhone a Sharp or Sony product? Who cares if they're eventually assembled in China, nobody wants that work anyhow [+], but think how much Japan: We've Still Got It karma it would have been worth to create the defining product of our age." My take on the answer, by the way, is that the iPhone is a 20% hardware 80% software product, and Japanese hardware manufacturers were not well-positioned for that opportunity. That has, sadly, not changed. You would think that Google solving the software problem for them would give them a bigger opportunity, but that hasn't been borne out in practice, to my understanding. Anyhow, the fact that mobile phones are widely perceived as Chinese is not entirely accidental. Something like 40% of the BOM might be Japanese products, but a Japanese CPU and a Japanese camera and a Japanese gasket plus a Chinese paper box is perceived as a Chinese cell phone. Japanese tech firms have very keen memories of the 1980s and don't want to be the "yellow peril" again, for US politicians/companies to take swings at to protect domestic industries. Nominating China for the role of punching bag? Triple bonus points. (Japan and China have a... storied relationship.) [+] Exaggeration for comedic effect. There exist many Japanese folks, including those in industry, who would be happy if a larger portion of the supply chain were purely domestic.
tsotha 12y ago
When you make everyone work until 1:00 AM you can afford quite a bit of inefficiency.
rdtsc 12y ago
Well is US economy on the verge of collapse. Because I see people putting crazy hours here as well with only 2 weeks or less of vacation time. > - They spend hours choosing the text of buttons, Hello bike shedding. Ever been to any meeting with "senior" management. Those people just don't know how to shut the fuck up or admit they "don't understand" so they latch on and start pronouncing orders about stuff they understand -- button colors. Happens in US, China, Africa, Europe. > - they're expected to learn the Way We Do Things In This Company until their 30s, Ok but then they have learnt them and are good to go for another 30 or 40 years until they retire. Having job security is no joke when health insurance, housing, family is involved. There is something to be sad about it. It might even be worth a salary cut. > - they attend work for extended hours, Depending what you compare to. American workers also work what Europeans might consider crazy and unreasonable hours (if you add vacation or lack of into the mix especially). > - the workforce capacities are planned dozens of years in advance, I have seen large military industrial contractors lay off thousands in a swift hand move because some major contract from US govt got lost. The other extreme is you know not plan in advance and only plan 2 years ahead then let everyone go and re-hire/re-train/re-certify new ones. Is that better. I am not sure yet. > - decision-making is centralized in the hands of the major companies, investments are interlocked between company-arranged rents, company-arranged investments and company-arranged paperwork, Wait, isn't most of the US economy run by large organization which make decision not unlike dictatorships. Centralized with the classic pyramid management scheme. I guess if all we do is read HN we might get a bit of a wrong impression about how the economy and labor market works here. > - and they have competition from foreign products which were produced by more officient economies, e.g. the iPhone So China (FoxConnn)? Yeah China is great. They are efficient but that is in part because they are willing to cut corners and disregard safety or health standards. But yeah I get it, you mean to say "Apple" and by proxy -- US. Well they can't do everything well. Their car businesses are doing well. Look at Ford, GM etc vs Honda and Toyota. Perhaps there the situation is reversed.
- GFischer 12y ago
  If you suscribe to some economic theories, workforce capacity planning years in advance sounds disastrously inefficient. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
wodenokoto 12y ago
> Seriously, from all the inefficiencies pointed out in this article, how is the economy of Japan not in the verge of collapse? I dare say that it is. Have you ever seen their debt to GDP ratio? How Japan manages to compete has been a big question in academic business studies for a very long time. I think Michael Porter did one of the best analysis of why Japan manages to be competitive in some markets, but his work is getting rather old now. http://www.amazon.com/Can-Japan-Compete-Michael-Porter/dp/0465059899 http://www.amazon.com/Can-Japan-Compete-Michael-Porter/dp/04...

by aragot 12y ago

x0x0 12y ago

There's countervailing inefficiencies in America. Just to touch on a few: We don't train people; they're expected to self-finance virtually all training. This often leads to a severely undertrained workforce, partially masked by immigration. When potential employees self-direct training, it also leads to mismatches between employer needs and employee training. Following the lead of employers, employees have discovered theres no loyalty at all and hence treat employment as an adversarial relationship. Witness, eg, the bullshit from asshole Mark Suster. Your employer retains the right to drop you for any reason, or no reason at all, with no termination pay or help... but you better not go down the street for a better offer. Loyalty flows upwards only! It's an enormous risk to develop very deep skills in a tiny niche: that niche may go out of need, and as an employee, you're just fucked. No serious assistance retraining. Zero assurance that, after your one year of unemployment benefits are up, society won't shrug and say, "Tough fucking luck; welcome to poverty." The incredible overpriced mess that is us healthcare. We spend roughly 2x as much as anyone else in the developed world, for mostly worse outcomes. With way more friction. The debacle of US infrastructure, particularly in a place like the valley. Poor and overpriced telecommunications. Incredibly high housing costs. Terrible transportation. No real attempt to address any of the above. Endless whining that there aren't enough engineers, but an unwillingness to pay trained engineers from the midwest or west or south enough money to afford anything like an equivalent life. Contrast to tokyo: if an engineer were paid $50k to live in the valley, they'd be living in their car. In tokyo, there's developed enough transportation systems this is manageable. Lack of support for parents: from very modest time off for parents, to expensive daycare ($300-$500 per week for an under-two year old child), to a dozen other issues. One parent takes a huge productivity cut or the parents hire a nanny for $25k+/year.

firstaccount 12y ago
Developer in Ohio here, I feel the pain.
pastProlog 12y ago
> It's an enormous risk to develop very deep skills in a tiny niche: that niche may go out of need, and as an employee, you're just fucked. Not to mention if you've been at a company for a long time and they have you in charge of the legacy systems, which are moving farther and farther away from the profit center systems with all their shiny new bells and whistles. Again and again and again I have seen people punished and let go due to their "loyalty" in maintaining the legacy systems, as opposed to working on the systems with constant new features that are where the business growth and revenue is.

aomurphy 12y ago

Because there are benefits to this way of doing things, and not all of Japan is like this. As the link points out being incredibly careful with practices, and really ensuring the quality of a product is exactly the right thing in many situations. When building, say, cars. Huge amounts of training, careful procedures, and lots of time with senior engineers to help is often very useful. Further while a lot of the sales stuff seems completely ridiculous, there is benefit in having very personal interactions and understanding. Again, look at the link to see why. Japanese corporations are actually very innovative in a lot of ways, and often build extraordinarily impressive products, if often ones that are hampered by terrible design. Secondly, not all of Japan is like this. Japanese productivity is pretty weirdly bifurcated: For office work, Japan is terrible (well below the USA, Europe), for manufacturing Japan is world-class. Japanese companies build things really really well, with very few workers, quickly. They just can;t organize paperwork in any reasonable way. Here's a link to a nice brief summary of this stuff by an economist in the US whose worked on Japan before: http://neojaponisme.com/2014/01/15/japanese-economic-mythbusting/#comment-68715 http://neojaponisme.com/2014/01/15/japanese-economic-mythbus...

vram22 12y ago
>for manufacturing Japan is world-class. Japanese companies build things really really well, with very few workers, quickly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way I bought and read that book some years ago. Found it pretty interesting. There is a lot of detail and statistics in it, but the overall theme is of Kaizen (roughly, continuous improvement), along with muda, mura, muri (all three terms explained in the links below): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term) "In 2004, Dr. Jeffrey Liker, a University of Michigan professor of industrial engineering, published The Toyota Way. In his book Liker calls the Toyota Way "a system designed to provide the tools for people to continually improve their work." Also, see Muji :) http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2010/05/muji-simplicity-is-deceptively-complex.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2010/05/muji-simplicity-is-decepti... http://www.muji.com/ http://www.muji.com/ http://www.muji.us/about-muji/ http://www.muji.us/about-muji/

kazinator 12y ago

> They spend hours choosing the text of buttons Haha. A movie which satirizes this aspect of Japanese culture is オムライス　("Omuraisu" -- Omelette Rice: 2011 I think). In this film, the main character walks around his town (one of the purposes of his walk being to obtain ingredients for omelette rice), and responds to various odd signage. He invents stories which explain how those signs might have come to be, and those stories come alive as a sequence of disconnected, or loosely connected vignettes by various comedians. One of the vignettes revolves around a succinct sign explaining a shop's opening hours on various days. The protagonist imagines that the sign began as a slightly different sign: one with a missing dash (though this is not easy for viewers to notice, I think). In the vignette, the characters argue about how the sign is unclear and propose various changes to it which make it more and more verbose. Finally, a third guy comes along and just adds the missing dash to the original (producing the succinct sign as seen by the protagonist). Everyone is like, "whoa ...". Japanese sites don't rate this film very highly, but I liked it. It's not bad for "foreigners" interested in Japan. No subs were available, so I had to do without.

Lost_BiomedE 12y ago

'how is the economy of Japan not in the verge of collapse?' You can make a very compelling argument that it is.

mechanical_fish 12y ago

The glib response is "what 'inefficiencies'?" The U.S. version of the social contract has advantages, but "greater overall efficiency" is not one of them. U.S. employees are also trained on the job. The difference is that it's a succession of jobs, separated by job searches and interviews – an inefficient and unreliable process. Statistics show that the average U.S. worker put in 1788 hours per year in 2013. The average for Japan? 1735 hours per year. Neither of these represent world-class efficiencies: The Germans and the Dutch, for example, manage to run their modern economies on less than 1400 hours per worker. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode%3DANHRS http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode%3DANHRS The USA does have a significantly higher per-capita GDP than Japan, but the Swiss are higher still, and only work 1588 hours per week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... (These are glib analyses, of course, because averages lie in various ways. The fact that Qatar has three times the per-capita GDP of the USA should give one pause; per-capita GDP is not the same thing as "quality of life of the average resident".) The idea that iPhone manufacturing is somehow "foreign" to Japan is pretty funny. Mobile phones are international products, built with parts and machines and expertise from around the world, certainly including Japan: http://www.cnet.com/news/japan-manufacturers-said-to-gear-up-for-apple-and-iphone-6/?_escaped_fragment_= http://www.cnet.com/news/japan-manufacturers-said-to-gear-up... Yes, many phones aren't assembled in Japan these days, but they aren't assembled in the USA either. The Japanese can still field some of the greatest electronics engineers on the planet, but they work on higher-leverage problems than final packaging and assembly.

patio11 12y ago
The biggest part of the reaction to the iPhone among domestic engineers is "#()(#%0) Why, why, why?! We had the screens and the capacitors and the CPUs and the memory and the buttons. Why isn't the iPhone a Sharp or Sony product? Who cares if they're eventually assembled in China, nobody wants that work anyhow [+], but think how much Japan: We've Still Got It karma it would have been worth to create the defining product of our age." My take on the answer, by the way, is that the iPhone is a 20% hardware 80% software product, and Japanese hardware manufacturers were not well-positioned for that opportunity. That has, sadly, not changed. You would think that Google solving the software problem for them would give them a bigger opportunity, but that hasn't been borne out in practice, to my understanding. Anyhow, the fact that mobile phones are widely perceived as Chinese is not entirely accidental. Something like 40% of the BOM might be Japanese products, but a Japanese CPU and a Japanese camera and a Japanese gasket plus a Chinese paper box is perceived as a Chinese cell phone. Japanese tech firms have very keen memories of the 1980s and don't want to be the "yellow peril" again, for US politicians/companies to take swings at to protect domestic industries. Nominating China for the role of punching bag? Triple bonus points. (Japan and China have a... storied relationship.) [+] Exaggeration for comedic effect. There exist many Japanese folks, including those in industry, who would be happy if a larger portion of the supply chain were purely domestic.

tsotha 12y ago

When you make everyone work until 1:00 AM you can afford quite a bit of inefficiency.

rdtsc 12y ago

Well is US economy on the verge of collapse. Because I see people putting crazy hours here as well with only 2 weeks or less of vacation time. > - They spend hours choosing the text of buttons, Hello bike shedding. Ever been to any meeting with "senior" management. Those people just don't know how to shut the fuck up or admit they "don't understand" so they latch on and start pronouncing orders about stuff they understand -- button colors. Happens in US, China, Africa, Europe. > - they're expected to learn the Way We Do Things In This Company until their 30s, Ok but then they have learnt them and are good to go for another 30 or 40 years until they retire. Having job security is no joke when health insurance, housing, family is involved. There is something to be sad about it. It might even be worth a salary cut. > - they attend work for extended hours, Depending what you compare to. American workers also work what Europeans might consider crazy and unreasonable hours (if you add vacation or lack of into the mix especially). > - the workforce capacities are planned dozens of years in advance, I have seen large military industrial contractors lay off thousands in a swift hand move because some major contract from US govt got lost. The other extreme is you know not plan in advance and only plan 2 years ahead then let everyone go and re-hire/re-train/re-certify new ones. Is that better. I am not sure yet. > - decision-making is centralized in the hands of the major companies, investments are interlocked between company-arranged rents, company-arranged investments and company-arranged paperwork, Wait, isn't most of the US economy run by large organization which make decision not unlike dictatorships. Centralized with the classic pyramid management scheme. I guess if all we do is read HN we might get a bit of a wrong impression about how the economy and labor market works here. > - and they have competition from foreign products which were produced by more officient economies, e.g. the iPhone So China (FoxConnn)? Yeah China is great. They are efficient but that is in part because they are willing to cut corners and disregard safety or health standards. But yeah I get it, you mean to say "Apple" and by proxy -- US. Well they can't do everything well. Their car businesses are doing well. Look at Ford, GM etc vs Honda and Toyota. Perhaps there the situation is reversed.

GFischer 12y ago
If you suscribe to some economic theories, workforce capacity planning years in advance sounds disastrously inefficient. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

wodenokoto 12y ago

> Seriously, from all the inefficiencies pointed out in this article, how is the economy of Japan not in the verge of collapse? I dare say that it is. Have you ever seen their debt to GDP ratio? How Japan manages to compete has been a big question in academic business studies for a very long time. I think Michael Porter did one of the best analysis of why Japan manages to be competitive in some markets, but his work is getting rather old now. http://www.amazon.com/Can-Japan-Compete-Michael-Porter/dp/0465059899 http://www.amazon.com/Can-Japan-Compete-Michael-Porter/dp/04...