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As a Japanese programmer who's terribly paid according to the many American fellow programmers, I have to defend this practice. Why an engineer has to be paid,

by euske 12y ago

As a Japanese programmer who's terribly paid according to the many American fellow programmers, I have to defend this practice. Why an engineer has to be paid, say, like three times than janitors? Because of the markets. Not because their job is inherently more noble than the lowly paid ones; they're equally contributing to the society. But what if the market is set up in a way that both salaries are roughly equalized? This is somewhat how the Japanese salary system works, and I believe this is The Better Way. I believe people are better off in a more egalitarian society. I'm not claiming that Japan is anywhere close to that overall, but as long as the salary goes I think this is a saner system. (I also worked in a US corp, and hated their salary gap.)

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
gwern 12y ago
If, as a programmer, you are not contributing much more value to the world than a janitor, you are doing something terribly terribly wrong. (And I say this as someone who has worked two janitorial jobs.)
- jaredklewis 12y ago
  Janitors keep places clean so programmers can focus on programming and thus "contribute to society." Assuming programmers are doing some good, not cleaning their own office lets them do more of it. In this way I think janitors can contribute significantly. But I think the more important point is that contribution to society is always a team effort, not an individual thing. Any contribution you make is in part thanks to your parents, teachers, co-workers, janitors, and so on. They deserve some credit.
  - linuxydave 12y ago
    I have no idea why people hate janitors so much. They do their job so you can do yours better. It's a very simple concept.
- SiVal 12y ago
  As a former janitor myself, I strongly second this. I used to mop floors and clean toilets. I helped a few people a little bit, and they treated me okay. I then learned to program and was surprised at how much more interested business people were in having my help. If money talks, the money coming out of their own pockets was telling me just how much more sincerely they valued my programming than my toilet cleaning services. And recently I've been teaching my middle school son to program. A few weeks ago, a project he did for his aunt caught the attention of a Gifted and Talented Ed (GATE program) director in another Silicon Valley city, who started recommending it to all the parents. My son had been accustomed to the school routine of having to use his skills to do hard work on school projects that were then treated as having no real value by the people who requested them. Over a weekend, his programming skills suddenly made him valuable in the real world to a lot of adults, none of whom he'd ever met. It was a revelation to him. It's unlikely that his yard-cleaning skills would have produced similar results. It appears to me that the feedback from the real world is that people would much rather have my family writing code for them than washing their windows, and our experience is hardly unique. I can't say for sure that Japan's enlightened policy of paying programmers like janitors has contributed to Japan's near irrelevance in the global software industry, but when I've worked with developers in Japan (I lived in Tokyo and speak Japanese), I've always been glad that I wasn't a Japanese programmer.
  - brianpan 12y ago
    You guys disagree with the Japanese programmer because of the difference in cultural contexts. You see how "valuable" programming is compared to janitorial in the context of our culture. Western society (business people, aunts, and teachers) assign monetary (and other) value to programming skills. The Japanese programmer was talking about how noble the jobs are. You may think the programmer is underpaid. The Japanese programmer thinks the janitor is undervalued (not viewed highly enough for the noble work that he is doing). He has his own cultural context, with its own emphases. Their free market reflects their culture- programmers and janitors are "valued" more equally than in the West. He's also saying that a more egalitarian valuation is better than ours which has greater variance.
    - 12y ago
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Bollocks. A large mass of programmers are constructing cultural ephemera. Without the janitor the building doesn't last.
  - roma1n 12y ago
    Also the janitor adds lots of concrete, measurable value. Avoiding half of the company getting sick and/or quitting? Check.
    - gwern 12y ago
      That is a beyond absurd claim. If you cut janitorial staff by say half, are you going to get half the company quitting or sick? Hell no.
  - gwern 12y ago
    Not bollocks. Think about the value of a slightly less dirty floor for an hour. Now think about the value of a slightly less buggy website. Which one actually matters? > Without the janitor the building doesn't last. Janitors aren't carpenters or construction workers or architects or civil engineers. They're janitors.
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      Think about a skyscraper in Manhattan. Think about the many businesses employing a multitude of people within. Now think about how long they would be able to keep running if all the janitors left and if you couldn't get any more. You would have folk selling crack in the stairwells within the week and businesses folding within the month. Also, as to your comparison, it strongly depends which business you are in. If you are running a building services company and your web designers quit, that might lose you some business. If your janitors quit, you are out of business. (edited to add - even if you are in a web design business, if you need a building to run the business from then the janitor will be a fundamental part of keeping the business afloat, unless you can get your web designers to also mop the floors and manage the security and maintenance. I have worked for a small media company in London where this was almost exactly the case, only there the CEO didn't expect it of the staff, but took over all janitorial duties himself as it was a small building and didn't take much time out of his day. He'd do most of his planning while cleaning.) There is a truth behind the cliché of the chief monk being the guy with the brush sweeping up and there is good reason behind the cleaning days that are promoted by Hidesaburo Kagiyama as a management practice for Japanese companies, where the day starts with the CEO cleaning a toilet with their bare hands in front of their employees. Here's an example of Hidesaburo Kagiyama visiting a Chinese University to explain and demonstrate his philosophy: "When Kagiyama visited a university in China to clean the toilets with the students, the toilets were exactly as described above. The students held their breath and waited to see how Kagiyama would treat those filthy toilets. Under the gaze of the students, Kagiyama started pushing the pile of feces and urine deep into the toilet bowl with his bare hand and flushed it. He then looked back at the students quietly and said, “Now you clean this toilet.” In this way, he assigned the toilets to the students respectively. Looking at the example set by Kagiyama, the students could no longer back out. They set about to clean the toilets." from here - http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~nippon/file/jog480e.pdf http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~nippon/file/jog480e.pdf Hidesaburo Kagiyama is the president of Yellow Hat, a Japanese car parts supplier that takes just over a billion dollars (120 billion Yen) in yearly revenue.
joyeuse6701 12y ago
>Because of the markets. Not because their job is inherently more noble than the lowly paid ones; So...a noble job should be better compensated? Why? Doesn't that become an issue with the concept of nobility? > they're equally contributing to the society How do you reason? I'd like to know how you came to that conclusion that they must be equal. Perhaps the issue is that compensation: money, prestige, and quality of life is better for an engineer in the U.S. than Japan. At least, that seems to be the viewpoint of the American Programmers you know: More Money > Better Quality of Life. I agree that a more egalitarian society would be better.
- willvarfar 12y ago
  > the viewpoint of the American Programmers you know: More Money > Better Quality of Life. The article addresses this directly, with an unattributed quote that he then expands upon: > “Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.”
maratd 12y ago
Your compensation isn't determined by nobility or a sense of equity. It's determined by the difficulty of the job. The more difficult the job, the less people are able to do it, the smaller the supply of labor for that position, the higher the paycheck. It's that simple. When a market doesn't reflect that, it is horribly broken and will be horribly abused by the participants.
- droopybuns 12y ago
  You're missing a dimension here: Your salary is determined in large part by your ability to negotiate. Jobs are not open market. There's no information clarity about what your competitors for a job are likely to demand. Consequently, you can't depend on the magical hand alone to determine your salary.
  - TTPrograms 12y ago
    Are you talking about in America? It's true that salaries aren't totally transparent, but you really have to stick your head in the ground to not have any idea what a given job pays: http://www.glassdoor.com/ http://www.glassdoor.com/
    - simi_ 12y ago
      Or even better: http://www.salar.ly/ http://www.salar.ly/
      - toephu2 12y ago
        while accurate, remember that is of foreigners working in US only (read: mostly H1Bs)
  - tsotha 12y ago
    This is only partially true. Even before the internet people talked to each other. You knew basically what you should be making for a given position. I've negotiated salary on every job after the first. I probably ended up with a few extra percent, but it wasn't major.
krapp 12y ago
Employees are not compensated because of the value they bring to society, but the value they bring to a company. Janitors and programmers may be parts of the same machine, but the programmers are expensive cogs which have to be lubricated with money to keep them working (some cogs, obviously, are smaller and need less oil.) Janitors, on the other hand, and other employees who contribute little to the bottom line of a company, are treated like caster wheels. Annoying when they're not working properly, but trivial to replace, and mostly not worth caring about.
- willvarfar 12y ago
  Eh employees are compensated based on the market rates - which employers collude to depress - rather than value they generate. Company profit is revenue minus cost after all.
SilasX 12y ago
That may be more financially egalitarian; it is definitely not socially egalitarian, as relative social status is barely reflected in such salaries.
- patio11 12y ago
  Japanese financial egalitarianism is also, to a certain degree, a statistical mirage. At higher internal statuses inside the company, it will simply anticipate your desires and provide for them, rather than you ever needing to sully yourself with money. The IRS takes a rather dim view of this and has since the reforms in, IIRC, the 1970s, which treat perks as taxable income. The National Tax Agency theoretically disapproves of them but the actual practice in Japan is that companies get away with things that would get your entire accounting division jailed in the US. For example, a Japanese CEO might have a salary of 4x that of his youngest salaryman. However, he also drives a $200k car. It is not "his" car, it is the company's car, but aside from the name on the title you could be excused for not knowing that. He's also homeless, if you discount the $10 million house which happens to be owned by the company's real estate arm which he happens to live in. After he's CEO emeritus, he'll probably be provided with a board seat, a job at an affiliated company, or what have you, and the perks will continue, as befits someone of his stature. This is true at all levels of the company, too. My salary was $30k, but there is some tangible value in having a pocket full of business cards which practically read "Attention, person who has just been handed this card: give the bearer whatever he wants. We're good for it. If you don't, we will remember." That status is very much not the same as the one you get if you combine two part-time jobs into the same level of income.
  - mechanical_fish 12y ago
    Speaking of emeritus employees: When do salarymen retire? What happens after that? Does the salaryman finally get to see that beach in Hawaii that his wife has been visiting every year, or does the pension not always stretch that far? Do the perks keep going after retirement even for the non-CEOs?
    - patio11 12y ago
noir_lord 12y ago
I like your world-view on this but I also think that the Nordic countries get just about everything right and am notoriously oblivious to money so perhaps that is why. I make a very poor capitalist.
guard-of-terra 12y ago
Janitors are soon to be replaced with code. And one skilled person to look after this code, paid accordingly.
ajuc 12y ago
What does it even mind "a noble job"? If you meant contribution (as in - maximizing total utility) then they aren't contributing equally.
- danudey 12y ago
  They're each contributing the same: one person's worth of work. The article discusses the idea that when you're hired you're given a career that the company decides on, not you. So in that context, where they'll turn an art history major into a java developer, things are different. The Japanese system is predicated on the idea that salarymen are fungible, and in that context your personal skills or contributions don't factor in. You're the same as everyone else, and if every one of a company's 80,000 employees is functionally identical from the point of view of the system, there's no real line between a programmer and a janitor.
  - Natsu 12y ago
    > They're each contributing the same: one person's worth of work. You're talking about effort and he's talking about value, which are quite different metrics. A programmer uses a crazy work multiplier known as a computer to affect, potentially, millions or even billions of lives (in the cases of Google or Facebook). A janitor cleans a small area and generally won't affect as much, in addition to being more easily replaceable due to being unskilled labor that does not require all that training. For what it's worth, I say that having worked jobs not far removed from janitor.
derekp7 12y ago
It is probably fair to say that each hour of labor is worth the same pay regardless of the job (ignoring market rates, etc). However, the reason I think things like programming or other high skill labor should be worth more, is it does actually involve more labor. First, I had spent at least 4 - 6 hours a day learning the craft, from the time I was 13 years old, improving at a steady rate. Still spend a good 3 - 4 hours a day keeping up. Some skilled crafts also involve a lot of formal education, in addition to many hours of practice. Add on top of that -- when I go home, I'm still constantly thinking about my craft, and problems that I'm currently working on. Therefore, for each hour I'm at work, I probably have spent at least 2 - 3 hours outside of work (either currently, or from past learning).
ubersync 12y ago
A janitor does not need much training for his work. So he can start working full time much earlier than an engineer, who most likely went to school for an extra 6 to 8 years to train for the job. It would be totally unfair for an engineer to miss 8 years of salary, amass a huge student loan, and still be paid equal to a janitor.
- aeturnum 12y ago
  Well, then I suppose you would be in favor of a system where engineers are paid more for the first 8 (or, say, 10) years, and then both jobs are adjusted down to the same salary? Perhaps with jobs also paying off loans.
  - SiVal 12y ago
    Even as a former janitor, it's obvious to me, as it would be to most janitors, that if I were an employer and could get either janitors or programmers for the same price, I'd hire as many programmers as I could, as few janitors as I could get away with, increasing the value of the products and services I could sell while lowering my costs: profit! Of course, every other sane employer would do the same thing, making these theoretically cheap programmers hard to find (without payments under the table to both programmers and the inevitable government enforcers) and leaving a lot of theoretically well-paid janitors unemployed. In other words, the normal real-world consequences of enforced utopian economic theory.
    - aeturnum 12y ago
      I don't see the flaw in that scenario. People want to hire lots of programmers now in the united states - good programmers are in short supply ("programmers" are not, for some value of "programmer"). I guess the unstated implication of your scenario is that businesses would start paying programmers more to work for them. However, at least in Japan, this has not happened. Programmer salaries stay close to other employees. I don't think I can snap my fingers and change things everywhere, but I think there's ample evidence that similar salaries for disparate educational requirements works on a societal level. Thus is not really a, "what if," scenario.
notastartup 12y ago
This is such a typical defeatist mentality that I've seen not just in Japan but amongst East Asian engineers. It's treated as some sort of menial job, there's no pride or passion in it's practice, and that's why it's so easy to be exploited. The market is not the law or the most efficient state, it is easily influenced by large entity or a conglomerate of businesses with the common interest of depressing the costly side of their business. To say that because the market pays a bit over what janitors are paid seems very much lacking in confidence and quite frankly, self degrading. You won't get anywhere with that kind of attitude, Japan or America.
drderidder 12y ago
There's some truth in that. I lived in Japan for many years and the egalitarianism in the society made for a pretty smooth running country that still impresses me. At the root of arguments that tech workers deserve a higher salary there seems to be an underlying assumption that people deserve more if they're more intelligent or talented. I lean more towards the idea that "to whom much has been given, much shall be required". There's an organization called the WageMark Foundation[1] that ranks companies on wage disparity, setting 8:1 as their target (on average its closer to 200:1)[2]. They say large wage gaps undermine good business practices and have proven “detrimental to economic growth and the existence of a healthy middle-income population.” When I found a local company that has a max wage gap of 10:1 and an inclusive profit sharing structure[3], they earned my respect and customer loyalty. [1] https://www.wagemark.org/ [2] http://go.bloomberg.com/multimedia/ceo-pay-ratio/ [3] http://tinyurl.com/mahpbd2
- jodrellblank 12y ago
  At the root of arguments that tech workers deserve a higher salary there seems to be an underlying assumption that people deserve more if they're more intelligent or talented. Do you really think people are arguing from that perspective? Maybe "to whom much has been given, much shall be required" works as a moral principle, but when talking about business transactions and programmers increasing company income, 'much shall be required from the more talented' meaning 'required by your boss, who will pocket the income from your work instead of you having it' that seems more 'exploitative' than 'enlightened'. Maybe if the entire company had everyone at the same pay, and any excess income was taxed for the use of the whole society, I could see it.
  - lmm 12y ago
    > Maybe if the entire company had everyone at the same pay, and any excess income was taxed for the use of the whole society, I could see it. I think that's why this works in Japan. The American notion of these CEOs earning millions (and then getting extra millions in bonuses even when they screw up or are fired) is very foreign (as the article says, the company will keep you in style appropriate to your station, but in more subtle ways). The conglomerate pays everyone similarly, makes modest profits (which probably means that some parts of it are losing money big time, and subsidized by the profitable divisions - but it would be unthinkable to just close a division and fire everyone) and returns them to shareholders, who are at least perceived as being mostly ordinary folks saving for retirement.
gurkendoktor 12y ago
But given that these Japanese engineers could make big $$$ in other parts of the world, how do you avoid major brain drain?
- cskau 12y ago
  The outside world is not Japan. That is more than enough to keep most from wanting to leave.
- SiVal 12y ago
  I've worked on Japanese dev teams, and I've always liked the Japanese geeks I've worked with. They're usually out of the running for "serious" jobs at the company, so they tend to be much more relaxed and fun than the "important" people. But I'm not at all convinced that most of them could make much more money outside Japan. I've almost always had to communicate with Japanese devs in Japanese, because few of them spoke much English. They tended to be kids who didn't do all that well in school, including English class, so they didn't go to prestigious universities, whose students tend to go into more respected professions. Things might have changed since I lived there, but Japanese devs were not valued very highly in Japan and most would have a hard time being more valuable outside Japan.
vivivi 12y ago
> Why an engineer has to be paid, say, like three times than janitors? Ask Mr. Supply and Mrs. Demand.
teek 12y ago
Let me counter your argument as an American living in Japan (though not working). > Not because their job is inherently more noble than the lowly paid ones In Japan engineers are treated like janitors because that's how Japanese businesses view other non-sales non-management positions within the company. The bosses decide the direction of the company, and everyone down to the janitors and engineers follow those orders. If you aren't a manager, you have less responsibility and thus less power to decide or give feedback to the overall health of the business. In America, engineers often have more input to their superiors. In fact it isn't uncommon for engineers to assume management positions in American large corporations. I would even argue a manager with an engineering background will preform better than just a manager with an MBA. But even the lowly intern is allowed to speak up to his superiors because discussion even if it is against management's wishes is valued. This isn't true in Japan. The path to "nobility" in Japan is to work (study) your way to the most reputable university out of high school to give yourself the best chance at entering the most reputable firms in Japan. This is why schools like Keio that are an all inclusive program for children from primary school all the way through university are so popular (for Americans, this system nearly guarantees children entry to Keio University which is to Japanese a sort of Ivy league school). They're trusted to give their students the best possible outcomes in structured Japanese society because they're reputable. So while you may delude yourself into thinking that Japan is egalitarian, it is anything but. It is a mixture of meritocracy to a certain point with old feudal caste style concepts mixed in. > But what if the market is set up in a way that both salaries are roughly equalized? This is somewhat how the Japanese salary system works, and I believe this is The Better Way. This isn't the better way. This is a tendency towards socialism. Not that I disagree with the socialist philosophy. In many ways I wish America was more like Europe. But from what I have seen in Japan, this mentality allows for the idea of 仕方ない (shikata ga nai) or status quo mentality. That is most Japanese have the idea that they can't effect change within society because that's just the way things have always been done and that's just how it is. Contrast this with America's acceptance and encouragement to change and create changes. This difference is the reason why America has continued to last as it has for so long in addition to coming to dominating the world even when large industries have been off-shored. There are some downsides to America's behavior. Notably we don't preserve traditions and culture. But at the same time this allows for innovation. It attracts the best and brightest in the world because that's the promise: you can do what you need to change the world and that glory will forever belong to your name as long as books and information continue to be preserved. For example Japan has had a number of major visionaries, business men, and inventors but most of them are not respected within Japanese society because they didn't fit in. The most recent being Shuji Nakamura (Nobel prize winner for blue LED manufacturing discovery) who was Japanese but has since nationalized to America. Nakamura sued his previous Japanese employer over compensation for his discovery which was a mere 20,000 yen (~$200 USD) at the time. If that's the reward for advancing society, then nobody will want to attempt to do the impossible. Instead everyone will just throw their hands up and demote themselves to the easiest and most stable work possible which is exactly what you're seeing in Japan these days. But they have another option: immigrate to America where they will be respected. It is sad to say but I believe if Japan continues on the trend they are on right now, they will continue to sink into irrelevancy. Japanese citizens are not trained to be specialized, they're trained to fit into society. Those that fit in the best and devote themselves to the structured nature of Japan are best respected. Those that find other ways or do not follow the traditional path (the Japanese version of the corporate ladder) are not respected. So when a serious problem in Japan arises, if the leaders do not recognize it, and have the correct solution, the entire ship sinks. Because only the leaders are in the position to effect change. Not the janitors. Not the engineers. Finally a recent popular drama that aired in Japan was Hanzawa Naoki. (Spoiler alert) In the drama, the main protagonist spends his time ethically climbing the ranks of a large national bank in order to exact his revenge on a board member of the bank that he believes caused his father to commit suicide. He's successful but in the end, he's demoted from his current rank and transferred out of the main branch (because he forced the board member to kneel down and apologize in the most humiliating way during a board meeting). When I asked my Japanese friend what she thought of the drama's ending, she just replied, "that's just how it is." She didn't bother to think for once if a better outcome was possible.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>Japan has a saying “ichioku-sohchu-ryu” which translates to “a nation of middle-class people.” However, in the past few decades, they’ve seen the middle-class shrinking at twice the average rate of other OECD countries. Since 1980, incomes have dropped for the lower classes while they’ve risen for those in the higher classes. And this problem is exacerbated by the lack of employment security. During Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s term (2001-2006), the number of people working regular jobs dropped by 1.9 million while numbers of those in temporary positions rose by 3.3 million. Since the middle-class started disappearing, there’s been a reported increase in depression, domestic violence and suicide – which indicates the toll the economy has taken on the people. From: http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/poorest-list/10-countries-with-the-worst-income-inequality/ http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/poorest-list/10-countrie... Further data taken from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ.... Japan has a Gini coefficient of 38, better than the 48 of the United States of America, but still worse than such famously underdeveloped countries as Cambodia or Jordan, or badly-off First World countries like Italy or Greece, let alone such highly developed nations as the United Kingdom or Germany. You shouldn't brag about your prosperous egalitarianism when you've been in a deflationary depression for 25 years and your Gini coefficient is in the "not quite as bad as America" range.
jedmeyers 12y ago
It is almost the same as sayng that platinum, aluminium, gold and silver should cost the same since they are all metals.
shiro 12y ago
As a Japanese I understand your sentiment; now I live in US and I don't praise the huge disparity in the US society neither. However, your argument is misleading. In Japan, gap doesn't exist as much between occupations as in US, but between employment status; whether if you're a "proper" member of the company (正社員), usually hired right out of school and expected to spend your entire career there, or not. Even if one do the same amount of work, a proper member generally gets much higher pay, enjoys various benefits, and is protected well from layoffs. It's ironic that you brought up nobleness---in a sense, the proper member is regarded more noble, because they swear allegiance to the company, thus payed higher, regardless of what they actually do.

by euske 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

gwern 12y ago

If, as a programmer, you are not contributing much more value to the world than a janitor, you are doing something terribly terribly wrong. (And I say this as someone who has worked two janitorial jobs.)

jaredklewis 12y ago
Janitors keep places clean so programmers can focus on programming and thus "contribute to society." Assuming programmers are doing some good, not cleaning their own office lets them do more of it. In this way I think janitors can contribute significantly. But I think the more important point is that contribution to society is always a team effort, not an individual thing. Any contribution you make is in part thanks to your parents, teachers, co-workers, janitors, and so on. They deserve some credit.
- linuxydave 12y ago
  I have no idea why people hate janitors so much. They do their job so you can do yours better. It's a very simple concept.
SiVal 12y ago
As a former janitor myself, I strongly second this. I used to mop floors and clean toilets. I helped a few people a little bit, and they treated me okay. I then learned to program and was surprised at how much more interested business people were in having my help. If money talks, the money coming out of their own pockets was telling me just how much more sincerely they valued my programming than my toilet cleaning services. And recently I've been teaching my middle school son to program. A few weeks ago, a project he did for his aunt caught the attention of a Gifted and Talented Ed (GATE program) director in another Silicon Valley city, who started recommending it to all the parents. My son had been accustomed to the school routine of having to use his skills to do hard work on school projects that were then treated as having no real value by the people who requested them. Over a weekend, his programming skills suddenly made him valuable in the real world to a lot of adults, none of whom he'd ever met. It was a revelation to him. It's unlikely that his yard-cleaning skills would have produced similar results. It appears to me that the feedback from the real world is that people would much rather have my family writing code for them than washing their windows, and our experience is hardly unique. I can't say for sure that Japan's enlightened policy of paying programmers like janitors has contributed to Japan's near irrelevance in the global software industry, but when I've worked with developers in Japan (I lived in Tokyo and speak Japanese), I've always been glad that I wasn't a Japanese programmer.
- brianpan 12y ago
  You guys disagree with the Japanese programmer because of the difference in cultural contexts. You see how "valuable" programming is compared to janitorial in the context of our culture. Western society (business people, aunts, and teachers) assign monetary (and other) value to programming skills. The Japanese programmer was talking about how noble the jobs are. You may think the programmer is underpaid. The Japanese programmer thinks the janitor is undervalued (not viewed highly enough for the noble work that he is doing). He has his own cultural context, with its own emphases. Their free market reflects their culture- programmers and janitors are "valued" more equally than in the West. He's also saying that a more egalitarian valuation is better than ours which has greater variance.
  - 12y ago
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Bollocks. A large mass of programmers are constructing cultural ephemera. Without the janitor the building doesn't last.
- roma1n 12y ago
  Also the janitor adds lots of concrete, measurable value. Avoiding half of the company getting sick and/or quitting? Check.
  - gwern 12y ago
    That is a beyond absurd claim. If you cut janitorial staff by say half, are you going to get half the company quitting or sick? Hell no.
- gwern 12y ago
  Not bollocks. Think about the value of a slightly less dirty floor for an hour. Now think about the value of a slightly less buggy website. Which one actually matters? > Without the janitor the building doesn't last. Janitors aren't carpenters or construction workers or architects or civil engineers. They're janitors.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Think about a skyscraper in Manhattan. Think about the many businesses employing a multitude of people within. Now think about how long they would be able to keep running if all the janitors left and if you couldn't get any more. You would have folk selling crack in the stairwells within the week and businesses folding within the month. Also, as to your comparison, it strongly depends which business you are in. If you are running a building services company and your web designers quit, that might lose you some business. If your janitors quit, you are out of business. (edited to add - even if you are in a web design business, if you need a building to run the business from then the janitor will be a fundamental part of keeping the business afloat, unless you can get your web designers to also mop the floors and manage the security and maintenance. I have worked for a small media company in London where this was almost exactly the case, only there the CEO didn't expect it of the staff, but took over all janitorial duties himself as it was a small building and didn't take much time out of his day. He'd do most of his planning while cleaning.) There is a truth behind the cliché of the chief monk being the guy with the brush sweeping up and there is good reason behind the cleaning days that are promoted by Hidesaburo Kagiyama as a management practice for Japanese companies, where the day starts with the CEO cleaning a toilet with their bare hands in front of their employees. Here's an example of Hidesaburo Kagiyama visiting a Chinese University to explain and demonstrate his philosophy: "When Kagiyama visited a university in China to clean the toilets with the students, the toilets were exactly as described above. The students held their breath and waited to see how Kagiyama would treat those filthy toilets. Under the gaze of the students, Kagiyama started pushing the pile of feces and urine deep into the toilet bowl with his bare hand and flushed it. He then looked back at the students quietly and said, “Now you clean this toilet.” In this way, he assigned the toilets to the students respectively. Looking at the example set by Kagiyama, the students could no longer back out. They set about to clean the toilets." from here - http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~nippon/file/jog480e.pdf http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~nippon/file/jog480e.pdf Hidesaburo Kagiyama is the president of Yellow Hat, a Japanese car parts supplier that takes just over a billion dollars (120 billion Yen) in yearly revenue.

joyeuse6701 12y ago

>Because of the markets. Not because their job is inherently more noble than the lowly paid ones; So...a noble job should be better compensated? Why? Doesn't that become an issue with the concept of nobility? > they're equally contributing to the society How do you reason? I'd like to know how you came to that conclusion that they must be equal. Perhaps the issue is that compensation: money, prestige, and quality of life is better for an engineer in the U.S. than Japan. At least, that seems to be the viewpoint of the American Programmers you know: More Money > Better Quality of Life. I agree that a more egalitarian society would be better.

willvarfar 12y ago
> the viewpoint of the American Programmers you know: More Money > Better Quality of Life. The article addresses this directly, with an unattributed quote that he then expands upon: > “Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.”

maratd 12y ago

Your compensation isn't determined by nobility or a sense of equity. It's determined by the difficulty of the job. The more difficult the job, the less people are able to do it, the smaller the supply of labor for that position, the higher the paycheck. It's that simple. When a market doesn't reflect that, it is horribly broken and will be horribly abused by the participants.

droopybuns 12y ago
You're missing a dimension here: Your salary is determined in large part by your ability to negotiate. Jobs are not open market. There's no information clarity about what your competitors for a job are likely to demand. Consequently, you can't depend on the magical hand alone to determine your salary.
- TTPrograms 12y ago
  Are you talking about in America? It's true that salaries aren't totally transparent, but you really have to stick your head in the ground to not have any idea what a given job pays: http://www.glassdoor.com/ http://www.glassdoor.com/
  - simi_ 12y ago
    Or even better: http://www.salar.ly/ http://www.salar.ly/
    - toephu2 12y ago
      while accurate, remember that is of foreigners working in US only (read: mostly H1Bs)
- tsotha 12y ago
  This is only partially true. Even before the internet people talked to each other. You knew basically what you should be making for a given position. I've negotiated salary on every job after the first. I probably ended up with a few extra percent, but it wasn't major.

krapp 12y ago

Employees are not compensated because of the value they bring to society, but the value they bring to a company. Janitors and programmers may be parts of the same machine, but the programmers are expensive cogs which have to be lubricated with money to keep them working (some cogs, obviously, are smaller and need less oil.) Janitors, on the other hand, and other employees who contribute little to the bottom line of a company, are treated like caster wheels. Annoying when they're not working properly, but trivial to replace, and mostly not worth caring about.

willvarfar 12y ago
Eh employees are compensated based on the market rates - which employers collude to depress - rather than value they generate. Company profit is revenue minus cost after all.

SilasX 12y ago

That may be more financially egalitarian; it is definitely not socially egalitarian, as relative social status is barely reflected in such salaries.

patio11 12y ago
Japanese financial egalitarianism is also, to a certain degree, a statistical mirage. At higher internal statuses inside the company, it will simply anticipate your desires and provide for them, rather than you ever needing to sully yourself with money. The IRS takes a rather dim view of this and has since the reforms in, IIRC, the 1970s, which treat perks as taxable income. The National Tax Agency theoretically disapproves of them but the actual practice in Japan is that companies get away with things that would get your entire accounting division jailed in the US. For example, a Japanese CEO might have a salary of 4x that of his youngest salaryman. However, he also drives a $200k car. It is not "his" car, it is the company's car, but aside from the name on the title you could be excused for not knowing that. He's also homeless, if you discount the $10 million house which happens to be owned by the company's real estate arm which he happens to live in. After he's CEO emeritus, he'll probably be provided with a board seat, a job at an affiliated company, or what have you, and the perks will continue, as befits someone of his stature. This is true at all levels of the company, too. My salary was $30k, but there is some tangible value in having a pocket full of business cards which practically read "Attention, person who has just been handed this card: give the bearer whatever he wants. We're good for it. If you don't, we will remember." That status is very much not the same as the one you get if you combine two part-time jobs into the same level of income.
- mechanical_fish 12y ago
  Speaking of emeritus employees: When do salarymen retire? What happens after that? Does the salaryman finally get to see that beach in Hawaii that his wife has been visiting every year, or does the pension not always stretch that far? Do the perks keep going after retirement even for the non-CEOs?
  - patio11 12y ago

noir_lord 12y ago

I like your world-view on this but I also think that the Nordic countries get just about everything right and am notoriously oblivious to money so perhaps that is why. I make a very poor capitalist.

guard-of-terra 12y ago

Janitors are soon to be replaced with code. And one skilled person to look after this code, paid accordingly.

ajuc 12y ago

What does it even mind "a noble job"? If you meant contribution (as in - maximizing total utility) then they aren't contributing equally.

danudey 12y ago
They're each contributing the same: one person's worth of work. The article discusses the idea that when you're hired you're given a career that the company decides on, not you. So in that context, where they'll turn an art history major into a java developer, things are different. The Japanese system is predicated on the idea that salarymen are fungible, and in that context your personal skills or contributions don't factor in. You're the same as everyone else, and if every one of a company's 80,000 employees is functionally identical from the point of view of the system, there's no real line between a programmer and a janitor.
- Natsu 12y ago
  > They're each contributing the same: one person's worth of work. You're talking about effort and he's talking about value, which are quite different metrics. A programmer uses a crazy work multiplier known as a computer to affect, potentially, millions or even billions of lives (in the cases of Google or Facebook). A janitor cleans a small area and generally won't affect as much, in addition to being more easily replaceable due to being unskilled labor that does not require all that training. For what it's worth, I say that having worked jobs not far removed from janitor.

derekp7 12y ago

It is probably fair to say that each hour of labor is worth the same pay regardless of the job (ignoring market rates, etc). However, the reason I think things like programming or other high skill labor should be worth more, is it does actually involve more labor. First, I had spent at least 4 - 6 hours a day learning the craft, from the time I was 13 years old, improving at a steady rate. Still spend a good 3 - 4 hours a day keeping up. Some skilled crafts also involve a lot of formal education, in addition to many hours of practice. Add on top of that -- when I go home, I'm still constantly thinking about my craft, and problems that I'm currently working on. Therefore, for each hour I'm at work, I probably have spent at least 2 - 3 hours outside of work (either currently, or from past learning).

ubersync 12y ago

A janitor does not need much training for his work. So he can start working full time much earlier than an engineer, who most likely went to school for an extra 6 to 8 years to train for the job. It would be totally unfair for an engineer to miss 8 years of salary, amass a huge student loan, and still be paid equal to a janitor.

aeturnum 12y ago
Well, then I suppose you would be in favor of a system where engineers are paid more for the first 8 (or, say, 10) years, and then both jobs are adjusted down to the same salary? Perhaps with jobs also paying off loans.
- SiVal 12y ago
  Even as a former janitor, it's obvious to me, as it would be to most janitors, that if I were an employer and could get either janitors or programmers for the same price, I'd hire as many programmers as I could, as few janitors as I could get away with, increasing the value of the products and services I could sell while lowering my costs: profit! Of course, every other sane employer would do the same thing, making these theoretically cheap programmers hard to find (without payments under the table to both programmers and the inevitable government enforcers) and leaving a lot of theoretically well-paid janitors unemployed. In other words, the normal real-world consequences of enforced utopian economic theory.
  - aeturnum 12y ago
    I don't see the flaw in that scenario. People want to hire lots of programmers now in the united states - good programmers are in short supply ("programmers" are not, for some value of "programmer"). I guess the unstated implication of your scenario is that businesses would start paying programmers more to work for them. However, at least in Japan, this has not happened. Programmer salaries stay close to other employees. I don't think I can snap my fingers and change things everywhere, but I think there's ample evidence that similar salaries for disparate educational requirements works on a societal level. Thus is not really a, "what if," scenario.

notastartup 12y ago

This is such a typical defeatist mentality that I've seen not just in Japan but amongst East Asian engineers. It's treated as some sort of menial job, there's no pride or passion in it's practice, and that's why it's so easy to be exploited. The market is not the law or the most efficient state, it is easily influenced by large entity or a conglomerate of businesses with the common interest of depressing the costly side of their business. To say that because the market pays a bit over what janitors are paid seems very much lacking in confidence and quite frankly, self degrading. You won't get anywhere with that kind of attitude, Japan or America.

drderidder 12y ago

There's some truth in that. I lived in Japan for many years and the egalitarianism in the society made for a pretty smooth running country that still impresses me. At the root of arguments that tech workers deserve a higher salary there seems to be an underlying assumption that people deserve more if they're more intelligent or talented. I lean more towards the idea that "to whom much has been given, much shall be required". There's an organization called the WageMark Foundation[1] that ranks companies on wage disparity, setting 8:1 as their target (on average its closer to 200:1)[2]. They say large wage gaps undermine good business practices and have proven “detrimental to economic growth and the existence of a healthy middle-income population.” When I found a local company that has a max wage gap of 10:1 and an inclusive profit sharing structure[3], they earned my respect and customer loyalty. [1] https://www.wagemark.org/ [2] http://go.bloomberg.com/multimedia/ceo-pay-ratio/ [3] http://tinyurl.com/mahpbd2

jodrellblank 12y ago
At the root of arguments that tech workers deserve a higher salary there seems to be an underlying assumption that people deserve more if they're more intelligent or talented. Do you really think people are arguing from that perspective? Maybe "to whom much has been given, much shall be required" works as a moral principle, but when talking about business transactions and programmers increasing company income, 'much shall be required from the more talented' meaning 'required by your boss, who will pocket the income from your work instead of you having it' that seems more 'exploitative' than 'enlightened'. Maybe if the entire company had everyone at the same pay, and any excess income was taxed for the use of the whole society, I could see it.
- lmm 12y ago
  > Maybe if the entire company had everyone at the same pay, and any excess income was taxed for the use of the whole society, I could see it. I think that's why this works in Japan. The American notion of these CEOs earning millions (and then getting extra millions in bonuses even when they screw up or are fired) is very foreign (as the article says, the company will keep you in style appropriate to your station, but in more subtle ways). The conglomerate pays everyone similarly, makes modest profits (which probably means that some parts of it are losing money big time, and subsidized by the profitable divisions - but it would be unthinkable to just close a division and fire everyone) and returns them to shareholders, who are at least perceived as being mostly ordinary folks saving for retirement.

gurkendoktor 12y ago

But given that these Japanese engineers could make big $$$ in other parts of the world, how do you avoid major brain drain?

cskau 12y ago
The outside world is not Japan. That is more than enough to keep most from wanting to leave.
SiVal 12y ago
I've worked on Japanese dev teams, and I've always liked the Japanese geeks I've worked with. They're usually out of the running for "serious" jobs at the company, so they tend to be much more relaxed and fun than the "important" people. But I'm not at all convinced that most of them could make much more money outside Japan. I've almost always had to communicate with Japanese devs in Japanese, because few of them spoke much English. They tended to be kids who didn't do all that well in school, including English class, so they didn't go to prestigious universities, whose students tend to go into more respected professions. Things might have changed since I lived there, but Japanese devs were not valued very highly in Japan and most would have a hard time being more valuable outside Japan.

vivivi 12y ago

> Why an engineer has to be paid, say, like three times than janitors? Ask Mr. Supply and Mrs. Demand.

teek 12y ago

Let me counter your argument as an American living in Japan (though not working). > Not because their job is inherently more noble than the lowly paid ones In Japan engineers are treated like janitors because that's how Japanese businesses view other non-sales non-management positions within the company. The bosses decide the direction of the company, and everyone down to the janitors and engineers follow those orders. If you aren't a manager, you have less responsibility and thus less power to decide or give feedback to the overall health of the business. In America, engineers often have more input to their superiors. In fact it isn't uncommon for engineers to assume management positions in American large corporations. I would even argue a manager with an engineering background will preform better than just a manager with an MBA. But even the lowly intern is allowed to speak up to his superiors because discussion even if it is against management's wishes is valued. This isn't true in Japan. The path to "nobility" in Japan is to work (study) your way to the most reputable university out of high school to give yourself the best chance at entering the most reputable firms in Japan. This is why schools like Keio that are an all inclusive program for children from primary school all the way through university are so popular (for Americans, this system nearly guarantees children entry to Keio University which is to Japanese a sort of Ivy league school). They're trusted to give their students the best possible outcomes in structured Japanese society because they're reputable. So while you may delude yourself into thinking that Japan is egalitarian, it is anything but. It is a mixture of meritocracy to a certain point with old feudal caste style concepts mixed in. > But what if the market is set up in a way that both salaries are roughly equalized? This is somewhat how the Japanese salary system works, and I believe this is The Better Way. This isn't the better way. This is a tendency towards socialism. Not that I disagree with the socialist philosophy. In many ways I wish America was more like Europe. But from what I have seen in Japan, this mentality allows for the idea of 仕方ない (shikata ga nai) or status quo mentality. That is most Japanese have the idea that they can't effect change within society because that's just the way things have always been done and that's just how it is. Contrast this with America's acceptance and encouragement to change and create changes. This difference is the reason why America has continued to last as it has for so long in addition to coming to dominating the world even when large industries have been off-shored. There are some downsides to America's behavior. Notably we don't preserve traditions and culture. But at the same time this allows for innovation. It attracts the best and brightest in the world because that's the promise: you can do what you need to change the world and that glory will forever belong to your name as long as books and information continue to be preserved. For example Japan has had a number of major visionaries, business men, and inventors but most of them are not respected within Japanese society because they didn't fit in. The most recent being Shuji Nakamura (Nobel prize winner for blue LED manufacturing discovery) who was Japanese but has since nationalized to America. Nakamura sued his previous Japanese employer over compensation for his discovery which was a mere 20,000 yen (~$200 USD) at the time. If that's the reward for advancing society, then nobody will want to attempt to do the impossible. Instead everyone will just throw their hands up and demote themselves to the easiest and most stable work possible which is exactly what you're seeing in Japan these days. But they have another option: immigrate to America where they will be respected. It is sad to say but I believe if Japan continues on the trend they are on right now, they will continue to sink into irrelevancy. Japanese citizens are not trained to be specialized, they're trained to fit into society. Those that fit in the best and devote themselves to the structured nature of Japan are best respected. Those that find other ways or do not follow the traditional path (the Japanese version of the corporate ladder) are not respected. So when a serious problem in Japan arises, if the leaders do not recognize it, and have the correct solution, the entire ship sinks. Because only the leaders are in the position to effect change. Not the janitors. Not the engineers. Finally a recent popular drama that aired in Japan was Hanzawa Naoki. (Spoiler alert) In the drama, the main protagonist spends his time ethically climbing the ranks of a large national bank in order to exact his revenge on a board member of the bank that he believes caused his father to commit suicide. He's successful but in the end, he's demoted from his current rank and transferred out of the main branch (because he forced the board member to kneel down and apologize in the most humiliating way during a board meeting). When I asked my Japanese friend what she thought of the drama's ending, she just replied, "that's just how it is." She didn't bother to think for once if a better outcome was possible.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

>Japan has a saying “ichioku-sohchu-ryu” which translates to “a nation of middle-class people.” However, in the past few decades, they’ve seen the middle-class shrinking at twice the average rate of other OECD countries. Since 1980, incomes have dropped for the lower classes while they’ve risen for those in the higher classes. And this problem is exacerbated by the lack of employment security. During Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s term (2001-2006), the number of people working regular jobs dropped by 1.9 million while numbers of those in temporary positions rose by 3.3 million. Since the middle-class started disappearing, there’s been a reported increase in depression, domestic violence and suicide – which indicates the toll the economy has taken on the people. From: http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/poorest-list/10-countries-with-the-worst-income-inequality/ http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/poorest-list/10-countrie... Further data taken from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ.... Japan has a Gini coefficient of 38, better than the 48 of the United States of America, but still worse than such famously underdeveloped countries as Cambodia or Jordan, or badly-off First World countries like Italy or Greece, let alone such highly developed nations as the United Kingdom or Germany. You shouldn't brag about your prosperous egalitarianism when you've been in a deflationary depression for 25 years and your Gini coefficient is in the "not quite as bad as America" range.

jedmeyers 12y ago

It is almost the same as sayng that platinum, aluminium, gold and silver should cost the same since they are all metals.

shiro 12y ago

As a Japanese I understand your sentiment; now I live in US and I don't praise the huge disparity in the US society neither. However, your argument is misleading. In Japan, gap doesn't exist as much between occupations as in US, but between employment status; whether if you're a "proper" member of the company (正社員), usually hired right out of school and expected to spend your entire career there, or not. Even if one do the same amount of work, a proper member generally gets much higher pay, enjoys various benefits, and is protected well from layoffs. It's ironic that you brought up nobleness---in a sense, the proper member is regarded more noble, because they swear allegiance to the company, thus payed higher, regardless of what they actually do.