Why is Japan So Weak in Software?

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44 Comments

  1. somewhere in the comments I saw a new word for me relatingvto demography graphs and in many coubtries is a synonomius with the less general now elitetocrtacy, in many relevant areas that essentially the bulk cohort that now shifted upwards. With the occasinal peer pulling the ropes still with an illusion or capability and yet trivival cabality to donharm. It is always harder to work uphill then to a hill. Pa Pirius et all Alexandriae. scributes documents universalis.

  2. In japan:

    1. Engineers are capped compared to MBA in terms of prestige (you aren't climbing above L5 like bloomberg)
    2. Pay is shit, software, data engineers and etc scientist are jobs that are almost all math and critical and logical thinking (if you and i hate it would you do if it made less than marketing)
    3. Incompetant leadership, most of middle management you work with are old farts that can't esign a pdf documents (they literally human pigeon-carriers to meet up with you at a cafe)

    When I went to JP a skilled mathematician (not arithmetic actual discrete and logic math) from university of tokyo made less than 3,000,000 yen a year in todays currency it is like 2.2k usd a month.

    No one in tech likes tech due to the nature of the work the only reason it is paid well is as soon as you delve past UX "engineer" and front end "engineer", tech/fintech is completely math and the worst kind of math, the other benefit is that you can work in an enviroment where you are respected (or tolerated for being arrogant). I personally hate math almost as much as success hates me.

    Now imagine getting paid like less than 10 dollar an hour, while getting looked down and mistreated by a MBA (people get MBAs with a bachelor in psych… just so you know the type of idiots you are working with). Just so you know in the US the same scala engineer that I used in the example making 2.2k a month was paid that in like 3 weeks (I dropped out of college too and had 2 YOE).

  3. I used to teach a software engineer manager and she was on about 800k a month so I'm always a bit baffled when people say the pay sucks because that was more than most doctors.

  4. Depends on how you look at it since with regards to video games Japan dominates. So Japan is actually quite good in terms of software in that area.

  5. because large conglomerates do not innovate. you don't hear about companies being started in garages because 80 hour work weeks don't give a lot of free time for other ventures

  6. Japan is not a creative society. It is a civilisation of crafts that build really high quality products. As a society their collective power is on a par with Germany hence why their manufacturing is so good.

  7. Replace Japan with India which has a software industry but barely any global Software Product Brands & we make things for the whole world in the background.

  8. This a viideo with interesting content, thanks. Eric Schmid praised the Taiwanese for having the most technologically advanced semi-conducting capacity in the world but also claimed they were lousy with software.

  9. Programmers, developers and ugh, coders, only focus on the object code. SOFTWARE ENGINEERS focus on the source code, the object code takes care of itself. The trick is not in writing the code, but in TESTING the code. But hey, you know, software is just like batteries, right?

  10. Used to work for NEC in the mid 80s. I was a mainframe computer engineer. The hardware were extremely reliable. They hardly fail despite running round the clock. The software needed occasionally patching and update. NEC was clearly trying to snatch business from IBM in SE Asia. But, they have failed.

  11. It's been a meme for decades that Asians can't code. One reason given was that most programming languages are like yoorpan languages. Don't quite buy it, personally.

  12. I thought this question has been discussed before but I misremembered a briliant Quora answer from an Indian software engineer about the same question on Japan.
    As a career professional on the field and experienced Japan, the Indian guys mentioned Japanese working culture:
    It is basically an extension of their high school system – a "reset" orientation programm, seniority, and unyielding loyalty requirement. The first one is the most damaging, since programmer is not something you can really "teach" or "train" people in typical industrial apprenticeship progam that Japan learned from Germany during Meiji-Taisho era. Japanese companies didn't believe in talent nor special hiring, thus their programming talents are very very very very very far behind G7, let alone its neighbours, or even worse in a lot of respect, compared to South or even Southeast Asia. If you are a brilliant Japanese programmer, you'll work according to the whims and wishes of sales and marketing dept guy, who "bring the bounty" and looked up by the big bosses. Japanese giants with global presence that I know, employed all sorts of non-Japanese to code their programs: I know Chinese, Bangladeshi, and even Indonesian, becoming their head of software research.
    Application-wise, since they are bound by gerontocracy of Japanese boomers and its strong seniority culture – are very limited in function and depth, limited by their own outdated mindset that continues to be inherited as "tradition". Thus they don't have any appeal outside Japan, beyond their own foreign operations.
    A very defensive rebuttal usually comes from people (weebs) who are used to Japanese game industry. AHA!
    But again, their limited capability is highly visible in their own games: the simulation depth, engine physics, realism – Gran Turismo is in no way Assetto Corsa, rFactor2 , nor iRacing that has some degree of industrial application. When a modern western game create a supermarket scene – the entire merchandise are interactible, they broke, explode, splash all sorts of liquid that stains, you can smash the fridge and the window will broke. In Japanese games, the merchandise are textured 3D model that is blended into one object with the shelves – even the fridge are the same object with the wall. The Japanese game developers often re-write physics (e.g. fantasy setting) and just give it a final "look and feel" result, and balance their lackings with good storytelling, gameplay design, and artwork.
    The Indie scene is another indicator of how lacking is Japanese software development talent and capability is, in addition to reflect its market: flash games with very little animation, just interactible graphic novel. From Eastern Europe, you get something like Manor Lords, Banished, that is world's apart in complexity. In my Flight Simulator scene – Japanese developers are also limited to mostly doing artworks and 3D modelling (they are very efficient and high quality at that). But doing complex stuff like full-fidelity jetliner sim that requires quite a lot of programming? Heck – leave it the Westerners, Russians, Ukrainians, Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, and Chinese… There is a glaring absence of Japanese in that scene. You meet all sorts of non-western names, Jiangwei (iFly), Aamir (Fenix), Shervin (Bluebird), Ramzess – Ukrainian guy (FlightFactor) behind complex airliners – but Japanese talents are never there, in my 24 years of experience.

  13. Ruby is Japanese. Thanks to Ruby, we have Github, Gitlab, Heroku, and other major companies that the entire software world relies on. It's just that the US messes with Japan all the time, but the Japanese government is too weak to fight back, unlike China. That is why China has a large software industry. Vue 3 is Chinese. Japan needs a new government, a new party.

  14. There is one Japanese software I regularly use "CLIP STUDIO PAINT": it's a bit of Photoshop with vector art functionality and 3d combined, specifically for manga and hand drawing illustrations. The UI is a bit different than Adobe apps, but pretty good for its purpose (drawing), lots of features, stable and fast. And it's cheap (54$ for perpetual license)!

  15. Neither the EU nor other countries have a competitive IT industry like the US. China has proved that only some regulations can prevent the US from eating your IT industry.