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Comment by quant5 | Hacker News Reader

Patio11 has talked about how programmers are little respected and paid poorly in Japan compared with the US. Could this have something to do with Toyota's code quality being so poor and causing this issue?

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Keep in mind that I live in the country side and don't hang out with the likes of Patio11 ;-) I think he's seeing the best side of it. Where I live (in Japan, if it isn't obvious), the programmers I know have no training in programming, let alone a degree or anything like that. One of my friends was a secretary at an insurance company. One day her boss walked up to her and said, "From today you are going to be a programmer" and that was that!

I do also know a self taught free lancer who makes an absolute killing cleaning up problems in various companies. He does really short contracts (like 2-4 weeks) in Tokyo and Osaka. Then he comes back to Shizuoka and hangs out for a couple of weeks. So there is money to be made ;-)

That seems so strange to me since I always think of Japan as being so technologically advanced.

Granted, even here in the USA programming used to be considered "women's work", mostly revolving around planning and organization. So they passed it off to secretaries. I just didn't think that was something that was still happening.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmin...

> I always think of Japan as being so technologically advanced.

Ask anyone who has lived in Japan for a sufficient period of time and they will laugh at this statement, especially as it relates to programming.

I was thinking about robotics and consumer electronics mostly. I see that in the news a lot. There's even a wiki page about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Japa...

As I understand it, a lot of the early foundation Japanese PCs werr delayed by the need to support kanji for all but the most dedicated hacker. So higher resolution screens, initially lots of ROM to store the glyphs, and of course input methods to easily convert kana to kanji.

Or you could just hand print messages and send them by fax....

I can see how people think this, but once you live here you see the reality. There are sectors though where Japan is still pretty damn advanced, but you don't necessarily notice it in daily life. A great example is precision manufacturing - they are awesome at it.

Paul Sebastian Ziegler gave a talk at the HITB security conference in 2012 titled "Hacking in the Far East".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouQFu1FDllw

To me it was an eye opener to learn about the different attitudes of tech professionals in countries such as South Korea and particularly Japan.

I highly recommend watching it some time.

That plus project management philosophies and societally-expected overtime (fatigue buildup) are quite possibly all factors in this.

The programmers writing embedded software in the US aren't being paid all that much in respect or money either. It's not glamorous, you're basically invisible. Given all the money paid in the valley to develop the next Uber for Dogs it's hard for these companies to compete. That's why companies like GE are doing commercials for recruiting [1] but I don't think they hit the target.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvfU1NpCJQQ

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