Patio11 AMA about Japan, Technology, Business and Startups | Hacker News Reader

Patio11 AMA about Japan, Technology, Business and Startups

blog.hntokyo.io

69 pointsjason_tko20 comments

"Far better to do it at a startup (or at AppAmaGooBookSoft) than at a traditionally-managed Japanese company"

From what I've seen at least Google and Amazon don't have much engineering effort beyond localization in Japan. I'm curious to know if any of these guys are hiring for Software Engineering or SRE type roles (in Japan).

Can confirm that this is decidedly not the case for either GOOG or AMZN.

Many engineers on Google Chrome team are in Tokyo (Japan has quite a few experts in low level programming, and culturally excel at optimizing for speed).

Amazon Japan has engineers working on original products and features on their ecommerce storefront.

Yes, AppAmaGooBookSoft are hiring for software engineering and SREs in Tokyo. No, your perception that they do not have much engineering effort is not materially reflective of reality.

Google's open job reqs: https://careers.google.com/jobs#t=sq&q=j&li=20&l=false&jlo=e...

That's the public version. If you want the non-public version, take any one of several thousand people in Tokyo out for a beer.

“My agreement with my employers mostly forecloses personal side projects”

Understandable that he doesn’t have time, but the agreement sounds a little unfair.

I'm satisfied with the agreement, which was the result of two relatively sophisticated parties negotiating spiritedly towards a mutually acceptable outcome.

Without talking about that negotiation, note generally that if a prospective employer says "BTW we want all of your attention on the day job so our policy is $FOO" that you have many, many options for your next sentence, of which "OK then, if that is your policy." is only one.

Yes, it’s understandable, particularly if side projects are not important to you at the moment. But it still reflects poorly on the company (from my standpoint).

As an aside (while it’s the de facto standard) my understanding was that it’s illegal in Japan to restrict your work outside of company time. If anyone has a good reference for this, it would be welcome.

It's more or less illegal in California for employers to restrict off-hours work as well, but it's not illegal for them to claim copyright for off-hours work that is related to their business.

Interesting, yes that’s fair. I even think non-competes while being paid (not post termination) are fair. But being totally restricted (or largely restricted) from non-competing work doesn’t seem so fair.

To quote Joel Spolsky (being more succinct than I would be):

"Anything you do on your own time, with your own equipment, that is not related to your employer’s line of work is yours, even if the contract you signed says otherwise."

(For California only)

So as usual, it's a bit more complex, but the key is whether it's related to your employer's line of work. Of course the employer may try to claim _anything_ to belong to them, but they may not prevail in court. That outcome is less than ideal for the employee - best not talk about side projects at work or do anything related to them at work.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...

Really confused as to why this would be downvoted. Can anyone enlighten me?

People (probably the newcomers) don't know the purpose of downvotes here. I'm being downvoted into oblivion for political opinions there.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed - there's always some percent of users who didn't read the FAQ, but I feel like it got much worse in recent months. I wonder, did karma threshold needed for downvoting get smaller or something? It's really sad to see interesting opinions get paler and paler due to downvotes of people who apparently disagree, but are too lazy to state what they disagree with exactly in a comment. Relatedly, posts that reiterate some common memes/ideas/misconceptions in a couple of sentences get promoted to a much higher degree than they used to. It's not to the point where HN would be unusable, far from it, but it certainly doesn't improve the experience.

'Amen.'

You are not alone. Seems quite a few people really do prefer 'conversations' in which theirs is the only viewpoint posited.

I question how many people here are interested in learning versus simply proselytizing. (shrug) Whatevs...

Also from same author, on the emergence of AWS EC2 and S3:

https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194921&cid=15971343

"... not going to set the world on fire."

But see (also on front page currently):

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-com-announces-fourth-q...

It seems like AWS is doing quite well.

i don't understand the point of this comment.

I don't understand the point of the post.

To be fair, the slashdot description of it was a grid computing service, but VMs running on EC2 are not running on a grid in the traditional sense.

I understand the differences, however, the term was being used to describe EC2. In another example, I saw Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in an interview refer to "grid computing" as a synonym for EC2 when describing it to a naive audience. Indeed the AMA authors comment about "setting the world on fire" was responding to the first announcement of EC2, not a general discussion of grid computing. He chose to use that term, rightly or wrongly, because like Bezos he saw it as synonymous with EC2.

Come on, if someone were to cherry-pick wrongness from your history, mine, or anyone else's, it would be doozies all around. Therefore this crosses into incivility, which isn't allowed here. Not to mention it defeats good conversation, which is the point of these threads.

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