Toshiba’s loss of star engineer tells tale of company's decline
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
Copenhagen (my former home turf) used to be not great, basically software engineering was/is considered low status and all the smart devs in corporations were steered to higher status, but less technical, roles like architect, consulting or project management (or other middle management). Denmark really bought into the idea that we're the ideas people, the grunt work can be done in India or Poland or whatever. Some successful software startups came out of there, like Endomondo, Vivino and Zendesk, but they moved their centre of gravity to the bay area at first opportunity. This has since changed, and from what I've heard there's a fairly happening startup scene there now (still an awful place to be a corporate dev, though).
Curious if you have any insights on where do they end up going instead, even if anecdotal. (E.g.: smaller firms, own startups, or foreign (US/China) opportunities?)
My SO and I have seriously discussed moving to Tokyo when it comes time to raise a family. We're both pretty disappointed with the culture here in the US that makes it difficult to let your kids be independent and self reliant (See: Parents getting their kids taken away for letting them walk to the park, etc), and we've loved the time we've spent in Tokyo.
The salary situation makes this pretty tough, though.
That said, blockchain jobs in Japan are supposed to be abundant and pay more like US wages.
Unless it's Cannabis.
But alcohol, cigarettes and Coca Cola are less available if you live on a rural farm.
It was sold to a U.S. company, and everything about management and corporate culture has gotten worse. People are less happy and feel they have less job security, which translates into poorer performance and reduced commitment. Japanese companies have their issues, but a lot of Americans have much to learn from them about making employees want to stay.
Salaries are fair and correspond to the cost of living.
What kind of a job did your colleague apply for at Microsoft? They don't do much development work in Tokyo.
What hardware realm? They're involved all over.
Right now they're absolutely crushing the camera market - the A73 and AR73 are taking the world by storm, with tons of Canon and Nikon DSLR converts (Including myself). Their GM lenses are the sharpest available at a lot of focal lengths, the bokeh is close to the top of readily available modern lenses, etc. They're certainly competing there.
Their UHS-II cards are some of the fastest on the market.
The PS4 is the leader in lifetime sales vs. other consoles.
What hardware are you talking about?
Sony's camera division makes money from selling camera parts to other companies - including Apple.
Then the iPhone came out and just being a phone wasn't good enough.
Now everyone else uses Sony's sensor anyway so what is their advantage? Lenses?
Maybe not the first, damned close.
My comment does not refer to the gaming and photography divisions, as those are cash cows for Sony.
That said, they seem to do way less marketing than Samsung or Apple.
Even so, they have carved out a niche of making smaller Android phones (their Compact variants) that share internals with their larger brethren.
You're off by a factor of two. The PS4 has been out for 4.5 years, not "8 years or so".
> It may outsell the PS4 right now, though.
In FY2017 the PS4 sold 19 million units. The Switch sold 13 million (15.5M sold in total so far, but 2.7M were in FY2016).
On the dev side. I’ve been told that there are a few main consultancy firms which do the bulk of development for most companies. It’s more appropriate to hire these firms than it is to build your own teams. Because these firms do not pay high amounts to their devs, it sets the norm across the country.
It is extraordinarily unlikely that employee is an engineer.
(For additional "It's complicated!" context: I believe his bosses likely considered the offer they made him to be a plum. My ex-employer had a similar terminal outcome for distinguished engineers, where you'd be given a laboratory, perhaps an assistant or two, and total freedom. Is that a particularly compelling terminal offer? No. But it's an offer better than 99.8% of employees in the engineering track have. The mere fact that it is obviously better than what 99.8% of engineers get is a component of the offer; Japanese megacorps figure out that giving you money to purchase status is inefficient when they can simply award you status directly.)
Apartments in Japan tend to be small and having lived in various places in the world, I'm going to say that it is not really comparable. For example, no matter what you rent, you are going to get a stupidly small kitchen: probably a single sink, 0.5 meter counter top and a place to put a konro (2 burner gas range with a fish grill).
Apart from the kitchen (which takes a lot of practice to get used to), the bath room/wash rooms tend to make very efficient use of space. If you are living in Japanese style, you also put your futons away in the closet during the day and can live in what would be your bedroom.
I live in a rural area and since I work remotely, I wanted an office in the apartment. We tried to get a 3 bedroom apartment (so we would have a guest room as well), but it was just impossible. Nobody could even understand why a childless couple could possibly use that much space.
So it's more a matter of culture than price. In large centres you actually have a lot more choice. For example when I visit Tokyo, I often see advertisements for 4 bedroom luxury apartments. They are about the same price as you would pay in any other metropolitan centre in the world. However, things like that just aren't available in a lot of smaller places. You pretty much have to buy a house.
In my current role we have a similar program, beyond the relatively small bonus I think the only benefit is bragging rights. Patenting or inventing something means little to superiors. Large companies focus on the short term stategic initiatives, often being unable to capitalize on long term or even short term opportunities. That's why more nimble startups are more effective.
There were other, substantially larger bonuses for innovations made by staff, when these innovations had larger economical impact (for instance, optimizing the production line).
I guess that that is the point. I worked for a similar company. They were not interested in groundbreaking one-of-a-kind patent. They were looking for something to use as a countermeasure if another company in the same sector sues them.
A new chemical process, a new antibiotic, or something of that scale can be used to create a new successful product, save lives, etc. Patents were designed to make sure that companies could profit from them, but that the knowledge was not lost just because they keep it secret.
In software development, I have seen a lot of "method to send content to a remote storage using gesture-based commands" (this one is made up). When they just mean that a developer implemented a drag & drop touch functionality for the phone that sends a file to a server. A necessary implementation, but hardly an invention as any developer will come with a similar solution in minutes if presented with the problem.
The one patent per Scrum sprint program, bred a whole encyclopedia of "apparatus or algorithm for searching, publishing, or displaying a thing within another thing" patents.
I had a friend whose father was getting royalties for some chemical manufacturing process that he came up with. I recall that royalties were planned to be a major component of his retirement.
It's interesting that for execs big bonuses for good work are considered motivational and necessary whereas for the little guy good work doesn't need to be rewarded because it would add cost.
If so, it appears that there is room for foreign companies/startups (US, or even Chinese) to establish office in Japan and recruit away the best people with better pay/perks/vacation time/etc. Sort of "recruiting arbitrage." Heck, the same happened in the US in the past 10-15 years with a relatively small number of firms siphoning off the best talent.
Curious if there are any examples of that (e.g. I know that Google has an office in Tokyo, but I don't know what kind of work they do.)
That said, megacorps in Japan offer "perks" that American, especially tech companies, do not offer. See patio's post (scroll down to the "The company hereby promises the employee" section) for some examples:
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...
In many ways it's the opposite of our SV-style company culture, where we switch jobs every 3-5 years.
Germans usually express a preference for long-term stable employment and work-life balance rather than skyrocketing salaries. The same is true for a lot of European countries.
Work-life balance for software engineers is a bit better in the US than it is in Japan.
I just assume you took this number off the OECD chart which explicitly states that you can't compare between countries because they have different methods of evaluating the numbers. (Ironically I have only seen country-comparisons from this data)
You won't get anywhere near 1300 hours without counting all part-time, half-time workers who obviously don't get the full salary. The standard is 40 hours per week (37.5 if generous) with 30 days of paid vacation. That is 1700+ hours per year.
1] https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/warum-deutsche-auswa... 2] https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/deutsche-auswanderer... 3] https://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/arbeitsmarkt/mehr-abwande...
In the end if you live in SF vs Germany you might earn twice as much, but you spend 3 times as much. In Seattle it's maybe a better factor, but that's one of the few places with worse weather than Germany.
And then you have to account for 4 weeks less vacation, no paid overtime (or overtime as time off). I usually do two 3 week vacations a year and 2 weeks over Christmas. It's not only pay that counts.
And rents are still far away from the likes of SF/NYC/Seattle.
Apparently, in the 1980s, Japan used to outlaw Japanese engineers traveling to South Korea to advise South Korean companies. Ultimately, this strategy failed.
He should have pursued a career at one of competitor firms, possibly in the US.
When I was first introduced to this concept, someone pointed out this partly indicates why 3D printing innovations are introduced by US firms and often then refined by German or other coordinated market economy-based firms.
"A team led by Masuoka paved the way for the practical application of flash memory. The team was small when it was created in the 1980s, with an annual budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Asking for a bonus as an engineer for doing your job well is like begging for tips for waiting tables! If you don't think you are being compensated well for your skillset and you can get a better deal elsewhere then quit!
If one thinks they have a great idea that would be incredibly profitable, they should quit their job and develop it on their own dime. I have a background in micro/nanofabrication and highly doubt that Mr. Masuoka could have done what he did in his garage, without the state of the art fab technology available at Toshiba at the time.
A piece of advice to startup founders, always ALWAYS have a "propriety rights agreement" in place with whomever you work (contractors, employees, interns), detailing the ownership status of the IP created as a result of the collaboration. Without one, this could be a potential show-stopper later on when you are looking for outside investments and going through due diligence.
If you want more money you can just find a better offer. But some times you just want a fair share of credit.
I realize my employer might own the IP - but if I make some breakthrough making billions for my employer they could e.g give me a nice diploma in a plastic frame, or have me speak 30 minutes at an internal event about the discovery.
I think these things are often forgotten. It’s very easy for a manager to send an email saying “Bob’s new feature landed us a contract worth 10M! Great job Bob and everyone else”.
That is a completely hypothetical situation and always never happens in the real world. Billion dollar ideas take many years to develop and many more failed attempts to successfully commercialize with lots of highly skilled individuals contributing to the project.
In a well-run company, nobody is irreplaceable. Research is always incremental with everyone adding a little bit to the work done by their predecessors. Breakthroughs do not happen in a vacuum.
As the article mentions: "But Masuoka was not around to enjoy that success. He left Toshiba in 1994, before commercial production of the chips got rolling. A decade later, Masuoka filed a lawsuit against Toshiba, demanding 1 billion yen in compensation for his work in developing flash memory."
Turns out Toshiba got along just fine after Masuka rage quit. Do you think if the technology failed (which happens all the time) Musaka would come back a decade later to ask for ¥1bn?
The only thing that is rewarded in business is RISK. The founders who quit their cushy jobs to start a company out of their garage or the early stage investor who took a chance on this untested and unproven venture and put their capital at risk are the true movers and shakers.
If you are not putting your time and capital at risk you should not expect to be making billions of $.
<Ideas are cheap .. implementation is everything>
Consider whether you would like to own 80% of a failing company or 30% of a widely successful one.
There is a great body of research suggesting quite the opposite actually. Beyond a certain level of compensation, offering more money does not correlate with better productivity or creativity at all.
Those who are satisfied with doing the absolute minimum to keep a 9-5 job are not suddenly turned into great inventors if offered more money. I have often found that the most valuable engineers are their absolute worst critic when it comes to quality of work and work ethics. They would put in their absolute best even if they were doing something for free/opensource.
Relative compensation is also important - if I'm not being paid well relative to others, that can destroy my motivation.
Great inventors won't stay at a job doing 9-5 work, of course. Treat people as levers, and good people will leave.
That may be true, but that doesn't mean the converse isn't true, which is what's being alleged here, that a great inventor can be turned into an absolute-minimum employee when given insufficient reward.
More specifically, I think you're conflating the typical "inventives" that employers use (which I what I believe the studies have been about) with credit, respect, and/or an ownership stake. Even the article has a quote about it being not about the money.
> They would put in their absolute best even if they were doing something for free/opensource.
I'm speculating here, but I would expect that would change if they had to do that contribution under someone else's name, especially if that someone else were a manager and not an engineer.
Absolutely true.
> Even the article has a quote about it being not about the money.
I don't think that is the case. "Unhappy with what he saw as Toshiba's failure to reward his work, Masuoka quit to become a professor at Tohoku University." He was very well compensated AND given full credit and even allowed to publish his work.
It was ABSOLUTELY about the money! As the article mentions: "He left Toshiba in 1994, before commercial production of the chips got rolling. A decade later, Masuoka filed a lawsuit against Toshiba, demanding 1 billion yen in compensation for his work in developing flash memory."
From a different article: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/31/toshiba_settles_wit...
"Masuoka had told the court in 2004 that he believed ¥1bn ($9.1m) was appropriate compensation for the contribution his inventions had made to Toshiba's profits"
> I would expect that would change if they had to do that contribution under someone else's name ...
Again, absolutely true. But that was not the case here at all. If anything we should recognize that Masuoka was the lead scientist for a team of engineers, that means he had a more managerial role and other junior engineers actually did the work.
I don't think we really disagree on anything. I just hate it when people take out their pitchforks and go after the "big, bad corporations" every time one of these articles hits HN :/. Japanese culture is very different than what we in the west are accustomed to and the situation is a lot more complicated than just blaming all on the evil CEOs.
FTA:
Many called Masuoka greedy at the time.
He was unfazed by the critics. "Money is not the issue," Masuoka said. "I just want to continue with research and development. Japanese engineers must be rewarded."
It's also pretty easy to point out a money motive in the face of a civil lawsuit, as one can't sue (directly) for respect. That he eventually settled for less than 1/10th the amount he sued for suggests (to me, anyway) that it was more a shaming/publicity exercise than a money-making one.
> If anything we should recognize that Masuoka was the lead scientist for a team of engineers, that means he had a more managerial role and other junior engineers actually did the work.
I didn't see this mentioned anywhere, especially with regard to the invention. As such, I'm not willing to make any such huge leaps of assumption.
> I just hate it when people take out their pitchforks and go after the "big, bad corporations" every time one of these articles hits HN :/.
I'm curious as to why you perceive there being some kind of mob mentality ("pitchforks") and which comments here have name-called corporations.
I find it very relevant to discuss the compensation (monetary and otherwise) of highly productive (or potentially so.. "talented") employees and how they are allocated, usually a question of where/what they choose to work on. Personally, I find it worth the occasional emotion or blame-mongering creeping in.
> Japanese culture is very different than what we in the west are accustomed to and the situation is a lot more complicated than just blaming all on the evil CEOs.
That's as may be, but also somewhat irrelevant to the discussion, since, ultimately, it doesn't matter who/what is to "blame", at least not to the engineers, not if they have a choice. Increasingly, especially with the globalized labor market, they do.
If that is the reason you pay a bonus, then you already lost. People will just do the minimum required to achieve he bonus requirements and will not keep the companies interest in mind. I’ve seen places where people prioritized stuff that was no longer in the companies interest, but made them eligible for a bonus.
You could just as well fold the bonus into the fixed salary and be better off in most cases.
It’s totally ok if you feel like a bonus should be paid to an employee for achieving something special, but if your employees do not go beyond the bare minimum that keeps them their job, you’re in a kind of trouble that a bonus payment cannot fix.
I think it's important to differentiate between a "meanginful" share of the company and stock options in general. For the average engineer, joining after employee #10 where founder allocated 10% to an ever-diluting option pool, that doesn't seem likely.
Perhaps public companies' profit-sharing plans are closer to the mark, except that an individual employee is so much less likely to have the power to "move the needle" on profit that even that's questionable.
Those who make a multi-billion dollar division most definitely should be very well compensated. The CEO sure is.
Without talent like Masuoka, it really wouldn’t matter that there is advanced fab technology. You need skilled and talented people to use those things in creative ways.