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Comment by cgarrigue | Hacker News Reader

Luckily the work culture is slowly changing, at least regarding the matter of OT: following the suicide of a new recruit of Dentsu that was ruled to be a death by overwork, several companies started to ask their employees to refrain from doing OT.

However, as an engineer, it is sometimes quite frustrating to work with colleagues who do not want to try anything by themselves, because they want to be taught everything. This seems to come from the way they learn things at school: the teacher is always right, because he's the teacher; you need to listen to your seniors, because they know more than you. This leads to new recruits being taught everything by senior staffers, even when the methods are bad. And of course this limits innovation, because nobody wants to do something new.

On the other hand, for sure living here is great if you can live with the caveats of the Japanese society.

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>However, as an engineer, it is sometimes quite frustrating to work with colleagues who do not want to try anything by themselves, because they want to be taught everything. This seems to come from the way they learn things at school: the teacher is always right, because he's the teacher; you need to listen to your seniors, because they know more than you. This leads to new recruits being taught everything by senior staffers, even when the methods are bad. And of course this limits innovation, because nobody wants to do something new.

In software engineering I've had the same experience with anyone from a rote-learning culture. Software engineering is problem solving. If you can't solve problems, what can you do?

Sounds like the perfect opportunity for a consultant! You're presumably an expert and have technical authority that is not anchored to the company hierarchy.

That is a good way to see it.

Hate to go off on a tangent, but there was that article about how NIH lead I think nextdoor to abandon cron and make their own alternative. I wish we could do both, be willing to learn and understand history and context but be willing to break the mold. We seem to be off in the reinvent everything mode because we all want to innovate, even when that innovation is unwarranted.

> this limits innovation, because nobody wants to do something new.

Curious. The stuff that I've read about Toyota says they have "continuous improvement" as a core principle[1]. Does that just not carry over into the way they do software, or is Toyota an anomaly among Japanese companies, or what?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota#Company_strategy

In short, Toyota does not see themselves as a software firm (and they aren't in a broad sense); Sony also failed to transition beyond their best years of the 90s largely because they did not understand the importance of software and the Internet on consumer electronics as Apple did. I say this having worked at Toyota building some of the very first websites and web services for Toyota globally as well as working at Sony as well (I built the Internet services for the Network Handycam as well as other things.)

The OP is making stereotypes, and they aren’t universally true (as is usually true for stereotypes).

Japan is a big place. There are all kinds of people, and plenty of innovative organizations. It’s frankly embarrassing, the amount of nonsense that people are spouting in this thread.

Indeed, there is a lot of innovation happening in Japan. Most of it isn't software or sexy industries that get all the news in American press, though.

Could you give some examples? Not challenging you, just curious.

That sounds like top-down improvement such as 'agile' development, not bottom-up improvement like hacker culture. That said, I'm sure there are plenty of Japanese who are curious and self-motivated, and there are plenty of non-Japanese who don't want to put in any individual effort. It's just that the cultural narrative told by each society highlights different things.

>> who do not want to try anything by themselves, because they want to be taught everything

Anecdotally, from a recent podcast on military history, I heard this same explanation for why the Japanese Army did very poorly in some WWII battles where they lost commanding officers early in the fight: The footsoldiers were unable to think for themselves, unable to adapt/improvise, and unable to organize anything other than suicide charges.

Source? Because that's distilling a lot of complicated history down to a simple motivation.

Given that glorification of suicide was specifically taught to military recruits, and that various commanders promoted or dissuaded it to their subordinates, it would fair to say that many times Japanese suicide charges were ordered in-spite-of better ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banzai_charge#In_World_War_II

Better support for overly rigid, hierarchical structures would come from the performance of upper echelon commanders during the war, and an inability to adapt doctrine to rapidly improving technology (e.g. mixed air-ground-sea task forces, carrier tactics, and radar).

In-spite-of better ideas was my point - they were unable to improvise and adapt to a dynamic situation, and fell back on frontal assaults:

A reference - not the one i mentioned - which was a firsthand anecdote from a veteran of the Pacific theater:

https://books.google.com/books?id=abx_AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA123&lpg=...

You misunderstand. My point was that your attribution of motivation...

> The footsoldiers were unable to think for themselves, unable to adapt/improvise, and unable to organize anything other than suicide charges.

... is overly simplistic.

The soldiers were not necessarily unable to think of alternatives: they were doctrinally taught to reject those alternatives in favor of frontal assaults. They, their superiors, their superiors' superiors.

So "Japanese soldiers were unable to innovate" does not follow from "Japanese soldiers were prone to conducting frontal assaults."

"Japanese military doctrine in the 1930s strongly discouraged lower-level innovation" would be a more accurate statement, without attempting to tie it to capability.

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