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Comment by nicolas_t | Hacker News Reader

That also has to do with the state of software in Japan. For a very long time, being a software developer was seen as much less prestigious than being an electronic engineeer and a bit more akin to a secretary that codes up the requirements...

So the best and the brightest did not tend to go into software and the typical state of software engineering in a lot of big japanese companies was extremely bad... It's getting better but it's still not great.

Nintendo also has a tendency to outsource a lot of their software development (IIRC the SDK for the wii and the DS was outsourced to intelligent systems who themselves then outsourced part of it)

This is of course a generalization as things goes and there are great things coming out of Japan (hello Ruby!) but having lived there, there was a marked difference between the software engineering culture in Japan and the one I saw in the US and Europe, with Japan being easily a decade or more behind.

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I worked for Namco Bandai's American branch for a few years around 2006. The Japanese developers could apply to work in America for the cultural experience, IIRC the ones I met told me they were paid about $30000 USA in Japan and got a temporary bump in salary to $75000 or so for cost of living adjustment and a company car and apartment (this was in Santa Clara, CA). I think they were all extremely good, competent programmers and we American programmers were making about double what they were making, our contractors were making I think triple what they made. One of the Japanese guys coding anonymously in the corner worked on several of the Namco cabinet video games like Dig Dug back in the day.

I hope this isn’t too off topic but my son and I spent a lot of hours bonding over the game “Tank Tank Tank”. If by some small chance you were part of that project, thank you.

Sorry that was after my time, may have been entirely Namco Bandai Japan production.

Do you think part of the issue is that computerization of records lagged due to the difficulty of encoding Japanese? When I lived there in the mid-00s, everything was still done on paper AFAICT. By then Unicode sort of existed but was still niche.

On top of that, programming is done in English, which just adds cognitive burden. You could make a Japanese programming language, but those haven't gone anywhere, I think in part because you'd need to convert the characters to kanji as you type and that would take longer than just typing in Roman letters.

Yes but not really.

The “encoding problem” for Asian languages is real, but it goes back earlier than that, as it emerged with typewriters. See Thomas Mullaney’s “A history of the Chinese typewriter”, and Nanette Gottlieb’s “Word Processing Technology in Japan” for more. By the late 90s/00s it wasn’t a significant primary factor (that is if it was a factor, it was due to cultural inertia, and not lack of access to technology itself).

I think the problem here is looked at backwards. It’s not that Japan sucks at software - it’s that the US/North America got extremely good at software in the last 20 years (by a combination of factors that feed into each other, as always: the best research labs are in the US, the tools are built in the US, the companies that make use of them for competitive advantage are in the US, the economic context most favorable to founding such companies is in the US, etc). The rest of the world is catching up, but the gap is still visible.

Strange, any insight on what the perception is of game programmers in Japan? I feel like a lot of the great Switch games are made by Nintendo, it would seem they'd be dying for good developers to continue developing first party titles.

Is this why software developers are paid peanuts in Japan?

Well, yes, it's not valued as a profession. When I moved to Japan as a recent grad, I was paid 50% of what I would have been paid back in France...

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