Comment by NalNezumi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NalNezumi | Hacker News Reader

While establishing a "cause & effect" here seems very hard, from my personal experience working in software field in Japan, I think the winning concept here is actually the combination of removing middleman and paying good salaries.

Japan is very very behind in IT/digitalization compared to most western countries. This doesn't just mean it's behind in product portfolio and quality, but that perception of software engineer & managers and still quite behind. The respect that a lot of software engineers enjoys in US/EU is not quite there yet in Japan(and salary often reflect this).

The C-suite usually doesn't have a firm understanding of software/IT world, and instead ends-up hiring a lot of "Scrum-experts/Agile coaches" and hires software engineers from consultancy or recruitment companies for cheap. There's ofc companies that doesn't fall in this category, but for middle-sized companies in Japan (which is the bulk of the economy), this is the true state of things. Middle-men in Japan have therefore been way more encroaching on this, and they have the incentive to not improve the respect/social standing the software engineers have.

"Removing managers" in this article does not mean the same thing as it would in US/EU, conditions are different.

As a further example:

In my last full-on japanese company it was basically impossible to find any developer with more than 3 years experience by accidental design because:

1: No applicants studied computer science in university so they started learning when they joined the company and were assigned a development role.

2: After 3 years they they got promoted to a "manager" level role and stopped doing development. There was no concept of junior developer -> developer -> senior developer progression. If you wanted promotion you went from developer -> manager; it was the same for sysadmins. Their IT and development suffered heavily for it.

A team of 10 "western" style trained senior developers and sysadmins would have been able to do the work of 50 current employees at least for a large overall cost saving even with higher salaries.

Just the way things worked. Japan is indeed very different when it comes to how the workplace works in relation to tech in traditional companies.

As a 195cm tall, 120kg, non-Japanese, senior developer who has never been to Japan, I kind of want to get a job at a Japanese company and just see what happens.

Try Vietnam, they are the shortest in south east Asia. I'm 190 and couldn't fit in a seat at a restaurant outside of tourist spots.

There's tons of non-tourist spots where you'd fit. It's not super uncommon to find guys who are 180cm or taller, the tallest I've met is 194cm while waiting for the bus.

Even at 181cm you do have to watch your head though.. I've hit my head many times while going up stairs, and for those who don't know stairs are extremely common because many businesses are split up across multiple floors of a narrow building.

When I say I don't fit I'm being a little hyperbolic. I'm talking about sitting at a table with tiny plastic chairs and having my knees sit well above the table.

I'm 200cm and been an ad-hoc tourist attraction in various places I've visited :) Except Hanover, where everybody seemed just as tall

I have a friend who is about that tall. Every time my 3 yo sees him, she asks for a ride on his shoulders. They wall around and touch ceiling fans.

So the real job is being done by Indian outsourcers then? I can't believe that someone who never coded before can get to build anything decent in only 3 years.

There is a lot of outsourcing to Tata and others in Japan, yes. With many many middlemen between the poor guy spitting out the code and the one writing the requirements

The stuff did get built in the company, usually half by contractors and half by the internal staff developers under guidance form the aforementioned managers. It was just build very slowly and it was held together by sticky tape and dreams.

One manager spent 50% of his time keeping an old system he wrote as a developer years earlier from completely falling over because no one else could understand it, byzantine doesn't begin to describe it.

He worked many, many, many hours overtime doing this in addition to his managerly duties but, of course, because this is Japan, he won an award for hardest worker of the year and a trip to Hawaii... which he couldn't take because otherwise the system would fall over.

This would be a pretty good short film.

Reminds me of a relative's tale when he talked with a Japanese developer to find out why one product of their company was really slow at processing data and the other was much faster. Turns out they were developed by two different teams, one of which had the idea to use the GPU for acceleration. The two teams were neighbours in the same company building but communicated so little they didn't know what the others were doing, and how.

3 years is enough time, but you will produce trash for your first year. The problem is that you just spent 3 years training someone and now you throw all that training into the trash and start from scratch with the next guy.

Don't forget that the training of the new people is done by the managers, i.e. the people with 3 years experience before they stopped learning and practicing themselves. "Blind leading the Blind" in many cases.

> 2: After 3 years they they got promoted to a "manager" level role and stopped doing development. There was no concept of junior developer -> developer -> senior developer progression. If you wanted promotion you went from developer -> manager; it was the same for sysadmins. Their IT and development suffered heavily for it.

Do you have any insight into how this works in Japanese companies that do more traditional engineering? I find it hard to believe that companies like Toyota have no senior engineers.

They're referring specifically to software engineers.

Yes, but then the question arises: why is software treated differently to other engineering in Japan?

Because software is more an art than an engineering discipline?

Software is - or needs to be - an engineering discipline. It is very much less mature than the others, and the challenges are different too. You wouldn't expect a civil engineer to design a new chip without a lot of training in a completely new discipline.

I can confirm that Toyota has Senior Engineers (and Nissan).

Although I've seen this title on Teams be given to a 28 year old that didn't seem to be Senior quality, but I'm not much more experienced.

Physical engineering is a much older discipline and has/had (this is 7 years ago in my company) much more respect as a "real" career socially in corporate life. Makers of physical things tend(ed) to get more respect.

I don't have any special insight into Toyota outside of some anecdotal stories from friends though.

My experience was similar. And if it’s not promotion, it’s rotation.

The system isn’t all bad. It’s just that it produces general managers at the expense of functional expertise. (The other extreme where 100% of the org’s entire skill set and network is limited to their own silo rarely works outside of Apple) Balance is needed.

> No applicants studied computer science in university so they started learning when they joined the company and were assigned a development role.

Couple of years ago I had to integrate with a newly built api in japan. 2017, and they basically wrote their own web server in Java. Their own xml parsing. It looks like they read the spec for HTML and SOAP and implemented their own variation of it.

It’s the worst integration I’ve ever had to deal with.

If we got a 500 error from their system we had to write an incident report about why our system failed to call theirs. If they tried to call ours and it failed they would call up and we would ask them to “retry the call” and they would ask us to patch the data in our system because they can’t retry.

This is the exact same problem we have with Indian outsourcing.

You get that one who's really damn good at what they do. Just as they are up to speed on your project and working style, they get promoted to manage a group of 10+ engineers.

And then you start again with the next one, hoping that they're as good as the previous one.

My company has found good luck in India by not outsourcing, instead we have a branch office. Gives us the ability to grow people to be what we need them to be. Looking at all the names on the buildings around ours, I don't think we are the only ones to figure this out.

There are good people everywhere. You just need to find them, and grow them to where they can shine.

A company I consulted for did something similar, they flew their team from India to their offices for a month or two so they could teach them the proper company culture faster.

Simple things, like it's better to ask when you don't know than say "yes everything is fine" until it's too late.

Worked pretty well, a few from the team actually ended up immigrating and are still living over here with their families =)

I've heard that big, well-known consulting companies have refined this pattern into a business model that scales even better.

Why do any sort of progression, when you can just have a bunch of skilled people visiting customers to secure contracts, and once projects are started, they can be substituted for an army of juniors? Meanwhile, the seniors go secure more contracts elsewhere.

This is exactly the case - large consulting companies tend to hire loads of people fresh out of college (out of any engineering discipline) get them through a crash course and hand over work that's secured by onsite consultants. Attrition is a factor that's already been taken into the equation.

Basically you get what you pay for. Large consulting companies offer peanuts compared to good software developer salaries. But compared to the salaries you can expect in other fields of engineering if you are an average student (considering the glut of mediocre engineering colleges here)- consulting salaries seem decent.

Create a branch office in India and offer the expected salaries for software engineers and you can find great developers.

About 1. Are you sure? I think 80% of Japanese go to university. Or you mean they studied a different subject?

They studied a different subject.

Remeber in large traditional japanese companies you don't apply for a job, you apply for a well-known company and then they assign you a role that may or may not have anything to do with what you did at university.

The company I worked at was not a tech company so very few (none? I never saw any) applicants who studied computer science.

Thanks. I was aware of the hiring system but not the assignment. So basically non core jobs are assigned not by degree, good to know. (I just assume core jobs are, like Tepco hopefully uses EE for power generator and nuclear engineer for the nuclear plants)

... You would hope so but honestly I wouldn't be willing to bet money on it.

Very true, especially hiring "Scrum-experts/Agile coaches" and cheap engineers from outside. Based on my experience, they don't have good understanding of the business, so business people need to write up word-for-word documentation (e.g. Take this column from spreadsheet and multiply by 100 to show the numbers in percentage). At this point, business people who have programming skills wonder why they have to work with corporate IT.

On the other hand, don't many western companies outsource IT work as well? Having never worked in US/EU tech industry, I don't see much difference when it comes to outsourcing. (hiring temp engineers is obviously different from outsourcing, but the concept must be the same)

Do we get respect as SWE in EU? In every eu state I have been, except maybe uk in some sector, there was the meme that we are "the new blue collar workers" and indeed in a lot of places salaries were pretty much aligned

I think it you want to feel respected as developer in Western Europe, you should be consulting. The best way to get a respectable compensation for your efforts.

The governments found out that people are making too good money doing this. For example in the UK there is a term "disguised employment" thrown around and consultants being smeared as tax dodgers. This year they changed the law, so that company must declare whether hired person is a genuine contractor or de-facto an employee. There is a fine if they declare a disguised employee as a contractor, but not the other way around. The effect is that companies now offer contracts that always place a contractor as a disguised employee to avoid problems with the tax man. As a result such consultant has to pay over 50% in effective tax. Many good ones I know already looking to move overseas.

I am a software developer, and I feel software developers expect a lot more than is reasonable if they consider themselves part of the same society as everyone else. It's just a job like any other, and it's only in certain bubbles that developers are treated like rockstar prodigies.

For the rest of the world, or even just the rest of the US, to expect exceptionally high compensation in order to feel respected is unreasonable in my opinion. Software is an incredible tool and I'm glad to still find ways to love it, but as a profession, it's just like any other.

I have felt this way for a while, because I feel we can do a lot more meaningful work within our communities with software than we currently do. But all the developers are instead busy building Nudity in Kettle Reflection algorithms for market place image uploaders while getting rained on by VC money.

hmm, maybe i should study computer graphics so i can work on those algorithms lol

From my observation in several countries and industries, software development is not the job like any other.

Simply becase software development sucks thinking and knowledge from the product/sales/manager silos.

To make things works you have to know much more than many managers do. Effectively you do the digging, the thinking, the analysis, the design - via tooling or via POCs directly, and SDE is the sink who gets everything that other folks didn't think or care.

It's not like Uber driver who drives you where you want. It's more like baby-sitter who also serves like a Virgil, a guide in the hell, and who takes all the risks.

> It's just a job like any other, and it's only in certain bubbles that developers are treated like rockstar prodigies.

The bubbles that did however did incredibly well compared to the rest of the market. And often crushed traditional companies with a traditional view Software and engineers.

> Software is an incredible tool and I'm glad to still find ways to love it, but as a profession, it's just like any other.

The thing is, software scales almost infinitely. For a doctor to double his output, he'd have to put in twice the hours. For a software engineers to double his. But a 10x userbase growth? Happens overnight at some companies. That's where it's different.

EU devs get a lot of respect... here in the Valley!

> he respect that a lot of software engineers enjoys in US/EU

And then you go on describing the average attitude towards software developers I perceived in the Netherlands… :)

Could you elaborate?

I am not OP but I have noticed in several European countries that many companies see software engineering (and IT in general) as a "necessary evil". Even in SMEs selling automation solutions, the perception is that the "real" work is done by the mechanical/electrical engineers and the marketing department, while the software engineers are just...support people, aren't they? And everybody has learned a little bit of python programming at the university, no? /s

You need official certificates to be allowed to work with high voltage. But the program that controls that machine there, well, it can be written by some Germanistics student who can't find a job in his original field (no offense intended. I know several brilliant programmers who never studied. I just want to illustrate the difference).

If you understand this attitude, you will also understand why the general state of cybersecurity in such companies is such a problem.

I spent a lot of time in Berlin where there's no industry, just software. I can imagine that the attitude is much different somewhere in the west or in the south.

I think this is common in the rest of the US/EU as well. The difference between how "tech" companies treat software engineers is very different from how "normal" companies treat software. Tech companies "get" that the difference between good and bad software is enormous and that it's worth doing the work to get good people to build it, other companies usually don't.

Can confirm this was the case in the US, made me promise myself to never take another software engineer role at a non “tech” company ever again which I’ve held to ever since.

They outsourced every possible role in software engineering and IT to India to the bare minimum where all that was left were the devs who worked on the firmware for gov related projects and regulatory concerns meant only US citizens could work on it. For the devs that were left, it was an uphill battle for resources and salaries while it felt like Sales and marketing were put on a pedestal when this company’s entire product was our work.

"Do not work in a department that's only seen as a cost center" is a maxim I live by too. Everyone up the reporting chain is being antagonized, including the C-suite. If you're not (directly) contributing to the profits, the bean-counters will try to reign-in your departmental expenses, including salaries and equipment.

More specifically: I'm also a cross-professional, having obtained a degree in Electronic Engineering and learned software engineering out of personal interest (obviously with significant knowledge gaps.) Yet, I still notice I'm patronizingly put down by "the grown ups" in management that cultivate an obvious disdain for the "techies" and "engineers" (as in "the steam engine operator shoveling coal into the furnace"), despising their poor intellectual and professional quality, while at the same time trying to price them out with all means possible.

whatever...

>But the program that controls that machine there, well, it can be written by some Germanistics student who can't find a job in his original field

I think you'll find that the people who write control software are mostly Electrical Engineers.

In my experience, in EU it’s just the average perception and you’ll find a good section of big companies having better views. In Japan it’s more like finding exceptions to the rule.

I think it varies a lot between the countries. You can the difference even within German-speaking area. Recognition and the salaries (not sure about respect) are growing in Berlin and other large cities across Germany, but I heard that in Austria, software engineering is mostly seen as IT support cost centre.

I live in Austria. With the risk that comes from generalizations, I think you are mostly correct. They get respect from the general population, but when it comes to management and executives, software engineers are mostly seen as IT support, which is of course reflected in the very, very (!) low salaries.

There's this societal idea that "working in IT" is a good thing, but there is no distinction in most people's mind between different IT fields. Most people think that software engineers and people installing printers are more alike than similar.

I have an Austrian brother in law, he had a top position in a major Austrian company and he was ridiculously low paid.

He ended up moving to San Francisco where he's making 20x what he was making in Austria.

Shhh, buddy, he’s saying raising salaries here we don’t need to give alternate ideas ;)

Removing useless middlemen allows for raising salaries of the producers.

> Japan is very very behind in IT/digitalization compared to most western countries. This doesn't just mean it's behind in product portfolio and quality, but that perception of software engineer & managers and still quite behind.

Have you used anything digital in Japan? I find the interfaces to be fast, user friendly, and energy dense. Far better quality than what most of the western software people put out. You might need to clarify what you mean by behind - just business culture?

Is it a coincidence that sony and nintendo have horrendous online offerings?

What? The digital interfaces in Japan looked and felt like they were at least 10 years behind the curve. And if "energy dense" you mean that every single possible option was crammed to a small screen estate then sure.

I have a personal lifetime ban on buying Panasonic/Matsushita products because of the cruddy alpha quality firmware they built into a dvd player. It crashed 100% of the time when playing CDs among many other unforgivable flaws. Their fix in the revised model was to put a reset button on the front panel. Japan cannot manage complex software without a lot of time and manpower.

I can see that you mean well but I really cannot agree with this statement.

I feel as though I was thinking about web applications for major companies and everyone else was thinking of software for built in electronics, which I agree is awful

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