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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.