How the Japanese IT Industry Destroys Talent | Hacker News Reader

How the Japanese IT Industry Destroys Talent

japaninc.com

41 pointsjbm23 comments

Actual Article http://www.japaninc.com/mgz_nov-dec_2007_it-talent

Also Part I - My struggle at the Frontline of Japanese Enterprise IT http://www.japaninc.com/mgz_spring_2007_frontline_japanese_i...

Aside from this, can anyone in the know give some info about the startup community/hacker culture in Japan. Is there one?

I'm in Australia, and I've always had a suspicion that China or Japan would be the closest hub of innovation and interesting stuff outside of Aus.

It's not nearly as open as what you'd expect in other countries. The hacker community is really inward looking like Japan as a whole. You could check out, ON Lab. Hiro Maeda runs it and is a cool guy educated in the states.

http://onlab.jp/

Japan's IT industry is so thoroughly messed up I don't even know where to begin. However, for the scope of this article, I would say that Japanese enterprise solution companies (this is where the so-called "system integrators" live) is a tangled, incestuous mess. I'm only going to talk about one small aspect of it. One of the great tragedies of the Japanese software industry is how it seems to have taken on the worst aspects of the construction industry and the manufacturing industry. Many of the large companies dominate the industry, at least in terms of large contracts from major corporations and government. Some names that come to mind are NTT (the telecoms giant has a whole universe of IT subsidiaries), NEC, Fujitsu, etc. Yes, all companies from Japan's past glory days. Naturally, these companies get the lion's share of stable income. Of course, they have more work than they can handle or do so they naturally close the contract THEN find a company to implement it for them.

Middlemen Casual students of Japan might have heard of "shitauke" which roughly equals outsourcing but the concept is completely different. Just as many Japanese car manufacturers have their own go to parts makers, these parts makers might have their own go to parts makers ("magouke" or grand children outsourcing). So basically, you have this massive web of IT companies that are inter-connected and related in some way.

So big corporations get contracts, little companies get the scraps. This distorts the market because naturally the companies with big name brand value keep a greater share of the profit while the weaker outsourcing companies make it happen. So even within these outsourcing companies, they might try to cope by hiring temp programmers (yes, this is common in Japan and they live in internet cafes no less) or even outsourcing it to a third world country.

In most cases, the big IT corporations (that hire top recruits from the best colleges) are filled to the brim with project managers who might have the raw ability or potential to code but spend their front line career simply writing up specs and enforcing ridiculous deadlines.

As an anecdote, many symptoms of this malaise abound. ATMs malfunctioning because of bad system code (prevalent when upgrading systems created by mega bank mergers, the latest and most notorious being on the recent earthquake when a donation account took down the entire bank), the Tokyo Stock Exchange shutting down from massive trade volume (despite having nothing like American high frequency trading), the pension system database not designed to give people unique keys (or something like that), etc.

> Just as many Japanese car manufacturers have their own go to parts makers, these parts makers might have their own go to parts makers ("magouke" or grand children outsourcing).

I've worked for a "great-grandchild" outsourcer. Megacorp A outsourced to B, which hired C, which hired my company. I actually worked at A's offices so personally it was a good experience for me, though my salary was crap -- around my 2 year anniversary I talked to a recruiter, who kindly informed me that sanitation workers in the US earned about the same as me.

Once I went to Europe for a business trip. Though A's employees had all their expenses paid, my own contract with my company didn't predict that clients would ask grunts like me to go on international business trips, so they only paid a fixed daily allowance in yen (for meals and the like). To make it worse, the euro was really high against the yen, so my allowance amounted to 7 euros or so. After 2 weeks in Europe I was in the red. It was still a good experience though, and I always boast about it in job interviews in Japan.

Yeah, I've worked in fancy offices too (in my case earning more on contract than regular employees, without plump benefits but hey). My experience is that being the outsourced to is a polar experience. You're either a hired gun with special status or some dispensable clean up crew. It's a symptom of the rigid labor laws that limit everyone from achieving their potential.

Apparently it's managed to destroy even the minimal level of talent needed to construct a readable PNG.

"Instead of being evaluated on their capability to manage the overall system architecture, Japanese IT project managers are often assessed on how they can personally relate to the team members. Taking team members out for a drink, listening to their personal issues, serving as both counselor and cheerleader, are important to strengthen a project manager’s people network. "

OTOH, I've worked for several western corporate orgs where we have no shortage of PMs, stuck in meetings and forwarding emails and not doing any of the above.

+1 Japan

as the main picture is too small to view, it remains a mystery why the Japanese IT industry destroys talent.

I zoomed right in and found it has something to do with three spirals and pixelated text surrounded by jpeg artifacts...

Unfortunately, developers in software industry are considered as good as blue workers here in Japan. No talents are expected. For sales is the driver.

Actually talents are in top notch companies like Toyota. They rarely appear in public, though.

1. This article is four years old, it was published in 2007. Have things changed since then?

2. The graph is unreadable and clicking to get a larger image goes through a cycle of pages that don't have larger images but take a long time to load.

There are a few currents working against startups in Japan:

- Smart, ambitious people tend to join large, prestigious corporations, or government agencies

- Up until a few years ago, forming a company was very expensive (3 million yen minimum)

- Seniority is a powerful force in the Japanese workplace, which I suspect prevents young college grads from introducing the latest technologies in their companies.

- Japan has struggled to transition to a post-industrial economy, and IT is still dominated by hardware companies.

any opinion from Patrick or any other HNers in JP? The article seems plausible but is the opposite of what I'd have expected

Patrick, you will recall, left his JP job once he could; and I remember him describing the salaryman job as painful hard work, in line with this article.

I have a different take. Should write a blog post some day.

The usual disclaimer: Japan is a big place and not all Japanese companies/people act the same, just like not US company is Google.

I thought Ruby on Rails came from Japan. Hard to believe they don't contribute to Open Source - per article.

I thought it was just the Ruby language, not the Rails framework.

That's correct - Ruby is from Japan, Rails was developed by a Danish consultant working for a US-based firm. (He now lives in Chicago I believe).

Ruby Creator and chief Designer - Yukihiro Matsumoto Rails Creator and Maintainer - David Heinemeier Hansson

It's not hard to believe, once you stop committing 'base rate neglect'. I'll quote what I previously wrote on that exact topic http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20So... :

> There has long been a curious lacking of Japanese contributions in software technology. Japan has a highly educated population a good fraction of the US population (127m vs 300m), considerable indigenous R&D capability, long involvement in computing hardware, etc. Hence, if all were equal, one would expect something like a third of all major software packages written by Japanese or Internet services developed by Japanese, and so on. Instead, one notices almost a complete absence of such Japanese contributions. In software, the only major contribution I know of is the Ruby programming language; I am continually struck by the almost complete absence of FLOSS in doujinshi media & the survival and massive popularity of closed-source software. (Touhou Project games remain always closed-source; Westerners would never tolerate a powerful animation tool like MikuMikuDance being only freeware, and would insist on it being opened if only to make bug-fixing and extensions easier. It’s interesting to note that the only visual novel I have ever heard of being under a CC license (albeit a highly restricted CC-BY-NC-ND one) is the Western Katawa Shoujo. Of the 5 major visual novel engines - infrastructure that cries out for open source licensing - only 2 are so licensed.)

can i get a cliff notes...

"To summarize, Japanese corporations lack concrete IT strategies and the ability to envision the appropriate enterprise architecture that aligns with their business needs. As a result, SI services vendors adopt a ‘body shop’ strategy that gives no incentive for engineers to polish their skills. Japanese software vendors are not encouraged to provide solutions with the latest architecture that meets the needs of the global market. Being locked into such a vicious cycle, even the most talented engineers have very little opportunity to develop their skills to a world-class level."

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