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Comment by hamasho | Hacker News Reader

No problem. It's almost Friday's 5 PM in Japan right now.

It's time to stop working and go out for some beer.

what is it like programming in japan? do language look like japanese ?

Here are some additional fun facts. Fair warning - I'm neither making fun nor any form of derogatory remarks but rather the observations I learned working with both sides of the protagonist in my story below.

I'm usually the guy who will translate the English spoken by Indians to the Japanese and vice versa. We, Indians, have our Ing/Hin-lish, and they have the Japlish.

I once led the Indian team and interacted with the Japanese team at Dentsu to launch a new eye-care product for Johnson & Johnson. The content was, of course, Japanese, and we do have translators on our end but do not speak Japanese. So, English and here is a dramatized reproduction from my point-of-view.

Japanese team, "Now, we do propaganda to make people buy the products."

Me, in super-slow, enunciating beyond what my mouth can stretch, "No, no, we won't spread propaganda. Yes, we will do Marketing to help launch and make people know."

Me to my team waiting to stitch the Japlish, "Yes, Confirmed. Marketing team involving."

Me to the super nice Japanese team, "All Good. We, in India, Do everything."

Oh! Btw, commenting in Japanese with English terms thrown in is very common in programming code.

Even though some languages allow to use UTF-8 characters in the source code, we don't use it other than commenting. But sometimes, it's really wired. If you work in a team with members who don't care about naming, you see some wild variables like this (a little bit exaggerated);

    const CONSUTANTO_1 = 100;
    if (github.isNotWork()) salaryMan.drinkBiilu()

(BTW, it's 7:30 PM and apparently I'm still working)

> biilu

That’s really funny

A lot of katakana is. Katakana words are words or names that are borrowed from other languages typically, and written quasi-phonetically in Katakana, one of three writing systems (the other two being Hiragana and Kanji).

Since the individual sounds in Japanese are often consonant-vowel (with a few exceptions, like "n", vowel-only sounds, or the silent "u" in "su"), then it's often the case that foreign words that end in a consonant (like "bill") will have an attached vowel at the end - from my limited experience with Japanese, it's often "u" or "o". "L" in Japanese doesn't exist and is typically substituted for a rolled "r" (less roll, more single 'flick').

Many of the Katakana words are English-derived and often sound as though someone is using a fake Japanese accent to speak English. Learning a lot of katakana definitely earned a few laughs.

"Pinku" (ピンク, phonetically "pi-n-ku", pronounced more like "PEE-n-koo") meaning "pink", etc. always got chuckles out of me.

I'm just a beginner though, I'm sure someone else has more [accurate] information :)

Honestly this is so cringe I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic

Valid question IMHO. For instance in German software companies it seems to be fairly common to write code comments and documentation in English (even mostly communicate in English so that employees from other countries don't feel lost), while when I spent a few weeks working in China I noticed that comments and documentation are written in Chinese and communication in English isn't easy (spoken communication, written works quite well). Now I do indeed wonder if this is common for other Far East countries like South Korea and Japan too.

In a lot of the modern startups that's definitely the case, as a contractor I've come across some questionable "Denglisch" codebases a few times though.

I feel it's a valid question. When programming in Australia you have to either learn to read upside down or stand on your head otherwise all the electrons fall out!

That is why you always put down a foil-mat underneath laptop !

You'd be surprised what people around the world do : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

I don't think any of those are used for anything serious though (at least I hope not)

1С (odin-es) as language is very popular in Russia. Quite a lot of companies uses 1С (as company) products, most of which are ERP systems. Their english branding seems to be Yellow ERP yellow-erp.com

Market share of 1С in Russia was about 40%, it may grow soon due to foreign vendors leaving russian market.

It's "cringey" not "cringe". You need an adjective. And I'm amazed at how many people on HN are oblivious to obvious sarcasm.

Thanks for the correction :) Sometimes sarcasm is difficult to pick up when it appears without context you’re near the center of it, if I must make up an excuse.

Damn, I'm starting now

Very jealous when is Japan opening its borders to tourists?!

> Very jealous

It isn't always Friday 5 PM in Japan.

It's already open now*.

* Subject to a very strict definition of tourism.

> It's time to stop working and go out for some beer.

How about automated tools that use GitHub's APIs?

It's fine, they don't drink as much.

is Github ops team mainly in Japan? I would think it's heavily US based

do you think it's worth it to go there to work as a SDE?

I'm not sure I'd want to go there still, I was unfortunately born into a class of people that are "hard to even interview"[0].

I'm sure if you fit into one of the many preferred classes there is much to learn there, and a fair amount of prestige in working with high scale systems.

(relavant topic from 6 years ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story...

EDIT: I'm not trolling, I have legitimately not entertained the idea of interviewing here because of this, which is probably preferred for them, but it's worth pointing out to others who may not be informed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com