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Comment by adhesive_wombat | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that the stereotypical love of intense systematisation and specialisation in Japanese crafts doesn't seem to extend to software?

I have seen a few pieces of Japanese megacorp software that's you would have thought would be produced by their better teams (kernel code for major profit-centre products) and it was always dreadful.

I know megacorp software is often terrible, but this was a whole new level. It was like the "the intern's code" jokes on The Coding Love, but real and very serious (NDAs and everything).

Certainly when looking at it, I didn't have visions of a grandmaster lovingly using the exact, named, carefully maintained, tool for the job.

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This comment I made, and others in the thread, a while ago might shed some light on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27179677

It does extend, just it results in a moving castle of an infoelectromechanical self complication with overly bureaucratic interfaces, tons of back channel behaviors and tangential error messages.

The Japanese culture is not known to focus on setting global goals and recursively dividing it into local decision makings and actions. Rather it’s optimized for optimizing local behaviors, which yields amazing features, but often only as features.

Being a programmer in Japan is somewhat low-status at the moment.

From what friends said who worked there in the early 00s it's been that way for a while. Hardware was the rockstar. This is part of why Sony Japan finally relented and let the eu/us do the software on the PlayStation and Japan focused on the hardware making an excellent parternership.

I don't think so. That's maybe 10-15 years ago, but currently (according to this: https://benesse.jp/juken/202105/20210501-1.html, a survey made just 2021), a programmer is the 3rd, and a system engineer is the 4th highest desired occupation among Japanese high-schoolers, after a nurse and a local government official.

Where does doctor (medico) rank then? (I can't read Japanese.) Just quite fascinating that becoming a nurse would be more desirable than a doctor.

(Unless 'desirable' is a bit misleading here and there is some realistic achievability built in?)

It’s because I generally interact with people in my age group, i.e 10-15 years older than high schoolers.

If you ask kids in some other countries, what do they say? influencers? youtuberd?

I assure you, Japanese high schoolers also say they want to be influencers, YouTubers, and TikTok celebrities. That just wouldn’t fly on Benesse’s blog (they run a cram school).

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