I was wondering why software industry didn't take off in Japan like in the USA.
Now I know. It's the employment rules that makes firing people hard once recruited.
Now I know. It's the employment rules that makes firing people hard once recruited.
Japan has the lowest TOEFL score in Asia amongst 30+ countries. English proficiency is much higher in both advanced and developing Asian economies. This is not inherently a blocker for software development, but it reflects a trend counter to globalization and being receptive to American practices.
Japan has less billionaires than both Hong Kong, SK and Taiwan, all of which have a fraction of the population. Tax policy is one part of this, but there is a cultural aversion to risk taking. The typical apartment lease is 2+ years, which reflects the sense to long term commitment. There's also more restrictive regulation and actually following policies to the tee. Even human-powered bicycles require registration and not too powerful e-bikes requires license plates, registration, insurance. All of this means there are less startups, less startup ecosystem, less hackers. Heck, Indonesia has since grown a more vibrant startup ecosystem and even deca-unicorns.
Also reigning in from Japan's manufacturing era is prioritizing reliability and virtueing craft. Japan is still building appliances and electronics that last decades, which is at odds with the SDLC chasing shiny new features for smartphones every year. Unfortunately, consumers have spoke with their wallets that they value updates more than reliability. Ironically, Japan's software is pretty crap and not reliable. My bank is one of the more vibrants one, going through a DX digital experience / "digital transformation" as it is called, but all of the technology, hardware and software is atrocious. It's been the second time within a year where my ATM card has stopped working because it's gotten demagnetized. It's a lot of security theater.
Let's say hypothetically that your second sentence is wrong, and ability to fire people more easily than Japan is why US software took off. That doesn't mean it needed to be "fire anyone anytime". Just that it needed to be less locked-in than Japan.
In other words, someone made a claim for why the Japan software industry failed, which was employment law being at this extreme. You then claimed the other extreme was not necessary for success. And it looked like your post was intended as a counterargument. But it's not a counterargument unless those are the only two options for employment law. So I pointed out those aren't the only two options for employment law.
> The ease with which an employer can fire someone doesn't have much to do with why the software industry in the US took off versus other countries.
Okay, I think that's what your original comment should have said. Or it should have said "The software industry here didn’t take off because employers could fire people more easily than in Japan."
And then ideally supported that argument with more data.
Instead you made a weaker argument that doesn't help narrow down the truth very much.
Get the best people in one place and good stuff will happen
Tech ecosystems are based on self-reinforcing feedback loops.
...which happened because, after WW2, the federal government was very interested in establishing a decisive lead in computing and similar technologies [1] [2] [3]. The US military was a key early customer of Silicon Valley, and industry research labs like Xerox PARC received heavy support from publicly funded grants. Projects like ARPANET [4] paved the way for the Internet as we know it now.
To this day, programs like the Silicon Valley Innovation Program [5] continue to subsidise tech firms. This is a feature, not a bug: transitioning new technologies from early basic research to proof-of-concept to commercial viability takes time, more time than many companies and VC firms are willing to wait. ARPA, NSF, etc. exist largely to support this transition, which is why they deploy funding in both industry and academic settings.
[1] https://onezero.medium.com/the-hidden-history-of-how-the-gov... [2] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state [3] https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-valley-and-the-swamp-bi... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET [5] https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/svip