Ask HN: Why hasn't there been more outsourcing of tech jobs to Japan?
All I mostly see is outsourcing to India or insourcing of India via H1B. Google seems to give some fairly low numbers ($57,604 year) on average salary for programmers in Japan.
Freelancers here are more likely to prefer working for clients in Japan, too, as there is less hassle about payments and clients may be more reliable. I freelanced as a translator for twenty years in Japan, and over thousands of jobs from dozens of clients I had trouble getting paid only once. In contrast, complaints about nonpaying clients were a constant refrain among translators I knew in the U.S.
That said, in my semiretirement I recently started doing a little consulting work for an IT company in the U.S. Once we got through all the hassle of identity checks and bank transfers, I have been very impressed by the speed and smoothness of their payment system.
As in many countries that are similar, they may now have a laptop/pc but will often have a cheap android phone.
I worked on a team that had a bunch of folks from India who had been escalation engineers for big software companies. They were awesome—- at restoring services. Terrible at building or sustaining. Probably because they were trained well at troubleshooting and repair.
Another team I was on probably consisted of the smartest people I’ve ever met, period. All Indian, but from a pure university edu path and never worked in a big outsourcing shop.
At the end, people are people.
Likely China is also able to make use of their numbers, but they're able to keep much of their talent internal. Or it goes through proxies like Singapore, HK, Taiwan.
Corollary: Countries with really good education probably isn't as cost effective as well. Maybe it is for higher end stuff like ML or operating systems, but the filter for a React programmer is entirely different.
Japan has a strong craftsmanship culture, so I'd expect them to have engineers that do really well too. But from what I hear from friends who worked there, they work late hours, sleep late, wake late, come in late, and it's pretty much the effectiveness of a 9-5 culture.
Japan also has better worker protections, so hiring and firing is more difficult I imagine than India. One way I’ve heard American firms fire is to force employees to relocate to another Asia office with more lax protections. The employee gets relocation costs covered but if they get fired within a year they have to pay those expenses back. The employee knows they’re just going to get fired so they quit.
On top of that, English is probably not as good. It’s taught in schools but you don’t need it for most jobs.
I find it hard to believe the American firms can "force" employees in Japan to relocate to another country. They can insist, but that's it.
There is also a massive culture gap between Japan and the rest of the world. It's hard to explain if you haven't lived there.
The best analogy I can think of is asking a non passport holding American why don't they learn Japanese to attract business from one of the largest economies in the world.
Learning a new language as an adult is incredibly difficult. I have learned Spanish to a basic conversational level and it has been a massive struggle for me.
My Swiss and German friends seem to pick up new languages super easily though. Likely this is because they learned a second, third, or even fourth language as children.
So, not impossible but it is good to acknowledged that this isn’t an easy thing to do and likely would be a generational shift kind of thing.
Most of them can read and write it passably, but can't speak it confidently and as per culture, if they can't do it perfectly they don't want to do it at all.
I'm not sure they need that kind of business.
Indian Devs are paid around 7-25k USD depending on various factors, so India is significantly cheaper.
Singaporeans speak English, with world class education system. Hey don’t they want H1B? Because they have better options at home. Any expats will tell you lives are better in Singapore and Japan than in India.
Is this a quote from somewhere?