Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
tokyodev.com
tokyodev.com
It's worth getting a role where you're forced into improving. I'm definitely a better communicator than I was before that job because of it.
I once worked in a job where each day of the week was covered by a different person. Meaning at the end of the day you had to leave everything in a state that another person could pick it up right away without much hassle. This was mostly done via emails and pieces of paper with text on it, but worked flawlessly.
And the only reason it did was because you couldn't just ask the guy from the day before a question. It all needed to be anwered by the work he left for you.
- They didn't make assumptions about what the person reading would already know. Everything simple was explained, and was there were link to prior docs where complicated concepts were needed (e.g end of day cash consolidation in a store, because Japanese stores worked differently to US and Europe.) That made it really easy to read any document in isolation. We had a really good wiki that covered everything.
- The team insisted on keeping docs up to date, and deprecating old docs for things that weren't relevant any more. They kept things tidy. They didn't drop writing documentation when things got busy.
- They seemed to have spent quite a lot of effort organising things - tickets were always labelled and complete.
- They were dedicated to using consistent terminology everywhere. They had a glossary and they stuck to it, and that extended to the code that they wrote. Product docs, tech docs, and code all used the same language for the same thing. I think they avoided using similar terms for things too, especially where things could be ambiguous in translation from Japanese to English and vice versa.
To be honest, and with a decent amount of hindsight, I don't think anything was especially clever. It was just clear that the team put the effort in to doing the things most teams know they should be doing. I haven't worked there for a few years now but I bet they're having a lot of success with AI because that documentation would be a great source of context.
This was buried at the end of the essay, but is one of the most important points.
I worked (not as a developer) in a company that was acquired by a Japanese company. Meetings were structured, and debate was kept to a minimum. If there was disagreement (typically framed as a difference of opinion or conflicting goals) there would be an effort to achieve some sort of balance or harmony. If the boundary was not hard, it was possible to push back. Politely.
Also, if Japanese colleagues expressed frustration, or were confrontational, that was a red flag that some hard boundary had been crossed. This was extremely rare, and replies had to be made in a very careful, respectful way.
East Asia consists of only 4 countries, two of them (China and Taiwan) sharing the bulk of their main language.
In the other 3 East Asian countries, meetings being for ceremony isn't nearly as pronounced as in Japan. Plenty of meetings where discussion are had and new decisions are made.
The term literally comes from the concept of "preparing the roots", that is, the process of softening the ground and trimming around the roots of a tree (often a bonsai) in preparation for moving it safely.
Love japanese and japan but their work culture is horrific - Japanese are inefficient and the veneer of looking to work "hard" is more important than the hard work itself. People often stay until ridiculously late just to show they "put in the effort" which is more important than outcome.
Then again that happens in many other countries as well ...
I haven't directly experienced Japanese work culture (just language and traveling) but it seems like they value hard work above all else, which makes innovation almost a threat. You might take away someone's opportunity to show "hard work" if you removed a difficult task.
This is the root of a lot of busywork and bullshit jobs as well. People work hard producing something of little and often negative value.
Think of all the effort that goes into making competitive products, from life insurance and cellphone plans to airline tariffs difficult to compare. Compound that with advertising campaigns that don’t inform about the product or service they are selling. All that consumes colossal resources and deliver effectively negative value for society, for a market to be maximally efficient it needs informed consumers that can compare offerings.
Yeah I wonder about that sometimes, the maximal balance between efficiency and inefficiency. Some things are clearly a waste (like advertising as you mentioned) but then other stuff is part of innovation, and it's sometimes a bit fuzzy between the two. On paper it's wasteful that Mazda, Toyota, Ford, etc. all had to independently develop a sedan, yet it would be far worse if we only had one car company to choose from (far worse because of how monopolies inevitably stagnate).
Unregulated monopolies do, but regulated ones can be forced to innovate, both according to a plan, or through a process that internalises competition at the places where impact would be maximised (instead of multiple groups arriving at the same solution in secrecy, multiple groups exploring different possibilities while communicating between them and coordinating their efforts to avoid duplication).
For example some countries that have regulated monopolies can allow in small amounts of foreign products to motivate their own state sponsored companies, but without that and assuming its not something relatively straightforward like a utility or an oil company, I'm not aware of any that innovate effectively.
And easily demonstrable when meeting someone in a social setting:
"Hi, what's your name?"
Then the very next question: "What do you do for a living?"
I think it's a shame because Japan is going through a massive tourism boom at the moment. There's surely a huge number of incredibly smart and talented people who would like to bring their skills in and help lift Japan out of its economic slumber. But Japan is still very closed off and shows no signs of wanting to modernise.
Moving between very different cultures is a challenge, but the rewards are accordingly nicer, but it really sucks when the new culture doesn’t welcome and integrate you into it.
Between Hungary and Turkey, something similar happened with the pogacza. I brough some cheese pogacza to the office and a Turkish colleague immediately recognized what it was. We couldn't really figure out which culture it comes from, but we agree it's delicious and dangerously addictive.
Even as a native English speaker I find this type of language hard to understand, fluffy and ambiguous. We would all benefit from using plain language not just non native English speakers
I've worked in Japan for 7 years and majority of the time you will not be working with native English speakers, usually people who speak multiple languages at all times, if you're only language you know is English you are the minority and people will have to work with you to understand.
I couldnt even finish the article after that insane ramble of gibberish I'm genuinely confused who in the hell would ever talk like that.
This is pretty much life anywhere outside of North America and the UK (or colonies). In Norway, I don't think a single coworker of mine is a native English speaker (I am). We get along fine of course, but often I see the resistance they feel when having to switch to English. Second (or third) languages just take more brain power, and have more friction.
I have learned Norwegian, but English is still is required sometimes, as it's the common denominator amongst the mix of Norwegian, Swedish, German, and Spanish people. And that English is usually functional and as clear as can be.
This is the engineering department though. If you go to marketing or strategy it's full of this corpo double-speak.
But essentially I applied, a lot on LinkedIn. This started early 2021. Took about 8 months to secure a role, I was at 5 YoE at the time, embedded systems / embedded Linux engineering, and I would say moderately good at my job, nothing spectacular. No FAANG.
Oslo was quite difficult, I wasn't able to secure a job there. They are also very keen on grades and transcripts, even though it had been a decade since I was in University. I had mediocre grades, which may have hurt.
But I applied all over Norway, and got a robotics job in a small town on the west coast. They sponsored my skills visa, got me here, and after a year I transferred to our Oslo branch. Once you're in the country it's massively easier to move around. Interview was standard and sane, most here have been. Recruiter/manager soft fit check, a few technical rounds, then team and upper management interviews. Be humble but confident in interviews, don't brag excessively, it's very much the opposite of the US in working culture (read about "Janteloven"). Pay was substantially lower but I am so happy with the quality of life here I couldn't care less.
UDI, the immigration department, is steady but slow. Everything just takes time. Lots of info here (follow to the "skilled worker" portal): https://www.udi.no/en/want-to-apply/work-immigration/
I knew no Norwegian when moving. Nearly all tech jobs are English hybrid enough you can get by. But I would highly, highly recommend learning the language. Socially (private life) and professionally it helps so much. And it's a bit rare to really learn it, so people are often impressed or happy you do speak it. It's difficult though for a few reasons, dialect variety, English fluency among Norwegians, etc. I would say it took me all of 4 years to get to the point I could converse mostly fine at speed with someone speaking in a native dialect. Reading is much easier, that came after a year or two.
This was kind of an info dump, let me know if you have any specific questions!
Tl;dr: use LinkedIn, apply, apply, apply, don't get disheartened / give up, and give it time.
People trying to hide their own lack of knowledge and ability
guys that aren't sure if the yellow isn't too much
Hell, I’ve advised some of them.
In this case that just means: our landing page needs to convince more people to sign up without getting too bloated.
This means it implies a linear correlation between amount of content on the page and sign ups. More content, more signups. But not too much, otherwise it is bad again.
In essence it is a bad take on a probably real problem, expressed by a person that needs to hide behind the lingo.
I would rather refer to affordances than to "user-facing touchpoints", because that's a more specific abstraction aimed at, specifically, interactive elements whereas "touchpoints" is, to me, vague; does it refer, also, to the merely visual aspects which "touch" our retinas?
"Friction" is a metaphor, and there's nothing wrong with that! I imagine that one monitoring a conversion funnel would naturally ask "what's causing the members of this cohort to drop out of the flow?" Well, it's friction that challenges spatial progress, and spatial metaphors make good use of some underused cognitive hardware.
"Increase stickiness... but also keep it lean", though is, at worst, an oxymoron and, at best, lazy along the lines of "... just make it good and not bad."
My position is the perspective of a former freelancer who had to translate that lingo into actual actionable steps. The perspective of someone who builds a website alone in a day, while building one on a month when guided by committee.
I have nothing against specialized language, if it serves a purpose as I mentioned in my philosophy example. For some concepts the specialized words are the only ones giving you the precise language needed to reference them in a meaningful way. What I dislike is needless specialized language by people whose job is it to let others interpret what they meant. The ambiguity is of course a feature on multiple dime sions, they can decide whether you read the runes correctly after the fact.
User-facing touch points: everything a user can interact with
Sign-up friction: self explanatory
Stickiness: less bounce rate
Lean: don't overload with touch points/bloat
Bounce rate: a bounce is someone visiting your site and not signing up. A bounce rate is the amount of people that do this compared to sign ups
Touchpoints: things a user interacts with, like a landing page, a nav bar with a sign up button, the sign up page itself, forms on that page, etc.
Bloat: too much "stuff" that is unnecessary towards some end goal like too much copywriting on the landing page, or too complex of a sign up flow, etc.
This isn't snark, but this is all industry standard terminology.
This entire section is also good advice for working and communicating with English engineers. (Especially in a world where about 3/4 of English speakers don't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language as their first language.)
> Create new meeting strategies
A lot of this is also relevant within English, honestly. (The phrase この認識で合っていますか is good to know and I definitely wouldn't have come up with it on my own.)
> If you notice that certain members are very quiet at a meeting, despite seeming like they have something to say, see if you can give them an opportunity. A simple “Does anyone else have thoughts on this?” can go a long way in making sure everyone feels heard.
This in particular also seems like something I've seen recommended in many other contexts.
> Lastly, be aware that some katakana words are commonly abbreviated differently in colloquial Japanese, often becoming unrecognizable to English speakers. Here are some examples: ... Topic/theme (of a meeting): テーマ (te-ma)
The others check out, but https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83%86%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E isn't an abbreviation. It's just.. a loanword that English speakers might well not recognize, because it comes from German Thema (in turn from Latin and Greek; so ultimately the same source as the English "theme", but by a separate path). Also because we don't often use the word "theme" this way, but yeah.
I've hear this notion called "international English". English spoken in a way that non-native speakers find relatively easy to understand and follow.
The hard part of this is that non-native speakers will rarely ask for this. It's a gift that you have to give, and a gift you have to encourage others to give. And most of all, it needs to be done in a way so as not to be condescending, by simply being clear.
On the opposite end: I had a coworker, I only ever got about 30% of what he said. I thought it's my Japanese skills. He used complicated sentences and words all over the place. But when I asked other Japanese coworkers, they told me they could not understand him either.
I work with mostly Polish engineers and I am struck by how clear and concise their English verbal comms are. I admire it actually.
I'm a native UK English speaker and I wish I had the simple directness that the Poles, Dutch etc have.
If you said this in Japanese, I'd say something like "Hmm, that seems a bit...". And you'd be expected to figure out what the rest of the sentence was.
To be more clear, I don't think the generalization you're making is valid. My experience of non-"Western" cultural communication styles has not at all been uniformly more direct and clear. I think some subcultures in the US have an annoying habit of doing what you describe (e.g. "if you can't follow this you must be dumb" kind of mentality) but many others do not.
For example “bend over backwards”. I get the meaning, but my brain would never produce that phrase. I would say something like “adapts”, “compromises”, etc.
You can see that, to some extent, in how the article’s points apply to language and communication in general, not just between Japanese and English. While turns of phrase give your repartee a flavour that sells your point—like what you’re reading now—it’s also a product of your thinking process, and as the article says, could cloud the point you’re trying to make. If you can speak or write clearer, then your points will also become clearer to yourself. That’s follows my experience, since I speak a lot of German for work. In German, I must think carefully about each point I make, otherwise I’ll run into a sentence for which I don’t know the words. I endeavour to respect the language and culture, and in doing so put effort into making my points simple enough for me to reach for the right words and phrases to show this respect (at least, I try!)
For a good example: David Sylvian collaborating with the late Ryuichi Sakamoto. You can see them writing ‘Blue of Noon’ in the Brilliant Trees sessions on Vimeo/Youtube. David talks about his use of really minimal language to get musical structure and points across, since Ryuichi’s English wasn’t yet as perfect in the 80s as it was later on. You see this directly in the session videos. What’s truly the best about it, is the respect they show for each other.
Bad example (potentially): Aston Martin F1 collaborating with Honda on the new F1 engine :-) . After several years of extensive development and billion-dollar investment, today they’re at the back end of the grid, more than 3 seconds off the pace. According to recent rumours, as recently as November, the Aston Martin F1 bosses visited Tokyo to discuss progress of the engine that had been in development for a few years, apparently having hardly visited before, and were shocked to learn that only about 30% of the original workforce from Honda's previous venture in F1 remained. It seems they didn't even know how far behind schedule Honda was! For projects as large as F1 car development, it’s unfathomable that this mutual curiosity, which in effect is a form of respect, apparently wasn’t there.
I also find that casual conversations are more turn based, and people are expected to continue a conversation by asking questions (of the other person). So this also means being mindful of how long you've spoken, and to ask a question about the other person instead, to not keep the other person just listening. The gauge is questions (or short responses), and the period is silence.
I find that questions pose less importance with US people, which might still use them, but not in the way we're used to. There i feel like the gauge is speaking (or short responses) and the period is silence.
Greetings like "how's it going" and "what's up" were confusing at first too, it took me a while to get when people were using them as greetings.
I also have non English speaking family members so I get to improve everyday. And yes I make mistakes every day but 99% avoidable and the rest I just accept and move on. Multicultural and multilingual teams are a joy not a test so enjoy them when you have the chance. Might surprise yourself how much you will learn about people and communications and build a new level of self awareness in the process.
My 2c.
My magic thought process is, “Nobody can read anybody’s mind. So, speak or ask.”
I’ve also been an English-to-English translator between Indians and Japanese. The way is to enunciate, simplify, use generic words, and know at least a few commonly used words for that community. Indians have our own way of saying lots of things that translates to weird English, and so does the Japanese.
An Indian’s 5-minute is way different than a Japanese’s 5-minute! ;-)
I don’t try to go too deep and read into the nuances, as I feel I’m being pretentious. When in doubt, ask the counterpart to check if they got it and perhaps say it in their own way.
Early in my career in the 2000s, I got used to working extensively with Americans, who made it seem like everything was possible. We go fly hunting, bring in the sledgehammers. I once questioned my knowledge of the entire English language while talking to an Australian contractor whom I worked with. Turned out it was nothing compared to a Scottish designer that I worked with for 3 months.
I worked with a talented older group in Japan for a while.
If on a call they said something would be “difficult”, that was their understated way of saying “never in a million years would we do that”.
They were also strongly hierarchical and would often defer to their leader to avoid any disagreement.
They could teach the British a lesson in understatement…
Even though we had a close working relationship they were very much trying to “save face” when issues came up and didn’t directly admit shortcomings.
Also, never address them by their first names !!
Take out vs. Take up vs. Take in vs. Take on, etc
I try to avoid using phrasal verbs wherever a simple verb will do. And if I have to use a phrasal verb, I try to keep it together: "let's take on this task" vs. "Let's take this task on". The latter requires an extra effort to parse. But obviously "let's take this task" works too and is simpler.
The worst is when Americans use baseball idioms without even noticing they've switched away from "base-level English".
> If we get this shipped by the end of the month it'll be a homerun, and if by the end of the week then I'll consider that a grand slam.
So... ship soon = good then, got it.
(Edit: Now that I read this: I should try writing e.g. Chinese using these tools, next time, instead of defaulting to English. My mother language isn't English, but it's pretty close, comparatively speaking.)
A pattern I often end up with when there is a large language barrier: begin with long async messages that take a minute or two to write. End up with brief sync-ish messages as things get more detailed and we share more context.
What's preventing Japanese engineers from doing the same?
The fact they don't really need it in their life (or job). English is definitely necessary if you work service jobs in Tokyo (to deal with tourists), but not much anywhere else.
Japanese is one of a handful of languages where one can complete a postdoc entirely within the language. Many languages are not like this. e.g. in the Phillipines, STEM subjects are almost entirely taught in English, since Tagalog simply doesn't have words to describe most of the concepts. The result is something like 90% of the coursework being in English, with random Tagalog words mixed in. The concept is called "Taglish" if I recall correctly.
This is unnecessary in countries like Japan, China, South Korea, etc. If you're applying to a graduate school in Japan (or China, or Korea), expecting to receive education in English is actually the edge-case, not the expectation.
Also, at least in my company, there is an interesting trend where people are deciding learning English isn't really necessary since AI translation has gotten "good enough" for most use cases.
But the linked article seems to imply the opposite. I mean, working with an English PM sure sounds like the language is one of the job's core competencies.
Spoken Tagalog has always impressed me (though I can't really say I know any) for how freely English seems to be mixed in (and well pronounced, such that you notice the difference in phonology), in varying ratios. I'm quite sure there's a deliberate code-switching to it.
> people are deciding learning English isn't really necessary since AI translation has gotten "good enough" for most use cases.
It's honestly really impressive. Although I'm told it can occasionally glitch and treat the text as a prompt instead of just translating it.
Just keep in mind they are usually very good in reading, okayish in listening, and kinda needs work on speaking. But that’s expected. If you live a daily life in Japan like the Japanese, you barely need to speak English, or hear it, if at all. Even the foreign staff at the convenience store speak Japanese good enough for them to carry on their duties.
The goal and aim of those classes (I think) is so that 21st century Japanese engineers can decode foreign scientific papers and encode export user manuals on their own.
And so Japanese engineers can interpret and compose English text files as, one would handle C-like code. Consequently read/write data rates as well as emotional grasp are closer to that for code than speech, and the ability also gets dubious quick for anything "platform" specific and not literal. Like, even "to pull off" will cause an exception and quick jump/return with "achieve". It would be fair to say that calling it English literacy is a bit of a stretch.
It will do for many purposes, so in that sense, yes, Japanese people do know English.
There are people(not me) from rich or otherwise unique backgrounds or educated before WWII who use actual English and not that embedded English Lite, they're rare.
There are many countries (or cities) in the world where you can easily get by in English beacuse almost everyone you need to / want to interact with can speak English. Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm are 4 the come to mind even though their native languages are Dutch, French, German, Swedish.
Japan is not one of those countries. Yes, you can survive without speaking Japanese with a lot of effort and asking friends to translate.
So it's not an unreasonable question to ask if they speak English. It's effectively asking, are they liked the 4 cities mentioned above.
I was once at a bar in Tokyo and where I met a young French woman who was thrilled to be going back to France after 6 months in Japan. She had wrongly assumed the her English would get her by like it had in many other countries who's first language was not English.
Berlin is very much an exception to basically everything in Germany. Concerning Paris: many French people speak bad English.
Engineers can probably read because the majority of tech, computer languages, libraries, their docs are in English. Though that might change now that LLMs can make all the docs in Japanese removing the need for English skills.
Speaking ability is rare.
Granted, this was a long time ago and even seeing non-Japanese around in Tokyo was rare, unlike now. But in the office environment let alone in tech, I doubt you can really make it work without not just speaking Japanese, but being considerably adapted to their culture. I think the chances of the dev just moving to Japan to work in tech and be anything other than a total outcast are poor. Which is ok if you plan to just do a year or two maybe. Even the author himself first got well acquainted with the language and culture then moved into development. And even so, this is hardly for but a select few to just fit into this lifestyle.
For North Americans or Europeans, the intersection of people who can make it work and are also incentivised to make it work looks infinitesimally small to me, esp. if you can opt for jobs in the industry in America or even Europe. It's a totally different story for someone from say South Korea or Taiwan, or to a lesser extent other Asian countries. For starters, coming in as a junior dev in Japan or as a translator won't be a massive pay downgrade for them. For South Koreans and Taiwanese the culture will be a lot more familiar, although there will of course still be some friction. So imagine coming in as mid-manager or higher, wow it sounds like quite the experiment to me knowing the place well. CEO with capital, maybe. But good luck with that.
Most Japanese tech is in - well Japanese - companies like Mericari, Woven and Rakuten are exceptions, hence you get a blog post on how to speak English properly.
Please say "non-East Asians" when that's what you mean. There were already loads of Chinese and Koreans around in Tokyo 7 years ago.
> For North Americans or Europeans, the intersection of people who can make it work and are also incentivised to make it work looks infinitesimally small to me, esp. if you can opt for jobs in the industry in America or even Europe.
The cultural adaptation you're talking about applies just as much to China and Korea, yet there's a huge reason for Europeans (not Americans, but they're the sole outlier) to work there as SWEs - post-tax + post-big-city-CoL, salaries are a lot better until you get to 10+ YoE.
People tend to look at London or Amsterdam stated salaries and think this is impossible, but the tax and housing cost differences completely change the equation. 40k EUR at 40% tax is the same as 30k EUR at 20% tax.
In big European capitals, for 800 EUR/month you get a parking space or a place to share with 3 others. In China or Korea in a tier 1 city for the same money you can rent a nice, newly built place for two (so 400 EUR/month/person) in a central location with private indoor parking and great transit links.
it wasn't 7 years ago, it was 20 years ago, 7 years up to 2006 there were some Chinese, but really few and far between and in the Kanto area, mostly in Yokohama
i was studying Chinese back then, and I struggled to find people to practice
> The cultural adaptation you're talking about applies just as much to China and Korea, yet there's a huge reason for Europeans (not Americans, but they're the sole outlier) to work there as SWEs - post-tax + post-big-city-CoL, salaries are a lot better until you get to 10+ YoE.
probably it does - certainly Korea, China not as much - and also differently, and the topic here is Japan
> People tend to look at London or Amsterdam stated salaries and think this is impossible, but the tax and housing cost differences completely change the equation. 40k EUR at 40% tax is the same as 30k EUR at 20% tax.
40K is extremely low in tech, and where are you paying 40% tax on 40k??
>In big European capitals, for 800 EUR/month you get a parking space or a place to share with 3 others. In China or Korea in a tier 1 city for the same money you can rent a nice, newly built place for two (so 400 EUR/month/person) in a central location with private indoor parking and great transit links.
I can't speak of living in China or Korea, I have only visited. It wouldn't cross my mind to live in China, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.
RE in Japan is currently much better than in say the UK or SanFran or NYC. MUCH better. This wasn't the case when I was there, it was comparable or even more expensive. However the yen was stronger and salaries in tech were, although lower, much closer than they are now. If you are a computer scientist or an electrical engineer, you will easily make double or triple the salary, so rent doesn't make up for it. This is a volatile situation though, right now the situation for juniors seems to have deteriorated massively everywhere, so it's really hard to tell how it would work out either way. But unless you really want to learn the language and the culture and are willing to make strong sacrifices for it, moving to Japan in order to work in tech sounds like a crazy proposition.
> 40K is extremely low in tech, and where are you paying 40% tax on 40k??
Just to be clear, it was a random example just to show the calculation and how much tax percentages matter. You can simply double the comp numbers and it still works.
On top of that: 40k is really not extremely low. Fresh grad CS master's in French, average 2379 EUR net per month. That means about 35-40k gross. Very similar numbers in the Netherlands. Effective tax being 25-30% in both cases. Now compare post-tax to Japan, and Japan's comp at 0 YoE is maybe 1.5-2x lower. And then you look at rent in a Japanese big city vs a European big city, turns out that difference is much bigger than the comp difference.
And these are averages, not medians, so they're top-heavy. Medians will be even lower.
Maybe you've only been at a FAANG but you're overestimating European tech comp, for the huge majority of workers, Japan too is much, much better in terms of comp vs. CoL.
It's also a better deal for those US tech workers who live in high CoL areas without VC-backed comp, though that's of course a much smaller percentage compared to the Europeans.