I think it's primarily because
1). these companies push their employees so hard and
2). a majority of them don't know English
3). software programming is seen as something for nerds too lame to do electrical engineering
1 is important because as we all know, if you are a good programmer, it's not because you are _good_ it's because you spend your spare time catching up on other facets and honing your skills. When there isn't time for that, what do you expect to happen?
2 is equally important simply because Japan is stuck in their own land of tech help. I think things are much better now because of Google Translate and such, but most Japanese programmers have basically been isolated from us.
3 is the biggest one. Despite Ruby got invented there, most programmers there do not know it. There are no Japanese Operating Systems. There is no Japanese business software market. Most Japanese companies have absolutely _terrible_ sites from last decade.
[as a source http://www.economist.com/node/18958643]
So, what's to be done about it? Well, luckily Japan has insanely high internet speeds, and everything is moving to virtualization everywhere else. So, at the end of the day, there is a big chance that everything could shift in Japan at a much, much higher rate than in America. However, this will take a number of consulting companies pushing pretty pro American attitudes towards business culture as well as programming, which simply isn't going to fly all that well there.
Personally, I think Japan needs a much higher number of startups, and they need to basically do a startup chile thing for web startups. They need them badly, they need a majority of the existing work force radically retrained, and the people coming into the work force need to be pushed in very different directions compared to the usual.
Japan has the might, they have the know how. The main problems are simply that they can't keep up with the rate of development and change that other companies can handle, and the only way that's going to change is if these companies start isolating portions of themselves like startups.
My personal idea, which I would be very happy to see go into use, would be to start holding out of work 'bounties'. Coolest Erlang program developed this month gets $2000! Best new language gets $5000! That pushes people to become better, share knowledge, and find other smart people to get ahead and get the money, which would hopefully lead to those groups of people doing startups together after finding a possible 'founder'.
Also: there is no FSF/EFF in Japan. And because of the max 1% of the budge the military gets they don't even have the intelligence companies or the drive for them as we do.
p.s. I can't read Japanese, so everything I know is hearsay.
I work in a Japanese company which began strongly in the mobile market (on imode) but which is now pretty much pandering to the lowest common denominator with fortune telling, social games etc... My workstation is a win xp box from a few years ago with 2 gig ram. So is everyone else's. We still invest a lot of time & effort making flash/terrible HTML inline styled tag soup for the Gala-kei market (Galapagos keitai / mobile). Being native English speaking, I'm often tasked with obscure bug squashing or creating demo apps to show other debs how to use something, since most documentation is in English. I will bide my time for now, but i do feel a need to move to a more forward looking position.
Oh, and I'm usually one of the first to go home.. We work in a massive open desk environment so i'm pretty sure of that!
The title on HN is innacurate. The original title is about Japanese tech giants i.e. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp and the like.
Note that these aren't primarily software companies. So although some of your points about software in Japan are true, they aren't very relevant for the trend in question.
> The main problems are simply that they can't keep up with the rate of development and change that other companies can handle
Having worked in Japan for several years, I heartily (or sadly?) agree with this.
In some ways, Japanese megacorps still work like American corporations used to 50 years ago: life employment, seniority system, women have little chance of career development, etc.
That said, web companies are arguably on the rise in Japan. Cf. Rakuten, Gree, Cookpad.
The Japanese tech giants are exactly the companies that should to be doing well now, if they had healthy levels of innovation hormones. Sony, for example, still have a great name and most of the over 40s I know would definitely give it weight when buying a new TV or sound system.
There is a real opportunity now and for the next few years to incorporate great software into electronic products. iOS & Android are doing it with smart phones and tablets. But, it's a good time now to go back and rethink a lot of other electronics and see how software interfaces can make them better. What would an iMicrowave look like? Android Intercom? Refrigerator RT? Car Stereo. Washing Machine. etc. etc. What better way to differentiate your televisions in 2013 then giving them the best software?
Japanese companies were once at the forefront here - great products at great prices with an eye for new paradigms (eg walkman). They still have the brand names.
There's been a push by Hiroshi Mikitani, co-founder and CEO of Rakuten, a Japanese Amazon equivalent, for "Englishnization" (No, there's no mistake in the spelling. Mikitani came up with it, which itself seems to be a sign of impending failure)[0] - having all business within the company, even between Japanese people, conducted in English.
I don't have any inside info, but it seems that things have not been going well. Most employees still speak in Japanese on a day-to-day basis (except for in meetings), and they're studying just enough to get the score on the TOEIC that they need for their position at Rakuten.
I'm not as pessimistic as you are. It seems to me that making up a word with an illogical spelling is, from a linguistic perspective, the most quintessentially English thing you could do.
It's not the spelling that's the problem, it's the spoken word. I just said there's no mistake in the spelling so that people wouldn't think it's a typo that I made.
There's a difference between, say, spelling "tumbler" as "Tumblr" and coming up with a new word that sounds weird to native English-speaking ears. Apparently one of Mikitani's longtime native speaking employees, Kyle Yee, told him that it sounded weird, but Mikitani went ahead with it anyway[0]:
> "That word 'Englishnization' -- Mickey invented it," Yee says with a smile. "At first I wanted to say that the letter 'n' was a mistake. But Mickey said it was the word he chose as he wants everyone to always remember it. One day he'd like Oxford to put it into the dictionary.
This sort of insistence that they're right when it comes to English even though they're clearly not, seems to be a pattern, as it's also something I came across in a book about working in a Japan conglomerate[1]. The author, a native English speaker working at Mitsubishi, told his superiors that they had made some mistakes in an English-language document. Their response was to suggest that he had lived in Japan so long that he'd forgotten English!
There isn't much of a programming community in Japan for Japanese people, too. Most employees work "in-house" and don't have the type of open culture for discussing work and doing things related to their job outside of work that America and other nations have. This is in addition to Japan just catching up(I think) to the whole startup business model.
WRT to 1), hasn't our own patio11 told us the normal pattern in big companies is that their young whippersnappers aren't allowed to cut production code for a decade or more? The whole inculcate new employees in the company way thing.
It's also worth remembering the social model of low risk, high gain and high risk, low gain companies (i.e. the big ones you've heard of vs. lots of small fry you haven't unless you have some focus on the country). With Japan now coming onto a "lost quarter century" the first model has been smashed and that perhaps has something to do with these giants losing their mojo.
The other issue which you bring up about startups is related to why small fry almost never make it big; I don't know too much about that, but it's a general issue that goes beyond high tech or this sort of high tech. Perhaps surprising given how leveraged writing software and running Internet services is....
1 is important because as we all know, if you are a good programmer, it's not because you are _good_ it's because you spend your spare time catching up on other facets and honing your skills. When there isn't time for that, what do you expect to happen?
2 is equally important simply because Japan is stuck in their own land of tech help. I think things are much better now because of Google Translate and such, but most Japanese programmers have basically been isolated from us.
3 is the biggest one. Despite Ruby got invented there, most programmers there do not know it. There are no Japanese Operating Systems. There is no Japanese business software market. Most Japanese companies have absolutely _terrible_ sites from last decade. [as a source http://www.economist.com/node/18958643]
So, what's to be done about it? Well, luckily Japan has insanely high internet speeds, and everything is moving to virtualization everywhere else. So, at the end of the day, there is a big chance that everything could shift in Japan at a much, much higher rate than in America. However, this will take a number of consulting companies pushing pretty pro American attitudes towards business culture as well as programming, which simply isn't going to fly all that well there.
Personally, I think Japan needs a much higher number of startups, and they need to basically do a startup chile thing for web startups. They need them badly, they need a majority of the existing work force radically retrained, and the people coming into the work force need to be pushed in very different directions compared to the usual.
Japan has the might, they have the know how. The main problems are simply that they can't keep up with the rate of development and change that other companies can handle, and the only way that's going to change is if these companies start isolating portions of themselves like startups.
My personal idea, which I would be very happy to see go into use, would be to start holding out of work 'bounties'. Coolest Erlang program developed this month gets $2000! Best new language gets $5000! That pushes people to become better, share knowledge, and find other smart people to get ahead and get the money, which would hopefully lead to those groups of people doing startups together after finding a possible 'founder'.
Also: there is no FSF/EFF in Japan. And because of the max 1% of the budge the military gets they don't even have the intelligence companies or the drive for them as we do.
p.s. I can't read Japanese, so everything I know is hearsay.