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Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

Just curious—is this the same at every company in Japan? Or is this just an anecdote? Or somewhere in-between?

Reading about the Toyota Way, and the cultural focus at that company, I find it difficult to believe that Toyota would just let this go unseen in the midst of 'continuous improvement' and 'respect for people' in other parts of their operation...

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Japan is a big country with a diversity of people and companies in it. This post accurately captures the traditional expectation for work culture among a segment of the economy, which is largely professional full-time male employees of an elite fraternity of Japanese megacorps and their corresponding governmental counterparts. Many Japanese firms are not members of the elite fraternity of megacorps; many people resident in Japan are not professional Japanese men who are full employees (正社員) at their company. Salarymen peaked at about 30% of the labor force and have been declining; if I had to hazard a guess in 2015 it would be in the 20~25% range, but it depends a bit on how you define the edge cases.

I'm socially constrained from talking about Toyota in much detail. Can I talk about Google, instead? Ridiculously profitable company with teams of tens of thousands of geniuses running around busy inventing self-driving cars and being basically shadow-infrastructure for literally the entire world. Would you assume Google is not a total clusterflop? I would assume Google is not a total clusterflop. But then I e.g. talk to people who tried to interview there, and my confidence is shaken.

So Toyota. Yeah. Great company full of very dedicated people. Their cars are fantastic.

> But then I e.g. talk to people who tried to interview there, and my confidence is shaken.

Yeah, interviewing in the tech industry is a big problem. The basic problem with embarrassing interviews, I think, is that they're done by people whose job is not to interview. They're just a side thing for engineers. Which means that a) there's a good chance they're just not any good at it, but have to do it anyway, and b) there's no structural incentive to do it well or prepare thoroughly (quite the opposite: there's an incentive to instead spend time you would've spent on interview preparation on your main job, since you do get evaluated there).

So just because a Google engineer performed very poorly as an interviewer, doesn't necessarily mean that they're a bad engineer. They just may be very bad at interviewing.

Also, people are a heck of a lot more likely to talk about an interviewer that did terribly than one that did perfectly fine, and this is especially true for Google since it'd be at odds with their reputation, so there's probably a selection bias at work.

Agreed, I tend to assume most companies beyond any complex size (100? 200? a few hundred) are, in fact, almost completely dysfunctional, operating only on the chance ad-hoc ties of culture and individual stewardship that have had a chance to avoid being crushed by incredible complexity and traditional ineptitude of managing people at scale.

However, Toyota originated lean. Something's not wrong about that.

Why socially constrained?

Mr. McKenzie lived in Gifu for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifu_City#Industry Gifu is about half the size of San Francisco, and presumably the members of various trades in that city are just as much a small town as various trades are in San Franciso. Someone as gregarious as Mr. McKenzie certainly did not spend his time there flying solo. These are things Mr. McKenzie has said publicly, and they provide plenty of material with which to make a high-quality guess as to why Mr. McKenzie might be socially constrained and why he might prefer not to answer that question directly.

I was particularly unaware of the context. Thank you.

I worked at a particular BigCo in Nagoya. You know how Silicon Valley is a small town where everyone knows everyone? Nagoya is a much smaller town. I would prefer employees at BigCo in Nagoya continue to remember me as "fine chap, despite the obvious issue" and not as "that #^#{%^ing American backstabber", partly because there may yet come a day when the Ministry of Justice calls around for a character reference and partly because I'm modestly invested in the values system of BigCo despite having left it.

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