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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

Oh I liked the article too... didn't mean to suggest otherwise.

My one Japanese company experience was in my early career, and it was discouraging. It has been so long, I can name NEC.

The colleagues were great, but on the occasions that executives from Japan were visiting, we were specifically told to look busy. And looking busy actually meant printing things out, walking around with papers, etc. Even in those dark, pre-eco times, I found it absurd. On the plus side, I got proper introduction to sushi and fell in love with that.

I can only imagine what a good situation one must have to spend 27 years there.

Cheers to your future endeavors.

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It was ... challenging ...

The corporation (I don't name it in postings, but it's fairly easy to figure out, if you visit my SO Story) is one of the top-shelf corporations in Japan. Their brand is/was pretty much synonymous with "Quality."

I have been into writing Quality code, since my very first engineering project, and loved the passion.

The engineers and scientists in Tokyo were awesome. The company got "first draft pick." Every single one of them had at least a Master's degree. Many Ph.Ds. Having their business card opened a lot of doors for me.

I found their reliance on Process (note the capital "P") to be absolutely infuriating. It worked extremely well on hardware; not so well on software.

I did my best to coax them out of their mousehole, but, in the end, the conservatives won, and the company has basically retreated to its roots; which may not work out so well, in the long run.

Process is about HOW you do things. Product is about WHAT you make. I do think that both are necessary but taken to the extreme as you see in Japan and US doesn’t lead to any easy reconciliation.

They definitely took it to extremes. The problem is that it’s a 100-year-old company, that has been making top-shelf optical equipment, costing many thousands of dollars, for that entire time. They have an awesome and undeniable track record.

It was pretty much impossible to get these (highly accomplished and talented) engineers to accept that their way (hardware and some firmware) would not work on software.

It usually ended up with them, labeling my efforts to introduce flexibility as some variant of “lazy, bad-quality engineering.” Hard sell.

https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/concrete-galoshes/

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