Japan's IT exodus: A personal perspective

It is a very good translation, but when a Japanese programmer begins a sentence with "I might not be as fast to pick up a new technology as the young'uns but..." he's just making polite noises.

There is a pecking order in every company and it is almost never "sort by age asc." The two engineers at my company commonly held to be better than me (either of whom I'd stack with any Googler you cared to mention, btw) were ten and twenty years older. Both would work something similar intoba description comparing their programming abilities with a high school sophomore's first Hello World app. Everyone knows not to read it literally.

Neither of them would have much luck on the employment market but there is a separate HR pathology at play there, namely that Japanese companies do not hire for talent, they hire for perceived flexibility to mold into their corporate culture (among other things), and someone with 20 years of experience has all sorts of weird non-company habits they might have become attached to where a 22 year old is incompetent but a blank slate. Who cares, you can train fir competence any time over the next 45 years, goes the thinking.

My impression is that programmers who work in the gaming industry programmer in the US accept poor work conditions because they love games, they love writing games, they feel there's a certain "glamour" to it, and also (sort of recursively) because of peer pressure. Similar to aspiring Hollywood actors and film makers. So the employers take full advantage of that. But it's really the programmers' choice. I'm quite sure anyone working on writing games (as opposed to actors) could get a job with better conditions in a MegaCorp very easily, if only they could bring themselves to write "boring" apps in a corporate environment. And I suppose after a certain age, getting married and having kids, many game programmers will eventually do that anyway.

Here in Japan the problem is deeper. It's not limited to a subset of IT/software companies, so there's not much choice. The difference between working in a big company and in a so-called "black company" is not that big. It's mostly perceived prestige and stability, not so much actual work conditions like hours, pay and career path.

To make things worse, this is a country where social change happens very slowly. Technological novelties are readily embraced, but companies would rather slowly sink than give equal opportunities to women or foreigners or otherwise change their modus operandi. Some examples:

* companies expect hand-written resumes. You're a student applying to 10 companies? Write 10 resumes by hand. Oh, and include a picture.

* if you're a woman, things you should expect to be asked in a job interview: "Are you planning to get married? Are you planning to have kids? If so, are you leaving the company?"

* are you 30 years old and already changed jobs twice? Job hopper.

* are you over 35 and want to change jobs? Too old.

That makes sence. Plenty of people who started out coding but who ended up in management early weren't very good at it in the first place, but that is a very hard thing to accept psycologically so they come up with the "it is a young mans game" instead.