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Comment by fexecve | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with everything in this article post-2000. There were no "software gatekeepers" preventing Japanese software from flourishing on the PC or Mac. I'm not sure what the author is talking about there.

So there's still the unexplained question of why Japanese software is still bad, in 2023. And I think the answer is the language barrier. Windows and Mac dominate the world's computer systems, and the development tools for those environments are English-centric. The translations are lacking or no existent. The struggle of a Japanese developer to make an app is greater than that of a primarily English-speaking developer.

Also, outside of USA/China/India, software developers are still not given much respect or seen as equal to say, mechanical engineers or electrical engineers. So there's little reason for Japanese students to major in software.

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> So there's still the unexplained question of why Japanese software is still bad, in 2023.

I think its to do with their protectivism culture. My previous job was doing digital distribution of advertising content around the world. The Japan market was difficult to move because they could pay someone to ride a bike down the road to deliver an advert. And they activately avoided moving digital as it could put alot of people out of work.

When they did begin the move to digital in ~2018 they formed a comany called CMDeCo. https://ad-edi.com/cmdeco.html

It doesn't serve any real purpose at all, but what it did was move a bunch of tape jobs into digital jobs. But it made what should be a simple process into a complicated process.

Anecdotal: in one of the Japanese companies I've worked at, we had to do a Japanese-speaking-only follow-up after every meeting with the global team, as the majority of the team were relying on a machine translator. Every so often this ended up requiring a follow-up to a follow-up where the local team has questions but unable to ask due to a language barrier. It slowed down the progress considerably.

Another thing I've found particular interesting is that this language barrier also seems to cause some technique or design pattern to be extremely popular among the local developers out of proportion to the English-speaking world. For instance, Clean Architecture is extremely popular in certain industry (e.g., SI). I believe, it was due to the book having a decent Japanese translation, the lack of Japanese-language commentary against it, and the tendency to follow manuals due to social norms.

> And I think the answer is the language barrier.

This may contribute, but it's not the main issue imo. I've worked with tons of Japanese devs and English didn't hold them back much.

Plus look at Ruby, which was all the rage in webdev at one point. It was invented in Japan, and it had better documentation in Japanese than English.

Bigger issues for Japan's tech industry in 2023:

- Lack of VC/Startup investment (0.02% of GDP vs. 0.52% for USA)[1]

- Lack of government support

- Lack of strong CS university programs

- Risk-averse culture (failure is congratulated in the US but condemned in Japan; people don't want to risk building a startup)

- Continued prevalence of "System Integration" rather than in-house dev teams

- Outsourcing of dev work to cheaper countries (India etc).

- Difficulty of moving to Japan (visa issues, high taxes etc; hard for immigrants to start businesses here)

[1] https://www.boj.or.jp/en/research/brp/ron_2021/data/ron21031...

> I've worked with tons of Japanese devs and English didn't hold them back much.

Survivor bias?

>Plus look at Ruby, which was all the rage in webdev at one point. It was invented in Japan, and it had better documentation in Japanese than English.

Ruby has somewhat infamously had a divide between "Ruby programmers" and "Rails programmers". The fact that it was invented in Japan is fairly unrelated to anything about why it succeeded.

Ruby took off here due to Rails, and to a lesser degree _why's work way back in the day that made it so beloved.

Ah, good old days where the first step of developing a CGI app in Ruby was creating your own web framework. Rails changed everyhting.

I agree with all of your points except part of the last one. I agree starting a business could be harder than many places especially if there is a language barrier. But I disagree that it's difficult to move to Japan.

It's easy for a company to hire foreigners and get a visa for them. There isn't even a local market hiring test like there is in most countries. If you're skilled enough in the newish points system[1], the process is fast-tracked and you get benefits like your spouse can work without restrictions and you can get permanent residency in as little as one year.

Or you can get an investor visa[2] to start a business. The main requirement is having ¥50M of capital. If you can't swing that you may be able to get a startup visa[3] with relaxed requirements.

The taxes also aren't that high and while salary is much lower than US for tech people, the cost of living is also much lower. If you're coming from Europe to Japan, you'll probably enjoy a similar salary, with lower taxes and much lower cost of living. And slowly, there is a trend for tech companies to allow remote work from within Japan, with occasional visits to the HQ in Tokyo. I know a few people taking advantage of this to move to a low-cost area to live a quiet family life, or be close to skiing or whatever.

[1]https://www.lb.emb-japan.go.jp/Points-Based-Immigration-Trea...

[2]https://www.japanvisa.com/visas/japan-investor-visa

[3]https://www.meti.go.jp/english/policy/economy/startup_nbp/st...

> Windows and Mac dominate the world's computer systems, and the development tools for those environments are English-centric. The translations are lacking or no existent. The struggle of a Japanese developer to make an app is greater than that of a primarily English-speaking developer.

The lack of translations is true for almost every country and culture apart from the natively English-speaking ones. Some western languages such as German or French might get more in terms of translated (or natively written) documentation and teaching materials but many smaller ones have next to none. I've also seen software development materials with translations to Japanese or Chinese and nothing else (beside English).

I can't remember the last time I read any software development material or used software development tools in my native language.

There may still be some cultural differences that could lead to there being more or less of a language barrier, of course. Other languages may be closer to English, at least in terms of the writing system. In some cultures people might be less inclined to learn English as a second language well enough to be comfortable than in other cultures. Japan, having a large economy with a large domestic market as well as a strong language identity and a relatively homogeneous culture, might be one of those. (I seem to remember that, anecdotally, some highly educated Japanese people I met in the past were surprisingly uncomfortable speaking English, but I'm not sure how much of that was due to actual skill and how much it was about confidence or a lack of experience.)

But the anglocentrism of development tools and culture alone isn't enough to explain a difference between Japan and many other countries.

> The translations are lacking or no existent

I wonder if the Windows/C#/VS ecosystem translations are actually decent leading to Japanese developers not being forced to learn English? From what I have seen, Windows and Visual Studio have usable Japanese translations and documentation. I have seen code from Japanese devs that if the original writer had had better grasp of English, they probably would not have made the mistake by understanding the English and argument names.

This also means that outside of the MS ecosystem, it's a huge language barrier to overcome. It's probably not the main factor but just some foods for thoughts.

> The struggle of a Japanese developer to make an app is greater than that of a primarily English-speaking developer.

And yet somehow, Chinese developers manage just fine?

I think the population factor plays here.

The only difference I see is the Chinese market is large enough that you don't need to appeal globally.

That's true for Japan too, though. With 125M people, there are plenty of local incumbent apps and tech companies that don't feel any need to compete globally.

China has more developers that speak English than Japan does and they’re ~all in Shanghai, Beijing or Shenzhen because that’s where the money is. Shanghai is substantially easier to get around with very bad Chinese than Tokyo is with very bad Japanese.

Overwhelmingly majority of dev in Shanghai (or China in general) are still native Chinese. "Easier to get around with very bad Chinese" isn't a factor, at all. Not even rounding error.

China is better than Japan in software development simply because they pay (much) better, which causes more people (esp. more "smart" people) to pursue this career for the money.

And the reason why Japan doesn't pay software dev as well is in the article.

I think it’s more than just language but in this case I think the relative economic history is a factor: Japan had a large modern economy so there were tons of jobs working at domestic companies building with domestic tools. Modern China’s economy & educational system developed later and a lot of high tech work was dominated by American companies. I think that meant there was a generation where an equally bright engineer in Japan could think they’d have a solid job at one of the biggest companies in the world and never need to be highly proficient in English but their Chinese counterpart would make the opposite decision.

We’re at a really interesting point where that calculation may be reversing with China being a huge domestic market with strong pressure for independence.

Sorry but this is BS. What's your background here? The author of the article has quite some credibility here having lived in Japan for decades, and worked in said industry.

> And I think the answer is the language barrier.

You need to learn about a dozen English keywords to use something like C++. The rest is abstract thinking. Windows, Visual Studio etc have been available in Japanese for a long time. By that logic, every country that doesn't speak English should suck at software development.

As I read the article, post 2000, the simply wasn't any path forward for a startup. Nobody would give you money. Nobody would take you seriously. There was no easy way to distribute your software. It didn't cross anybody's mind to do so.

> You need to learn about a dozen English keywords to use something like C++. The rest is abstract thinking. Windows, Visual Studio etc have been available in Japanese for a long time. By that logic, every country that doesn't speak English should suck at software development.

Better to say every country where the professional class can’t be expected to read English can be expected to suck at software development. I can’t think of an obvious counter example. Being mostly isolated from the mainstream of software development doesn’t mean you can’t achieve anything but it does make it harder.

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