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Comment by nebula8804 | Hacker News Reader

Who in Japan is good at this? I can only imagine the R&D division at maybe Playstation and thats it.

China has so many people that EE and CS are a dime a dozen, thats why they have a competitive market thats low cost. People are in a jungle trying to survive.

[0]: https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s?t=101

The video is (Supposedly) EEs doing customer support roles thus allowing Cheap PCB for hobbyists, the equivalent in the US does not exist.

Side Note: I hear this is also why SASS never really took off in China. Why pay someone else for software when you can get a dozen people to make your own cheaper.

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One of the best engineers I know works for [1] Woven by Toyota, Inc. They do care about getting software right, arguably more so than the german automotive sector. Don't get me wrong they all want good software, but wanting good software and putting the right systems in place while resisting the urge to chase the next hype wave are quite two different things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woven_by_Toyota,_Inc.

>They do care about getting software right, arguably more so than the german automotive sector.

How so? All 3 major German Car Groups have invested substantially into software. VW Group set up an entire company with the core goal of allowing different operating practices for software development, which doesn't sound too dissimilar to Woven, at least in its goals.

VW had CARIAD, but it was a massive failure, and they moved on in spirit:

"Instead of developing software for cars independently, Cariad will act as a coordinator for externally developed technologies – primarily software from Rivian and Xpeng."

Most Japanese companies doing firmware are happily working like it's still the 90s. Nikon and Omron are examples. Sure, they don't have working networking, but some would say that's a good thing in automotive software.

By all accounts, rakuten is dealing with absolute horror shows of internal codebases, but they're generally competent at delivering reliable software without a lot of surprises in my experience.

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