Any discussion like this always conveniently forgets:
1. Japanese programmers wrote a huge proportion of cutting edge video games in the 80s, 90s, and 00s.
2. China (and Japan, and Korea, and India...) has a massive domestic consumer and b2b internet, written and scaled by domestic talent. It's much bigger than the US internet.
3. You better believe Koreans and Japanese write a WHOLE LOT of firmware. When was the last time your TV or BluRay player or Toyota ECU crashed? China is clearly playing catch up here - Chinese electronics crash all the time lol.
Of course then there's always the people who don't consider Japan to be "the east"... which always makes me laugh.
Comparisons between Japan, China, India, and Eastern Europe all seem spurious to me. The standard of living, educational opportunities, native language, cultural heritage, etc are all different.
Of course then there's always the people who don't consider Japan to be "the east"... which always makes me laugh.
I would consider anyone who's doing categorizations based on "east" and "west" to be a tad intellectually dishonest.
It's different not just among countries, but within a country. Good developers in big cities in China can make close to 100K USD.
There aren't many, if any, good developers in rural or extremely poor areas. Most of them move to technologically advanced urban hubs. This normalizes the differences a little and still make comparisons somewhat valid. At least less different than if you were to look at country-wide demographics.
People have a persistent blind spot for that one. I think there is Japan-developed software in, hmm, guesstimation, 60%+ of new cars in the US bought in the last 5 years? (Even in "American" cars. Japanese engineers and managers think that America is always one news story away from leading a witchhunt against Japan products. Recent events have, ahem, not diminished this perception.)
Well, "the east" is often shorthand for "low cost outsourcing countries", so in that sense Japan is a country apart from its neighbors.
These discussions also neglect the enormous selection bias present when you're talking about outsourcing. The vast majority of developers in Japan and China are not proficient enough in a foreign language to work with teams in other countries. We're gazing at these countries' developers through a very, very narrow lens.
Very true, but I was a little shocked to see how little of a software industry there actually is. Outside of embedded systems, there's a decent bit of B2B, but even in those more software oriented companies, programming is seen as an entry-level field to get promoted out of as quickly as possible, and a lot of projects are outsourced to India. This is probably related to the lack of 4-year CS programs in Japan - it's largely considered a vocational field, so you either go to Tokyo Tech, or learn English and leave the country.
How does the situation compare for startups (scarce as they may be) and foreign/US-owned companies in Japan? What you described has been a depressing reality for me as someone who majored in CS and Japanese.
There are foreign companies doing interesting work here in japan. People at ibm, google, ms, etc that I know are happy. Others that are still growing like Gilt are recruiting and offering above 10m yen/yr. I'm at amazon, really enjoying it, and we're hiring :)
There's a HN Tokyo group, but as far as I'm aware (I asked a few of them), most of those who have started businesses did it through their spouse - the visa situation is a little difficult for starting a business, but it can be done (I haven't asked patio11, though, he would probably have some insight on this). The guys at (now apparently defunct) starling software seemed to imply on their blog that they were successful starting in Canada and opening a branch in Japan.
On the other hand, getting hired is a touch difficult, too. Companies that post at websites like Career Cross are mostly looking for fluency and lots of enterprise experience - I never even had any luck getting a reply. Most companies who are looking to hire foreigners also only want people who already have the right kind of Visa (an Engineering Visa - btw, if you have one, GrouponJP is hiring a PHP+Perl programmer to do some marketing analysis stuff).
Things aren't all bad, though. I got my job in Japan by going to one of the Recruit/MyNavi events for Japanese students who had studied in English speaking countries. Recruiters chase down the few foreigners there, but admittedly only one company was actually hiring programmers, and I ultimately wasn't happy there - YMMV.
Some video game and consumer electronics companies also hire foreigners, but large companies usually make all applicants take a test that's difficult for native speakers - I applied to Capcom, but they expected me to be fluent and take the test like everyone else. Of course, that depends on the company - you might have more luck elsewhere, and if you're close to fluent, it's worth a shot either way. Try to apply as a "new college graduate" if you can - there's a whole lot of bias against anyone who's held a previous full-time position, and I'm sure it doesn't disappear when they look at foreigner's resumes.
The other route is through foreign companies - I know at least one person at Google Tokyo who originally interviewed in the U.S. On the other hand, I know someone else at Lockheed Martin who's been fighting to get into their Japan office for years now - so how difficult it is depends on the company.
My advice - do Study abroad, JET, or just a 2~3 month trip; go to Tokyo (I personally prefer Osaka, but the jobs are in Tokyo) and go to the HN Tokyo meetup; if no one knows of any openings, apply to a bunch of foreign companies there; if that doesn't work, get a nice black suit and go to a recruiting event.
I don't know who wrote the software, but my hard-drive video recorder crashes quite regularly. Further, I've recently replaced my television, and I've crashed that too.
I have found most Japanese video games to be really linear. Go from level to level following for the most part a set path. I know these things are popular but I find them pretty boring compared to western developer produced games.
There are exceptions. Pacman was great. But things like Mario and Donkey Kong are about pressing the button at the right time, timing skills, not problem solving or exploring.
With the exception of the major western RPG makers (BioWare, Bethesda), most western games are either just as linear as their Japanese counterparts, or their exploration is almost completely pointless.
Also, I've been very disappointed with the "problem solving" in modern western games, which boil down to "we liked Half-Life 2, so move some crates around!"
Software is rubbish across the consumer space: TVs, DVDs, home routers. To interact with, it feels like somebody has scraped some functions together in assembly to meet a broad requirement, and then left it as soon as they could get away with it.
I expect the projects are hardware-driven. The movers and shakers care about the hardware, and design this first. Then some hardware-oriented guy get the short straw and is told "build a software layer on this technology to fill these checkboxes". The result is the unresponsive, buggy, hard-to-use rubbish that we get in our consumer devices.
I think companies would need to take a different approach to device design to get around this.
1. Japanese programmers wrote a huge proportion of cutting edge video games in the 80s, 90s, and 00s.
2. China (and Japan, and Korea, and India...) has a massive domestic consumer and b2b internet, written and scaled by domestic talent. It's much bigger than the US internet.
3. You better believe Koreans and Japanese write a WHOLE LOT of firmware. When was the last time your TV or BluRay player or Toyota ECU crashed? China is clearly playing catch up here - Chinese electronics crash all the time lol.
Of course then there's always the people who don't consider Japan to be "the east"... which always makes me laugh.