
Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination - DyslexicAtheist
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-17/recruit-is-japan-s-top-contender-for-global-internet-domination
======
ascar
I recently signed up to recruit to make a dinner reservation in Japan.

They used a lot of dark patterns for their email marketing. Bombarding me with
multiple different newsletters I didn't sign up for and I had to cancel every
single one of them separately. And nearly a week delay after sign-off. One of
the worst non-spam marketing I had to deal with in the last years.

~~~
reustle
This is common practice in Japan. We desperately need our own anti spam
legislation.

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ekianjo
Recruit is one of the worst domestic companies in Japan. Their services suck,
they are badly designed, they are not integrated, they have way too much
workforce for the kind of business they are in, I could go on and on. If
that's the best that Japan has to offer then the rest of the world is safe.

~~~
dmix
Man it's so depressing looking at what a giant Japan could be in the tech
industry if they got their shit together politically, economically, and
culturally to bring entrepreneurship and creative risk-taking back.

Their potential talent-to-output ratio has to be one of the worst in the
world. Probably the worst if you look at their flashes on brilliance in the
1980s and early 1990s and what they could be today.

This problem goes well beyond their central financial mismanagement with
stagflation.

~~~
VRay
Haha, it's true, man. I recently moved to Japan to live with family for a
while. I interviewed at the top Japanese software companies in Japan, and even
though I'm a senior engineer with 10 years' experience in FAANG in the USA,
they felt like they were doing me a favor offering me 15 million JPY/year
(150k USD at 100 yen per dollar, ~$130k USD at the time with the beefy US
dollar). Tokyo is actually a little cheaper to live in than Seattle assuming
you're OK with a tiny Tokyo apartment and a long Tokyo commute, but it isn't
THAT much cheaper.

I tried to politely explain how and why people like me command the kind of
salaries we do in the USA, but they just didn't get it. At 15M JPY I'd rather
just work in the USA for a year, then take a year off in Japan, so that's what
I ended up doing, haha.

All the local Japanese software giants are slowly being strangled to death on
their home turf, and they're completely failing to compete internationally.
It's a real shame, but oh well!

~~~
fiblye
Sometimes I think the HN community is vastly out of touch with normal everyday
humans, and comments like this validate it.

If you're making 7 million yen a year, you're making _really fucking good
money_. If you're making 10 million, that company is really kissing your ass
and you're essentially royalty. But 15 million is low?

Keep in mind that GDP per capita in Japan is only about 2/3 of America's, and
also that the wealth divide is pretty much non-existent while America is
basically two parallel societies: people who struggle to get by (or close to
it) and the rich and carefree, and thinking 15 mil is low is just insanity.
People would work 5 years at that job and retire to Okinawa with that cash.

>Tokyo is actually a little cheaper to live in than Seattle

That's an understatement. It's tremendously cheaper. You can get an apartment
near your workplace, eat out 15 times a week, and still only spend half the
money you'd spend on a decent in-city apartment in Seattle or SF.

>I tried to politely explain how and why people like me command the kind of
salaries we do in the USA, but they just didn't get it.

Oh, no, they got it. They just wondered why someone thinks anyone gets paid
that much. Not even most doctors are making that much. You basically requested
CEO wages and thought they were crazy.

~~~
speedplane
He isn't out of touch with reality. The economy works on supply and demand. He
can make more money in country than another doing the same job, so he chose
the country that paid him more. It's perfectly reasonable. It's not about it
being a _good_ or _bad_ salary, it's just what the market will bear.

~~~
fiblye
He can definitely get paid more in Seattle if he wants to. That's true. He
will also have a cost of living that's pretty much double what it would be in
Japan.

And true, it's an issue of supply and demand. He demanded too much and supply
isn't there.

His problem is that he thinks they're strange for not just offering more
money, not considering that, maybe, just maybe, a country with lower wages and
smaller GDP simply can't pay people hundreds of thousands of dollars a
year+bonus for jobs. When you think of it purely in the context of big
number=good, then it's bad. When you consider Japan is a much cheaper country
and there are other benefits (like not having to deal with ridiculously
expensive American health care, good public transportation, etc), it's clearly
by no means a bad deal. It's a deal probably nobody else in that company's
history ever was or ever will be offered ever again.

~~~
speedplane
> His problem is that he thinks they're strange for not just offering more
> money

I don't think he thinks they're strange, he's just surprised. When you visit
France and can buy high quality wine for half the cost that you get in the
U.S., it's surprising. When you go to Singapore and see that housing can often
be more expensive than luxury apartments in NYC, it's surprising. Similarly,
when you go to Japan and see people doing the same thing you do, but making
30%+ less, it's surprising.

Maybe the cost of living and government provided social services make up for
some of this difference, maybe they don't. But having some initial sticker
shock in the price differential can be pretty natural.

If he has a problem, it's that he thinks a unit of work should be valued
equally , i.e., if I do X, it should be universally valued at $Y. It's a nice
thought, and I'd like to wish it was true, but it's not how our economy works.
The value of X is not intrinsic, it's based on what someone is willing to pay
for it.

Coal mining in the U.S. in the 1950s provided a solid middle class foundation,
but the same job today does not. Beethoven is clearly a better musician than
most pop music, but few today would shell out money to listen to his music,
while they would for many popular artists.

Hopefully from this, he can realize how lucky he is to have access to a
country which, for a variety of reasons, values this type of production more
than other places in the world.

~~~
fiblye
It’s really not that programmers are more “valued” and everyone who isn’t
paying them enough money to buy a new house yearly isn’t properly appreciating
them. It’s that one country can afford to pay more, and it’s partly enabled by
a massive wealth disparity.

Being surprised is strange. It’s like being surprised that people get paid
less in Poland and that companies won’t pay as much for a programmer there.
Nobody has the money to pay for $300000/year programmers in Poland. It’s the
same virtually everywhere except incredibly expensive corners of the world,
like parts of America and Switzerland.

~~~
threatofrain
For the same reason that China is trouncing Taiwan in tech hiring, you need to
beat your competitors. What's reasonable to give to someone else to make them
do what you want depends on what your competitors do.

Framing it as "think of what another Japanese person would be making" is all
wrong. We can say the exact same thing about Taiwan, and we surely wouldn't
say the way for Taiwan to move forward is to tell candidates, "You just don't
understand Taiwan. It has a very different way of life." Those candidates will
understand Chinese money, the same way this person understood American money.

~~~
fiblye
Taiwan is also an absolutely tiny economy compared to China. That money has to
come from somewhere. In the case of many countries, it means paying most
workers peanuts while paying someone else 10x as much.

Some on HN are okay with massive wealth disparity and think it’s great for
some international programmer to be valued far more than any local just
because they worked at a company like Facebook. Some countries, like Taiwan
and Japan, aren’t on that train.

~~~
threatofrain
And that's why Taiwan is in a brain drain to China and the US. Chinese
companies don't need to make the same excuses as Taiwanese companies when it
comes to money.

~~~
fiblye
How’s it an excuse?

Hey, Afghanis and Sudanese people out there, want to fix your country? Just
quit being poor. Pay money that you don’t have. It’s what the two largest,
most powerful, wealthiest countries in the world do, so why can’t you? No
excuse not to pay them the same as a Silicon Valley startup getting funding
that dwarfs your GDP.

Aside from throwing people out on the streets and cutting wages for the middle
class in order to support some yuppie JavaScript coders from another country,
it’s not economically possible to just poof money into existence to pay
ridiculous wages. I mean yeah, America does it and that works for some people
here. Most people despise that.

~~~
VRay
You're looking at the economy and business in general completely wrong. You
have a SERIOUS fundamental misunderstanding of how it works.

There isn't a fixed pool of X trillion dollars per year for all companies and
government agencies to split up among workers.

If a company gives $300k to some guy in Silicon Valley, he'll turn around and
give it to other people providing him with goods and services. They in turn
spend the money on things they need.

~~~
fiblye
That is the very definition of trickle down economics.

Spoilers: it's been thoroughly debunked. It factually does not work.

------
ascar
Considering they completely lack internationalization/localization (at least
on signup, on Hot Pepper and their Recruit account management page), it
doesn't give me the impression Recruit has the right mindset to compete on a
global scale.

While this is just a medium hard problem to fix technically, it's the mindset
of most employees that would have to change. Good i18n/l10n requires some
consideration of development (it's easy to create untranslatable text, when
the technical structure of strings can't reflect foreign grammar),
marketing/sales (you need different approaches for different markets) and
management (giving time to do i18n right).

Currently Recruit shows the typical island mentality. Their consideration ends
at the borders of Japan. Not a good place to start for global domination.

~~~
lowdest
Recruit owns Indeed and Glassdoor, which are doing pretty well beyond Japan.

~~~
ascar
I imagine these are acquisitions that already did well before they got bought.

Glassdoor is also becoming increasingly known for letting companies "bribe"
them to delete bad reviews.

------
Johnwbh
The analogy with tencent and alibaba seems instructive, but not necessarily in
a good way. They are both massive bloated platforms that do lots of different
disconnected things not very well. e.g. the wechat messaging app contains
subprograms for games, payment, flight bookings, etc you can't turn off. They
only continue to exist because of network effects, and because they play nice
with the Chinese government.

If Recruit works on the same model then they will have the same problem moving
abroad that there is no one thing they are better at than an existing company

~~~
Barrin92
>They are both massive bloated platforms that do lots of different
disconnected things not very well. e.g. the wechat messaging app contains
subprograms for games, payment, flight bookings, etc you can't turn off

In an age where bringing users together and building ecosystems seems to count
for more and more this isn't necessarily a downside. We're used to the startup
and "move quick" mentality but conglomerates have been making somewhat of a
comeback for a while now, and Google and Amazon aren't exactly 'non bloated'
either, because I'm sure for many of their services there's some small company
somewhere that does it better. (case in point, DeepL's translation is actually
astonishingly good).

So maybe being a big scary monolith with government support is a good strategy
to be a dominating internet company in this day and age and in the years to
come.

------
kazuki
In my view, recruit is a sales company. They have very strong sales team
covering SMBs. That allowed them to build gurunavi (similar to Yelp), airregi
(similar to square), and so on. Couple of years ago they started focus more on
hiring top engineering talent and I think it is absolutely right move, but
frankly I don't think they can compete grobally as tech company in near
future.

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niztk
I live and run a startup out of Japan and given the engineering talent here or
lack thereof, I can almost guarantee that you won’t see any Japanese tech
startup going global anytime soon. If anything, they will copy another global
innovative company and dominate the domestic market but with no real
innovation (look no further than the very mediocre Rakuten).

Gone are the days where Sony, Nintendo and others had what it takes to craft a
quality product that was compelling to global audiences.

Japan has lost its mojo and the sad thing is that the conservatives forces are
so strong that this country won’t attract any talent needed to change the bad
bad status quo for the foreseeable future.

~~~
ascar
I moved to Japan to do research for my CS master thesis at one of the top5
universities. While I knew English is not spoken by most Japanese, I was
honestly surprised that nearly all the CS students in my lab lack the English
skill for daily conversations, let alone have a technical discussion.

Considering how international and English dominated CS is and only Japans best
students get a place at this university, that is a very bad basis to create
top software engineering talent.

~~~
niztk
Indeed, Japan consistently ranks dead last in terms of English proficiency
among OECD countries. Heck, it’s even last among Asian economies including
developing ones.

There’s hardly any i18n for apps/services/portals implemented in Japan barring
very few exceptions with minimum and rough execution. The few times I tried to
hire Japanese engineering talent, I was shocked by the extreme lack of English
aptitude for those out of CS curriculums and we are talking about top
universities such as Tokyo University (Todai) and other prestigious institutes
of technology. I can’t help but think that Japan will sink deeper into
mediocrity if they don’t fix their language problem.

~~~
ascar
It already starts at school. Learning English with Katakana leads to such an
incorrect pronunciation that they basically have to relearn talking in
English, when they eventually meet foreigners. I have been to multiple school
visits as part of the university program and it's a sad state. But in my
experience they are trying to improve it, e.g. by bringing us foreign students
to the schools and raising awareness.

~~~
mirimir
For "Sukiyaki Western Django", I've read that Miike just had his Japanese
actors memorize the classic western drawl. And that's what it sounds like, to
me.

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xrd
The #1 largest market for GitHub is the US. The second largest group of users
is from Japan. I'm surprised there aren't more startups from Japan. The people
are tech savvy and the economic malaise exceeding 20 years should be pushing
people towards entrepreneurship and risk taking.

~~~
a_t48
From what I know, Japanese companies are pretty resistant to using new
software technology. (Someone, please correct me if I'm wrong).

~~~
ekianjo
Hey, Japanese companies still require fax for many things, so your statement
is absolutely correct :-) Joking aside, yes this is true. Most companies run
on Excel.

------
slurpeedog
While they may be held back by Japan’s insular culture, that very weakness is
also a moat.

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z3t4
Their business idea seem original: put yourself between customers and
services.

~~~
ndnxhs
Just another rent seeker

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echelon
I remember Recruit developed one of Nintendo's first online platforms, Randnet
[1]. After trying to pioneer in this space on each of their early consoles,
only to see it fail to gain traction with their customers, Nintendo let online
gameplay and networking take a back seat. Microsoft and Sony (and Sega) jumped
on board that train with the very next generation of consoles and became
leaders in online console gaming.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/64DD](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/64DD)

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tgeo
They are also the holding company which owns Indeed.com

~~~
lykr0n
Yep. They are using Indeed talent and culture to help drive their expansion.

------
reustle
From what I know about the tech/talent there, it won't be happening any time
soon

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Animats
So it's a wannabe WeChat, basically.

------
jitl
I still find it very difficult to trust Bloomberg after “The Big Hack” was
widely refuted without a retraction. Now whenever I read a Bloomberg puff
peice like this, I’m wondering who’s agenda they’re serving. Who’s got all the
Recruit stock that wants to see it rise? How much of the article is twisted to
paint this company in a positive light? They’re not a trustworthy publication
anymore.

~~~
segmondy
Hey, folks thought Echelon was a joke in the 90's until Snowden showed that
Echelon is child's play.

The Big Hack might be true or not, but it's not far fetched. There might be
more at play here. Watch this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As&feature=youtu.be)

~~~
saagarjha
The issue is that Bloomberg couldn’t provide any real evidence for their
claims when pressed.

~~~
jessaustin
That's standard practice for media these days. One recalls the dozens of
breathlessly reported then forgotten inside of a week "inside leaks" about
"Russian collusion".

