I ❤ Japan
Out of context: Reply #438
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- drgs1
A funny thread about why Japan cannot produce any good software
https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…"I experienced this working for the US arm of a Japanese company. To report a bug would cause the programmer to lose face, so we had to waste a lot of time going through all kinds of contortions to lead someone to the bug without calling it out. We wrote a lot of "feature requests" that were really bug reports."
"In a Japanese company, people in general do not speak openly in meetings, because they are afraid of disrupting group harmony. Ideas need to be circulated in a series of one-on-one discussions--this is called "newashi" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... This means that for a group of N people, it's N*(N-1)/2 private discussions that need to happen. And everyone needs to be in agreement and comfortable that the idea is "right", and that there is nothing the slightest bit off with it. Only after all these discussions have happened and everyone is fully bought-in, there is then a meeting to "rubber stamp" the idea."
"While the risk-adverse and face-losing-adverse traits of the Japanese culture can explain the (in general) slow development and response of Japanese companies (not limited to software), they cannot explain the quirky, often ugly and not user friendly UI of Japanese software. Germans are a bit risk-adverse, too, though not comparable to Japanese, their software, especially enterprise software are showing the same rigid UI and in general difficulty to use. In fact, you can not use them without reading the manual or being trained and that is expected from the end users, too! In a stark contrast, user-oriented software today are very intuitive, offers pleasant onboarding thus every user can use them casually."
"The same holds for Germany. Beside the "no pain no gain" attitude, the pursuit of "perfection" leads to weird outcomes. For example, the music band Kraftwerk dissolved because half of the members wanted to make sounds that looked "perfect" on an oscilloscope and not how good they sounded."
- heh, I almost posted this for you here when it came out :)Nairn
- Why didnt you? I would have found it soonerdrgs
- yep.shapesalad
- Japan is the top example where isolation leads to lack of reflection; to not be able to compare and see yourself through the eyes of other culturesdrgs
- I think the same applies to Russia and Arabs. The reason? Language barriers
https://i.imgur.com/…drgs