[jankcorn]

I spent ~11 years in Japan, porting/building telecom protocol software and, more importantly, trying to build software development and business competence in our teams. Sadly, although I had a reasonable impact on individual software engineers technical ability, I was unable to find any path to leverage that into "software business building" expertise.

Of course, the attribution of causes to this is highly subjective and I expect every person to come away from the elephant with a different interpretation.

In my case, the very, very top down 'age hierarchy' culture was (and continues unabated) to crush any ideas and proposals that come up from younger and more competent engineers. In the last 30 years with Japan, I have met only a small handful of people that are willing to take input, let alone change direction, from someone younger than them. (a trivial example was a fellow company director of mine that was born 5 _days_ earlier than me. In 4 years working together, not once would he take anything I said seriously. Hmm...)

Give the number of excellent Japanese software engineers that I know, the burden of this "culture" is (to me) quite tragic on its impact slowing down national progress in an important global field. If anyone as ideas how to get around this, I would love to know and learn.

[Gravityloss]

I guess the solution would be to build a different company from the ground up and then shield against the common culture sneaking in. You would need to repeat it very often though. Or have a branch office of a non-japanese company.

I live in a small country and there are foreign companies and while they have to adjust to local laws and have mostly local employees, they still are culturally different from each other.

I wonder how GE with a strong central process and culture control is doing in Japan?

[MichaelZuo]

IBM does very well in Japan, or used to, so there might be something there.

[adev_]

Yes, exactly: That summarize it all.

It is not only in software that Japan has currently difficulties. It is in any domain that requires to "move fast and break thing".

Japan is excellent at incremental improvement (Kaizen) but absolutely terrible at managing disruptions.

And the reasons are exactly the ones you point out: Excessively hierarchical management practices means that mid-management will kill any evolution that is seen as a risk to them.