[spkm]

I'm a german software developer working for a japanese corporation in a german subsidiary. I agree with pretty much everything in your post. Especially the exhausting chain of approvals and also the unwillingness to make quick/tough decisions feels like walking through molasses at times. However, there is also an upside to this. I can actually confirm that they take quality control very serious, probably due to the losing face cultural thing if the product fails the customer and therefore rarely do quick last minute changes or crunch, because it degrades quality.

[sersi]

I worked for a software consulting company in Japan, we had a contract with a big well known company. The contract gave a precise date for the delivery with huge fines if we delivered late but there was also a long bug fixing period after the initial delivery.

So we had overtime for 2 months working from 10am to 4am just so that we could deliver the "feature complete" software. If any bugs were found they were classified as either blockers (feature cannot be shown without) or scheduled to be fixed after delivery.

My boss knew it was stupid, he didn't like it but it was the standard contract from that big Japanese company and we were small and they weren't going to change that.

[nradov]

That's a very narrow viewpoint. From the customer perspective, defect rate is only one component of the product quality vector.

[platevoltage]

As a fan of Nintendo (the games, not the company of course), this definitely checks out. There are exceptions, but you rarely see a new Zelda game release in the state you can expect from Bethesda.