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.
Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination
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Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination
#32I 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…
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…
There's been a trend for Japan to close upon itself in the past 15 years or more already, so going overseas and learning english has become more uncommon than ever. That, and the utter lack of interest to whats happening beyond their borders, is really damaging the future outlooks for Japan.
Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination
#33I 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…
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…
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.
Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination
#34The #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.
According to Github’s own stats, Japan is eighth in both contributions and sign-ups. https://octoverse.github.com/people
Note that the way Github defines contributions is very fuzzy (signing up and opening a ticket is good enough to be considered a contributor). If we were to measure the number of commits or the number of lines of codes contributed I'd wage the picture would be quite different (and probably worse for Japan, but I could be wrong).
Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination
#35The #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.
From what I know, Japanese companies are pretty resistant to using new software technology. (Someone, please correct me if I'm wrong).
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.
Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination
#36The #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.
Why be an entrepreneur when there’s so much social glory in being a salaryman?
There is no glory in being in salaryman. I'm not sure where you heard that but salaryman has almost always been a derogatory term.
Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination
#37I 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.
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
> The Big Hack might be true or not
So where is even the evidence that it might be true? Bloomberg did a fluff piece without any data or evidence to support their claims. And worse than anything, they kept their story alive despite all the suspicion raised by other companies. That's pretty bad for a journalistic body.
> folks thought Echelon was a joke
I'm not sure what sources you refer to, but most people at the time thought that something like Echelon was true in some form or another. The main thing that Snowden did is to show evidence of wrongdoing, the extent of the data collection scope, and the complicity of numerous high profile companies.
Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 tho…
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.
Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination
#39I 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…
To me it seems like an indication of the differences in software vs other engineering that the conservatism that led to Japans world class mechanical and civil engineering acheivements has held back software engineering. For great cars, trains, electronics etc you can benefit from deep institutional knowledge(built by company loyalty and lifetime employment) and long product cycles. Whereas for software though there is the occasional airplane or medical device needing reliability, 99% of the time (and money) the move fast and break thing philosophy wins.
Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination
#40The 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 R…
I think your misunderstanding the goals of alibaba / Tencent. The derive their value precisely from their strategy of doing lots of things ok instead of one thing well. They are "platforms" not applications. And if they stuck to what they each did well in the beginning they likely wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful as they are now.
Also I think it's too early to tell whether how their worldwide expansion plans will play out. It's worth noting that between them they own a slice of most major tech companies in SEA. I wouldn't be surprised if thats not the only part of the world either..