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Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

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Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#21

Post by founditerating »

mfuzzey wrote: post #19

"we really need to focus on user-facing touchpoints, because there’s too much sign-up friction. Like, we need to 10x the stickiness of the landing page but also keep it lean," Even as a native English speaker I find this type of language hard to understand, fluffy and ambiguous. We would all benefit from using plain language not just non native English speakers

Who the hell talks like this in the first place?

I've worked in Japan for 7 years and majority of the time you will not be working with native English speakers, usually people who speak multiple languages at all times, if you're only language you know is English you are the minority and people will have to work with you to understand.

I couldnt even finish the article after that insane ramble of gibberish I'm genuinely confused who in the hell would ever talk like that.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#22

Post by onion2k »

sunray2 wrote: post #13
onion2k wrote: post #4

Lush, the bathbombs company, has an internal tech team that builds the apps, website, and point of sale systems. I worked there for a little while on some web-based tooling for payments which involved working with the Japanese team who did the tech for the Japanese site. They were really good. Everything was incredibly clear and easy to understand because they had to put a lot of effort into written comms due to both…

Sounds really nice! Do you have an example of the concise, high quality communciation the Japanese team used? It'd be interesing to see what they focused on to make it so clear.

There are a few things.

- They didn't make assumptions about what the person reading would already know. Everything simple was explained, and was there were link to prior docs where complicated concepts were needed (e.g end of day cash consolidation in a store, because Japanese stores worked differently to US and Europe.) That made it really easy to read any document in isolation. We had a really good wiki that covered everything.

- The team insisted on keeping docs up to date, and deprecating old docs for things that weren't relevant any more. They kept things tidy. They didn't drop writing documentation when things got busy.

- They seemed to have spent quite a lot of effort organising things - tickets were always labelled and complete.

- They were dedicated to using consistent terminology everywhere. They had a glossary and they stuck to it, and that extended to the code that they wrote. Product docs, tech docs, and code all used the same language for the same thing. I think they avoided using similar terms for things too, especially where things could be ambiguous in translation from Japanese to English and vice versa.

To be honest, and with a decent amount of hindsight, I don't think anything was especially clever. It was just clear that the team put the effort in to doing the things most teams know they should be doing. I haven't worked there for a few years now but I bet they're having a lot of success with AI because that documentation would be a great source of context.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#25

Post by birdsongs »

founditerating wrote: post #21
mfuzzey wrote: post #19

"we really need to focus on user-facing touchpoints, because there’s too much sign-up friction. Like, we need to 10x the stickiness of the landing page but also keep it lean," Even as a native English speaker I find this type of language hard to understand, fluffy and ambiguous. We would all benefit from using plain language not just non native English speakers

Who the hell talks like this in the first place? I've worked in Japan for 7 years and majority of the time you will not be working with native English speakers, usually people who speak multiple languages at all times, if you're only language you know is English you are the minority and people will have to work with you to understand. I couldnt even finish the article after that insane ramble of gibberish I'm genuine…

> and majority of the time you will not be working with native English speakers, usually people who speak multiple languages at all times, if you're only language you know is English you are the minority and people will have to work with you to understand.

This is pretty much life anywhere outside of North America and the UK (or colonies). In Norway, I don't think a single coworker of mine is a native English speaker (I am). We get along fine of course, but often I see the resistance they feel when having to switch to English. Second (or third) languages just take more brain power, and have more friction.

I have learned Norwegian, but English is still is required sometimes, as it's the common denominator amongst the mix of Norwegian, Swedish, German, and Spanish people. And that English is usually functional and as clear as can be.

This is the engineering department though. If you go to marketing or strategy it's full of this corpo double-speak.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#26

Post by atoav »

mfuzzey wrote: post #19

"we really need to focus on user-facing touchpoints, because there’s too much sign-up friction. Like, we need to 10x the stickiness of the landing page but also keep it lean," Even as a native English speaker I find this type of language hard to understand, fluffy and ambiguous. We would all benefit from using plain language not just non native English speakers

This is The Lingo. It is something people use when they try to say bland obvious stuff while sounding like they are tech wizards that deserve a high wage. I know the pattern, I studied philosophy, where you also have some writers that express simple ideas with complex lingo, while you have others where the lingo is complex, but it is needed, because the thought is also complex. For the uninitiated telling the two apart can be hard.

In this case that just means: our landing page needs to convince more people to sign up without getting too bloated.

This means it implies a linear correlation between amount of content on the page and sign ups. More content, more signups. But not too much, otherwise it is bad again.

In essence it is a bad take on a probably real problem, expressed by a person that needs to hide behind the lingo.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#27

Post by trueismywork »

onion2k wrote: post #22
sunray2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds really nice! Do you have an example of the concise, high quality communciation the Japanese team used? It'd be interesing to see what they focused on to make it so clear.

There are a few things. - They didn't make assumptions about what the person reading would already know. Everything simple was explained, and was there were link to prior docs where complicated concepts were needed (e.g end of day cash consolidation in a store, because Japanese stores worked differently to US and Europe.) That made it really easy to read any document in isolation. We had a really good wiki that cover…

Getting small details right is something everyone thinks is obvious. But how to achieve it without becoming mired in processes and keeping work going is a skill that is very difficult to cultivate and a very difficult problem to solve. Requiring a lot of clever people skills. Warms my heart to hear stuff like this.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#28

Post by tdeck »

accidentallfact wrote: post #17
chii wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that international english be the same simple english (e.g., https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page )?

I believe that this goes beyond vocabulary. It's more about who bears the burden in communication - in most cultures, it's the speaker, who is supposed to communicate clearly, and concisely. In western culture, it's the listener, who is expected to decipher whatever the speaker is talking about.

> In most cultures, it's the speaker, who is supposed to communicate clearly, and concisely. In western culture, it's the listener, who is expected to decipher whatever the speaker is talking about.

If you said this in Japanese, I'd say something like "Hmm, that seems a bit...". And you'd be expected to figure out what the rest of the sentence was.

To be more clear, I don't think the generalization you're making is valid. My experience of non-"Western" cultural communication styles has not at all been uniformly more direct and clear. I think some subcultures in the US have an annoying habit of doing what you describe (e.g. "if you can't follow this you must be dumb" kind of mentality) but many others do not.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#29

Post by financltravsty »

mfuzzey wrote: post #19

"we really need to focus on user-facing touchpoints, because there’s too much sign-up friction. Like, we need to 10x the stickiness of the landing page but also keep it lean," Even as a native English speaker I find this type of language hard to understand, fluffy and ambiguous. We would all benefit from using plain language not just non native English speakers

This makes sense?

User-facing touch points: everything a user can interact with

Sign-up friction: self explanatory

Stickiness: less bounce rate

Lean: don't overload with touch points/bloat

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