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Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

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Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#101

Post by lucyjojo »

cedws wrote: post #43
bythreads wrote: post #15

Worked for years in japan, beg to disagree. Love japanese and japan but their work culture is horrific - Japanese are inefficient and the veneer of looking to work "hard" is more important than the hard work itself. People often stay until ridiculously late just to show they "put in the effort" which is more important than outcome. Then again that happens in many other countries as well ...

Yeah. I lived in Tokyo for 6 months as a digital nomad (so still working for an overseas employer.) As much as I love Japan, after hearing what the work culture is like I became pretty sure I didn't want to move there permanently. Not only is it an extremely unmeritocratic environment, the pay for software engs is rubbish. As a foreigner you'll more than likely be treated like dirt and passed up on for promotions. I…

I'm always puzzled by these comments because my personal experience (and those of my foreigner dev friends) is kinda the opposite.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#102

Post by pseudohadamard »

zahlman wrote: post #73

> Make your English more understandable This entire section is also good advice for working and communicating with English engineers. (Especially in a world where about 3/4 of English speakers don't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language as their first language.) > Create new meeting strategies A lot of this is also relevant within English, honestly. (The phrase この認識で合っていますか is good to know and I definit…

That was my reaction as well. The examples given at the start weren't just of poor communication to Japanese engineers, they were poor communication to anyone. Scenario 1 was so laden with corporate gibberish that I was having to guess at what was being said, and Scenario 2 was "ah, this person is -><- here on the autism spectrum".

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#103

Post by atoav »

gavmor wrote: post #92
atoav wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

That's an awfully cynical perspective, but these terms evolved because they're useful. No one is forcing us to speak them (although they are forcing us to hear them.) I would rather refer to affordances than to "user-facing touchpoints", because that's a more specific abstraction aimed at, specifically, interactive elements whereas "touchpoints" is, to me, vague; does it refer, also, to the merely visual aspects whic…

My perspective may come across cynical, although I am not a cynic, I just see this as what I observe. I am usually described as a very optimistic and patient person.

My position is the perspective of a former freelancer who had to translate that lingo into actual actionable steps. The perspective of someone who builds a website alone in a day, while building one on a month when guided by committee.

I have nothing against specialized language, if it serves a purpose as I mentioned in my philosophy example. For some concepts the specialized words are the only ones giving you the precise language needed to reference them in a meaningful way. What I dislike is needless specialized language by people whose job is it to let others interpret what they meant. The ambiguity is of course a feature on multiple dime sions, they can decide whether you read the runes correctly after the fact.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#104

Post by 3371 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #68
3371 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do (your country) people know Japanese?

I'm not sure what this question was meant to convey. There are many countries (or cities) in the world where you can easily get by in English beacuse almost everyone you need to / want to interact with can speak English. Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm are 4 the come to mind even though their native languages are Dutch, French, German, Swedish. Japan is not one of those countries. Yes, you can survive without spe…

The question labeling a whole ethnic can't understand English rubbed me the wrong way, that's about it. This is a much better comment for understanding your rationale.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#105

Post by muyuu »

deaux wrote: post #100
muyuu wrote: post #38

I worked in Japan for ~7 years. I don't think I can relate with any of this, for starters I think not speaking Japanese relatively fluently would completely shape your experience from the get go. Granted, this was a long time ago and even seeing non-Japanese around in Tokyo was rare, unlike now. But in the office environment let alone in tech, I doubt you can really make it work without not just speaking Japanese, bu…

> Granted, this was a long time ago and even seeing non-Japanese around in Tokyo was rare, unlike now. Please say "non-East Asians" when that's what you mean. There were already loads of Chinese and Koreans around in Tokyo 7 years ago. > For North Americans or Europeans, the intersection of people who can make it work and are also incentivised to make it work looks infinitesimally small to me, esp. if you can opt for…

> Please say "non-East Asians" when that's what you mean. There were already loads of Chinese and Koreans around in Tokyo 7 years ago.

it wasn't 7 years ago, it was 20 years ago, 7 years up to 2006 there were some Chinese, but really few and far between and in the Kanto area, mostly in Yokohama

i was studying Chinese back then, and I struggled to find people to practice

> The cultural adaptation you're talking about applies just as much to China and Korea, yet there's a huge reason for Europeans (not Americans, but they're the sole outlier) to work there as SWEs - post-tax + post-big-city-CoL, salaries are a lot better until you get to 10+ YoE.

probably it does - certainly Korea, China not as much - and also differently, and the topic here is Japan

> People tend to look at London or Amsterdam stated salaries and think this is impossible, but the tax and housing cost differences completely change the equation. 40k EUR at 40% tax is the same as 30k EUR at 20% tax.

40K is extremely low in tech, and where are you paying 40% tax on 40k??

>In big European capitals, for 800 EUR/month you get a parking space or a place to share with 3 others. In China or Korea in a tier 1 city for the same money you can rent a nice, newly built place for two (so 400 EUR/month/person) in a central location with private indoor parking and great transit links.

I can't speak of living in China or Korea, I have only visited. It wouldn't cross my mind to live in China, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.

RE in Japan is currently much better than in say the UK or SanFran or NYC. MUCH better. This wasn't the case when I was there, it was comparable or even more expensive. However the yen was stronger and salaries in tech were, although lower, much closer than they are now. If you are a computer scientist or an electrical engineer, you will easily make double or triple the salary, so rent doesn't make up for it. This is a volatile situation though, right now the situation for juniors seems to have deteriorated massively everywhere, so it's really hard to tell how it would work out either way. But unless you really want to learn the language and the culture and are willing to make strong sacrifices for it, moving to Japan in order to work in tech sounds like a crazy proposition.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#106

Post by rbanffy »

OneMorePerson wrote: post #93
rbanffy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the US for example there's still the vague idea that working hard is a virtue of sorts, but there's also an equivalent desire to produce something, This is the root of a lot of busywork and bullshit jobs as well. People work hard producing something of little and often negative value. Think of all the effort that goes into making competitive products, from life insurance and cellphone plans to airline tariffs di…

Oh yeah no doubt. That kind of thing is just human nature to some extent. Anywhere where getting something done gets you promoted or paid more (which again is a necessary side effect of rewarding progress) tends to have cases where people are producing bullshit or inflating their real contribution. Yeah I wonder about that sometimes, the maximal balance between efficiency and inefficiency. Some things are clearly a w…

> far worse because of how monopolies inevitably stagnate

Unregulated monopolies do, but regulated ones can be forced to innovate, both according to a plan, or through a process that internalises competition at the places where impact would be maximised (instead of multiple groups arriving at the same solution in secrecy, multiple groups exploring different possibilities while communicating between them and coordinating their efforts to avoid duplication).

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#107

Post by orthoxerox »

satvikpendem wrote: post #84
orthoxerox wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always interesting to watch how a bunch of non-native speakers of English from different countries sitting in a room can talk to each easily, but when a Brit or an American joins, the conversation immediately collapses.

In what way? What I've seen is the native English speaker bends over backwards to explain each and every idiom or try to not use them in the first place.

It's the general tempo of speech and speaking before you finish the thought that are the biggest roadblocks. ESL speakers usually talk like they are speaking in front of an audience, whereas natives talk like they are speaking in front of an audience, but they are DJT.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#108

Post by deaux »

muyuu wrote: post #105
deaux wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Granted, this was a long time ago and even seeing non-Japanese around in Tokyo was rare, unlike now. Please say "non-East Asians" when that's what you mean. There were already loads of Chinese and Koreans around in Tokyo 7 years ago. > For North Americans or Europeans, the intersection of people who can make it work and are also incentivised to make it work looks infinitesimally small to me, esp. if you can opt for…

> Please say "non-East Asians" when that's what you mean. There were already loads of Chinese and Koreans around in Tokyo 7 years ago. it wasn't 7 years ago, it was 20 years ago, 7 years up to 2006 there were some Chinese, but really few and far between and in the Kanto area, mostly in Yokohama i was studying Chinese back then, and I struggled to find people to practice > The cultural adaptation you're talking about…

The first one is on me, sorry for that.

> 40K is extremely low in tech, and where are you paying 40% tax on 40k??

Just to be clear, it was a random example just to show the calculation and how much tax percentages matter. You can simply double the comp numbers and it still works.

On top of that: 40k is really not extremely low. Fresh grad CS master's in French, average 2379 EUR net per month. That means about 35-40k gross. Very similar numbers in the Netherlands. Effective tax being 25-30% in both cases. Now compare post-tax to Japan, and Japan's comp at 0 YoE is maybe 1.5-2x lower. And then you look at rent in a Japanese big city vs a European big city, turns out that difference is much bigger than the comp difference.

And these are averages, not medians, so they're top-heavy. Medians will be even lower.

Maybe you've only been at a FAANG but you're overestimating European tech comp, for the huge majority of workers, Japan too is much, much better in terms of comp vs. CoL.

It's also a better deal for those US tech workers who live in high CoL areas without VC-backed comp, though that's of course a much smaller percentage compared to the Europeans.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#109

Post by materials »

sdevonoes wrote: post #87
satvikpendem wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way? What I've seen is the native English speaker bends over backwards to explain each and every idiom or try to not use them in the first place.

As a non native English speaker: British accent is harder to understand (I know there are many accents in the UK). American accent is easier to understand. Idioms are equally harder to understand in both. For example “bend over backwards”. I get the meaning, but my brain would never produce that phrase. I would say something like “adapts”, “compromises”, etc.

Do you think there is any benefit from learning idioms? When speaking a non-native language, I always struggle with wanting to sound like a native speaker, and never using idioms and jargon makes me feel like I'm setting myself apart. However, it's really hard to use them correctly when you don't speak the language natively.

Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers

#110

Post by materials »

canpan wrote: post #11
avidiax wrote: post #5

I feel that everyone could learn and apply the idea of having clear, concise language without jargon. I've hear this notion called "international English". English spoken in a way that non-native speakers find relatively easy to understand and follow. The hard part of this is that non-native speakers will rarely ask for this. It's a gift that you have to give, and a gift you have to encourage others to give. And most…

I speak multiple languages fluently and people are always surprised when I share that my vocabulary is seriously limited. I learned it is an advantage. I am forced to use simple words to explain. On the opposite end: I had a coworker, I only ever got about 30% of what he said. I thought it's my Japanese skills. He used complicated sentences and words all over the place. But when I asked other Japanese coworkers, they…

If Japanese coworkers could not understand your coworker, is it that he used complicated sentences or that he couldn't use them correctly? Being able to explain things in simple terms is really useful, but it also means that you have to explain a lot more when conveying nuance or precision because you can't choose the word that means exactly what you want to say. Do you ever run into this, or do you feel the simple explanations can cover everything you want to communicate?
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