91–100 of 111 posts
Text is often a lot easier than speech.
I would say, text requires more effort (at a minimum, typing is slower than speaking); but it pushes you to do things that you should do in speech but rarely would do spontaneously.
"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 ap…
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 which "touch" our retinas?
"Friction" is a metaphor, and there's nothing wrong with that! I imagine that one monitoring a conversion funnel would naturally ask "what's causing the members of this cohort to drop out of the flow?" Well, it's friction that challenges spatial progress, and spatial metaphors make good use of some underused cognitive hardware.
"Increase stickiness... but also keep it lean", though is, at worst, an oxymoron and, at best, lazy along the lines of "... just make it good and not bad."
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Most places/countries/companies that value hard work tend to produce a lot, but I also wonder what goes on when it tilts too far and hard work becomes what you are measuring for. 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, be efficient, etc. I haven't directly experienced Japanese work culture (just language and…
> 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…
Yeah I wonder about that sometimes, the maximal balance between efficiency and inefficiency. Some things are clearly a waste (like advertising as you mentioned) but then other stuff is part of innovation, and it's sometimes a bit fuzzy between the two. On paper it's wasteful that Mazda, Toyota, Ford, etc. all had to independently develop a sedan, yet it would be far worse if we only had one car company to choose from (far worse because of how monopolies inevitably stagnate).
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Most places/countries/companies that value hard work tend to produce a lot, but I also wonder what goes on when it tilts too far and hard work becomes what you are measuring for. 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, be efficient, etc. I haven't directly experienced Japanese work culture (just language and…
> In the US for example there's still the vague idea that working hard is a virtue of sorts And easily demonstrable when meeting someone in a social setting: "Hi, what's your name?" Then the very next question: "What do you do for a living?"
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…
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Sign-up friction, bounce rate, touch points, bloat
Sign-up friction: how much effort it takes to sign up; many times because it's hard to find the sign up page or the page itself has too many steps Bounce rate: a bounce is someone visiting your site and not signing up. A bounce rate is the amount of people that do this compared to sign ups Touchpoints: things a user interacts with, like a landing page, a nav bar with a sign up button, the sign up page itself, forms o…
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> The fact they don't really need it in their life (or job). English is definitely necessary if you work service jobs in Tokyo (to deal with tourists), but not much anywhere else. But the linked article seems to imply the opposite. I mean, working with an English PM sure sounds like the language is one of the job's core competencies.
The linked article worked at an outlier. Mercari is extremely far from the norm.
My magic thought process is, “Nobody can read anybody’s mind. So, speak or ask.”
I’ve also been an English-to-English translator between Indians and Japanese. The way is to enunciate, simplify, use generic words, and know at least a few commonly used words for that community. Indians have our own way of saying lots of things that translates to weird English, and so does the Japanese.
An Indian’s 5-minute is way different than a Japanese’s 5-minute! ;-)
I don’t try to go too deep and read into the nuances, as I feel I’m being pretentious. When in doubt, ask the counterpart to check if they got it and perhaps say it in their own way.
Early in my career in the 2000s, I got used to working extensively with Americans, who made it seem like everything was possible. We go fly hunting, bring in the sledgehammers. I once questioned my knowledge of the entire English language while talking to an Australian contractor whom I worked with. Turned out it was nothing compared to a Scottish designer that I worked with for 3 months.
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From what I understand, it’s not so much that all disagreement is to be avoided entirely, but rather that it should be done on an individual level prior to the meeting. So the fundamental difference is that a western company may use the meeting as an opportunity to discuss and debate an issue, whereas that process is done before the meeting in Japanese corporate culture.
In Japan and in many East Asian cultures, debate is behind closed doors. And it would have taken months . Meetings are for ceremony.
East Asia consists of only 4 countries, two of them (China and Taiwan) sharing the bulk of their main language.
In the other 3 East Asian countries, meetings being for ceremony isn't nearly as pronounced as in Japan. Plenty of meetings where discussion are had and new decisions are made.
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…
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 jobs in the industry in America or even Europe.
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.
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.
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.