Programming in Japan

I'm interested in living in Japan in the future (5 years or maybe later, depending on how their economy is doing and any impending catastrophes). Any lainons living there? I'd like to know about the country's programming trends. I know this sounds like it belongs on the employment thread, but I'm not looking for work right now, I just want to know what it's like. I've heard that there's a clear cultural divide between the more traditional ones and the ones with a more "westernized" culture. How many of the latter are there? From what I've seen, LINE and Mercari appear to be FAANG-like. I don't wanna be overworked to death. for backend, is Ruby still huge? What about Go? I remember seeing a survey showing that Go was really popular in Japan and China, but it was a long time ago. for low level work, do you often see modern C and/or modern C++, or is very old C-style C++98 with nausea-inducing spaghetti code the norm? I've seen a surprising amount of Rust positions in tokyodev.org. I even saw mentions of it in Nintendo job postings. This makes me think that Rust adoption may be growing over there, but I've always been told that Japan's tech sector tends to lag behind and is very resistant to change just like Japan in general. And just browsing the Japanese web kinda confirms what I've been told, so I don't know what to think.

>>33902 Japan is a corporate hell hole. Unless you like working 18 hour days avoid it at all costs. And yes, Go, Ruby and Perl are the biggest languages in my experience.

>>33903 The thing about Japanese is that they want to convince you that they work 18 hours a day, that does not mean they are actually doing it. If you "sleep in the office" as OPs picture mention is that actual work?

>>33916 ... if you're sleeping in the office you're a slave to your employer.

>>33917 And you are saving on heater/cooling bills, maybe even rent. It is not a fulfilling life by any means, but some people just go home to be on the internet watching Netflix or Youtube anyway, and you can do that from inside the company.

>>33902 The Japanese work culture is very hard, very structured and many protocols for everything, if it is not in the instructions or procedures manual then you cannot do it, even if it is the most logical task of all if it is not written then not. In other, more social spheres, they tend to look down on foreigners and many have been humiliated by tyrannical bosses, now I'm talking about large companies or corporations, like Nintendo or Sony, even if it's the same in small companies, maybe with something luck and reference you can fall into a more relaxed company or even much better, in a company where there are several foreigners working with you, it would be the best since the only friends you will have there will be other foreigners, friendship in Japan is not the same concept friendship in western culture

>>33902 Labor laws in East Asia are notoriously bad. I don't live in Japan, but I do live in China and I can tell you that insanely high rents and low pay will squeeze the life out of you. Unless your in a high paying and well respected position, you definitely don't want to work here especially in tech.

>>33921 >but I do live in China How are you even posting here? You're still in 1984!

>>33921 Lainon in the #1 country (台灣#1), cost of living here is quite cheap, and you can work abroad quite easily. No need to even trend chase with languages, just kick back and write some lisp. China seems like the worst place to live and work

Working in Japan for a Japanese company is certainly going to be hell like everyone else already said. Your goal, and really the goal of all foreigners (and probably of all Japanese but they don't know English) is to get a job in a foreign company that has a western mentality. Check out JapanDev and TokyoDev. Most of the jobs are in webdev naturally, you can see the trends there. The ultimate goal is of course landing an USD paying job/working remotely once you have residency, which is certainly doable if you're skilled enough. Best of luck.

>>33919 > friendship in Japan is not the same concept friendship in western culture What do you mean? There is friendship in anime.

>>33927 Time to start learning Mandarin I guess.

>>33963 Do you think anime is real?

>>33976 >>33919 are you sure friendship in Japan is fundamentally different and you're not just repeating an orientalist observation from (s)expats? When I ask what's different the reply is often something along the lines of: >they mostly stick to friends they met in school >they don't speak English (no soykaf) >they stick to their groups and are more open to talk to people who share their interests >if you want to make Japanese friends as an adult, your best bet is to speak the language, go to a bar, join a club/org for your hobby I've lived in Latin America and the US. That's how it works over here too. You speak the local language and go outside, or if you still can, talk to your classmates from school/college. You don't talk about very personal stuff until you've known each other for a while. You look for groups that match your interests. Sometimes I wonder if the people who make these claims have any friends back home in the first place.

I was looking at some japanese video game dev site and I found it funny that they had to mention you don't need to work on weekend, as they consider it a holiday in that company. Let that sink it.

>>33919 yeah watch Fear and Trembling, its based on book written by some belgian woman who worked in japanese corporation and how much she got humiliated in the process, to the point of getting assigned to clean toilets even tho she was hired as accountant or something, just because of not following "unwritten rules"

>>34093 maybe she should have figured out these written rules. Many people suffer because they are dumb, but they will not tell you that they are dumb they will tell you other people are mysterious and cruel.

>>34093 >who worked in japanese corporation and how much she got humiliated in the process >and Trembling (original title: Stupeur et tremblements, which means "Stupefaction and trembling") is a fictional,[1] satirical novel by Amélie Nothomb, first published in 1999, and translated into English by Adriana Hunter in 2001

>>33976 Are you trying to tell me that Haruhi Sutzumia didn't exist? On a serious note, I meant that at least japanese people have some concept of friendship that they can show in anime and we can understand it. If their concept of friendship was completely alien to us, the friendship as depicted in anime would make no sense to us.

Remember that you are and always will be a gaijin

>>34095 Did you not click through that citation? Makes it pretty clear it's a dramatization of real events. And surprise surprise: >Having finished her studies, Nothomb returned to Japan to work in a Japanese company in Tokyo. Her experience of this time is expressed in Fear and Trembling.[5] >"It was absolutely true," she says. "Believe me, I have not enough imagination to think up that story. I wrote it because I didn't understand what happened to me. I think that maybe my mistake was to really try to become a Japanese girl. They don't want you to become Japanese." Despite the burning humiliation, she is grateful for the experience. "Thanks to that, I dared to send my writing to a publishing company because I was already that humiliated. A toilet cleaner? What could be worse? Even if the publisher refuses me, even if the critics despise me, that cannot be worse than cleaning the toilets." The all-too-common cultural dysfunction of many Japanese firms is not disputed any more. Even the government takes a tepid opposition to the traditional management techniques.

>>33918 "Are you not saving on food and rent by living in the slave barracks?" Survival is not enough. The idea of "work" is to compress as much actual work into as small a timespan as possible so that you can have more free time for yourself or your family. Normally, people would leave if the trade-offs became unfavorable, but with the advent of the industrial revolution, the costs of equipment skyrocketed. You could suddenly make it big by taking large loans, but most people are risk averse, and so the trade-off pushed people towards the stable factory jobs. The true cancer that is killing things is the massive legal thicket that has been raised around the starting and running of any sort of independent company. Good luck trying to build something new when half the components fall under nebulous patents. (here is a good vid on that https://youtu.be/aiKRt3-FbM0), but patents are just one of the legal hurdles. You would need an army of lawyers to ensure that you do not get struck by the "justice" of the legal system.

>>34303 Face culture and racism in China/Korea/Japan does that to people.

>>34596 Please stop citing literal pirates in arguments on the disastrous state of software patents. I get that the reified anon hacker culture is one of universal law-flaunting, but if anything not made by Microsoft is to actually make a difference among consumers at some point we need to slow-walk our message and take stock of exactly which crusades the general public is and isn't willing to morally get behind first. You only make the patent lawyers look more credible to Joe Schmoe the normal person programmer when you put them across from someone who got his leg up by straight copying code or to Joe Public the normal person voter when you put them across from someone who rejects copyright on the novel they all dream they'll write someday outright. Especially when they're the same person. RMS is fun but he's made zero sizable impact in forty years on the proprietary giant he wanted to slay because he refuses to read the wider democratic room, and so will we if we keep hammering this square peg into that round hole.

>>34615 I am so offended that you act like RMS has not made an impact Without him it's clear that Free and Open Source software would be in a far worse place. His work on emacs and GNU is more than most people do in their life time.

>>34615 the public doesn't know the difference between copyright and patents and doesn't really get any of it the public is concerned with appearing professional but if they get a benefit for skirting the law or social norms they're completely fine with it stallman didn't make a larger difference not because they weren't milquetoast enough but because they spent a decade failing to make a kernel & operating system, subsequently failed to provide substantially higher quality software, documentation, and teaching materials than corporations, and failed to gain mind-share and momentum by only having philosophical and ethical arguments and not crystal clear practical arguments all they had was "extremism" which was really just saying things people didn't like hearing, not actually extreme