This article is from WeChat official account:Xiaozhi’s Internet Observation (ID: hear_and_tell) span>, author: Tang Xiaozhi, head picture from: “Escape is shameful but useful” stills
Let’s chase a hot spot today, but this article will not analyze too much about the protagonist of programmers in “Escape is shameful but useful”, but from this perspective to observe the status quo of the Japanese IT industry .
Gakki will not marry a code farmer, but Moriyama can do it
Yesterday (May 19) was probably the “most painful day in life” for many male compatriots, just like Gao Yuanyuan married back then time. Who would have thought that after losing the mulberry elm harvested by the East, Liya Tong finally left Chen Gou, whom everyone wanted to kill with a knife in their hands, and had to sigh the mystery of life.
I remember that many years ago, someone asked Yui Aragaki what kind of male he wanted to partner with. I didn’t know her answer, but she made it clear-IT guys, don’t. It’s no wonder that when “Escape is Shameful but Useful” was released, some people ridiculed that it was an obscene drama of code farmers.
I haven’t seen many Japanese dramas. The only ones may be midnight, so I can only communicate with my brothers, but cannot Amway with the girls. But “Escape is shameful but useful” is a Japanese drama suitable for all ages. Even like the midnight stage, the audience is mostly male. After all, even my former colleague from the fat house is also called wife Gakki.
But as a person who has been in the developer community for many years, I personally feel that the hero Ping Kuang in the play does not look like a typical programmer, although his appearance in the play is very typical.
Ping Kuang in the play is 35 years old. First of all, this age is very delicate. It is on the cusp of a storm in China. I didn’t expect it to be the same in Japan. The 35-year-old has been laid off… In this way, it seems more typical? But don’t worry, let’s analyze why he is an atypical programmer.
Dispatch member VS regular member
When a lot of people first watch the drama, they like to substituting into the domestic environment, but in fact, the IT environment of each country is very different.
When I was at InfoQ before, I wanted to write a manuscript introducing China, the United States, Japan, India and Europe, the IT environment and the status quo of programmers in these countries/regions. But later, because of the huge amount of work, I finally chose to give up. I only spent time investigating some relevant industry information in Japan in the early stage.
In Japan, there are generally two types of programmers, one is dispatching a member, and the other is a regular member. After being laid off in the play, Ping Kuang decided to find a job in order to support Gakki’s wife. At that time, a key word in his search interface was “employees”
The dispatch of staff is somewhat similar to a domestic outsourcing company. You are hired by a talent dispatch company. The place where you work is determined by the project. Sometimes you may be dispatched to foreign companies in Japan such as Oracle and IBM, and sometimes you may be dispatched to Japan. Some enterprises can be large or small.
A regular member, as the name implies, is a formal programmer. This kind of work is usually done directly with the company. Most of the time, it is the company’s own project, but it is also possible to do some companies to take over. Outsourcing projects.
The difference between the two is actually the same as that of domestic outsourcing employees.The difference between different types of employees is similar, mainly in terms of salary and benefits. But the difference is that the scale of Japanese dispatched members is quite large, and many domestic friends who go to work in Japan are basically dispatched members.
So from this point of view, Ping Kuang can obtain the status of a full-time member of the staff, and can also afford a full-time housewife like Gakki. The financial conditions are actually quite good. You may also think that the high salary of programmers is not typical, but in fact, In Japan, it is not just programmers who have high salaries. The social status of programmers may not be as high as you think.
Software development that looks like a manufacturing industry
It is said that a professor at MIT made a metaphor. This metaphor is also the reason why I want to write a draft of the current status of the IT development industry in the five major areas of China, the United States, Japan, India and Europe. He said this:
In Europe, Software as a science(Software is Science)
In the United States, Software as a business(software as a business)< /span>
In India, Software as a service(Software as a Service)
In Japan, Software as a production(software is manufacturing)
These few keywords vividly explain the different attitudes towards software development in each country/region:
Europe treats software development as a science, and many people who study computer science are there, evenA lot of scientific research itself requires very strong computer capabilities, such as the famous European Nuclear Research Center.
The United States regards software development as a business. In the famous Silicon Valley garage culture, countless technology companies with staggering market value have been born.
India treats software development as a service, but it is very SaaS… In fact, this is the direct reason why India’s outsourcing is famous all over the world.
And Japan…their software development industry actually looks very much like manufacturing. The root cause is actually very simple. It can be said that Japan was originally the representative of the country based on industry. For example, when you mention well-known Japanese companies, you can think of many: Sony, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Fujitsu… But these companies are not or difficult to call technology companies.
So from the perspective of popularity, the companies that naturally attract labor to join in Japan are companies that favor manufacturing, unlike China and the United States that have many world-renowned technology companies. This explains why programmers are relatively high-level jobs in China and the United States, but not in Japan.
The current level of economic development in Japan determines that even the aunts who clean the lobby of the hotel may not get too low a salary. The salary of programmers will not widen the gap with other industries, not to mention that software development is also prone to hair loss. This man’s heart is always painful.
So from this point of view, not only Ping Kuang is not a typical programmer, but it is difficult for the entire Japanese IT industry to have a typical programmer that is generally recognized in China. The following resume shows that although Ping Kuang is not a typical programmer, he is at least a very good developer: system engineer, regular employee, application intelligence technician/basic intelligence technician (These two are the national IT exams in Japan, you can understand them as professional qualification certificates, the threshold is still quite high).
Everyone knows that the Japanese are very rigorous. Most of the time, this is a commendatory term. For example, manufacturing requires rigorousness, because problems that are not rigorous may not be trivial. But in the software development industry, rigor sometimes represents rigidity.
The process of software development in Japan is very stylized, which is similar to the manufacturing industry. The specific manifestation is that the software development process is embedded and interlocked one by one. If the previous link is not done well, the next one cannot be killed. This software development model is actually what we call waterfall development in the conventional sense. But the problem is that it’s 2021, and sometimes it is difficult for agile development to cope with the rapidly changing market environment. You are still grinding the “craftsmanship” of the movement, which is really a bit behind the times.
That’s why some people say that Japan has missed the mobile Internet. After all, your carefully polished app, as soon as it goes online, you find that it has fallen behind others by several positions.
For example, in the past two years, 7-Eleven made a mobile payment function called 7Pay. This mobile payment function, which 7-Eleven has high hopes for, should have become the representative of the Japanese government’s promotion of cashless payment. It was stolen and stolen only 4 days after it was online. It could only reduce the service, and even severely thwarted Japanese society’s acceptance of mobile payment. Security trust.
The logic of this feature being stolen can be called inferior: 7Pay’s system uses the mailbox as the account, and you only need to use “birthday” to retrieve the password, but the birthday option can be left blank. The default is January 1, 2019. When retrieving the password, if you fill in the wrong, there is no limit on the number of times, and the retrieved password can be received by a separate mailbox, so the path is like this:
Just take your email, use January 1, 2019 as your birthday, and choose to retrieve your password. Because there are always people who don’t change their birthday, you can change the password, and this account will belong to you.
Someone asked during the press conference later:
“Why doesn’t 7pay have secondary verification?”
The president of 7-Eleven replied: “What is secondary verification?”
Of course, it makes sense that the criminals who invaded this feature were from China. After all, if China’s software development industry is benchmarking against Japan, it is indeed a dimensionality reduction blow.
Isn’t Japanese IT able to get it right?
Since a long time ago, Chinese companies have been particularly willing to accept Japanese outsourcing projects, because Japanese programmers have already written the code in great detail. When you take it over, you can simply modify it and you can run it. On the other hand, Japanese companies’ requirements for software systems are far less stringent than Chinese companies.Get a little better.
Bless Gakki, after all, I’ve already had a wife.
This article is from WeChat official account:Xiaozhi’s Internet Observation (ID: hear_and_tell) span>, Author: Tang Xiaozhi