Why Japan is so bad at software

Being a software engineer in a Japanese corporation sounds like a form of torture. Sounds like 11 hour days of pretending to write documentation, because you can’t actually build anything without multiple layers of approval and QA

So in other words, it's because of fear of failure.

I went to Japan and their news and shows television graphics is like they were filmed from the early 2000's cameras. 😅😅

Pokemon is just extreme greed and laziness as 90%of sales are from merch and cards. They put the lowest budget to the real games because thsy can.

Like the old thing goes: “Japan has been stuck in the 90s since the 80s.” I envy them.

Death before dishonor strikes again

This sounds like Japanese companies are treating IT as an expense and not a revenue generator. This was very common in the US a little bit ago too. But it’s changed drastically.

Japanese internet looking like its stuck in time is a result of a different cultural factor. While Western minds prefer minimalism when it comes to site layouts, people in Japan prefer maximalism.

Sometimes Japan sounds like a medieval country that modernized

Dang thats such a strange thing

I think the culture of them having more emphasis on outward appearance as oppose to inwards values plays a role too. Example they tend of disregard people with work fatigue as they can still look healthy and function so more over time is fine and people with mental condtions as if they can like walk then they're fine.

The eShop makes so much sense now

It’s really the culture of software development not fitting into a culture that values doing things right. I don’t know when things changed in software. When I first started learning in the 80s they were actively teaching us not to do what is standard practice today. Anyway, I just got away from the whole scene for a long time because I had other things I wanted to do. Then when I wanted to go back to school in 2006, I had to learn how to even use a computer from scratch because I hadn’t touched one all those years. The first thing I noticed was nobody seemed to understand things. You could have people who understood their exact role on a specific project but it was very hard to get simple explanations about a lot of things. Anyway, I was out of things for so long I couldn’t begin to guess when things changed, but it just seems like people were overwhelmed with everything going on and it was too taxing on them to try to keep up.

Oh hey! The Germans and Italians can't do software either! The Axis are just bad at coding!

As a Pokemon fan, I can assure you the reason why Pokemon looks like that is because Game Freak (dev of Pokemon) doesn't even try, not because of any reasons you say. Like, you don't even need to find other devs, look at the just recently released game Beast of Reincarnation, which is made by GF themselves. This game clearly showed that they COULD do more than the baseline, but they WOULDN'T. Also, using PoGo as one of the evidence is not really correct, because GF always ask 3rd party studios to develop spin-off, they only do the main games themselves (which is, regrettably, because most of, if not all, spin-off are actually very good and might be consider better than the main games).

This just makes me that much more amazed at Tears of the Kingdom’s programmers, it seems like a MIRACLE that they got that game to work as well as they did!

I actually prefer them to stick to the older designs.

The median age in Japan is 50. On top of that, Japan is a society that idolizes seniority whereas western companies have a habit of kicking old software engineers to the curb. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. It’s not a surprise they can still excel at technologies they did back in the 80s and 90s but are struggling in the Information Age. Europe suffers the exact same problem. Instead of a seniority idolizing culture, regulations make it harder for companies there to reconfigure themselves to meet technological challenges. They’re still fine for now, but year after year, Europe and Japan become even more technologically subservient to the US and China.

Also there's no real pressure from local consumers to push for software improvement. Many Japanese have "if it's not broken don't fix it" attitude.

In other words, because pushing out software updates, patches and security fixes are essentially admissions of failure, Japan would rather avoid building products that require such updates or fixes. Not surprising coming from a country that still refuses to acknowledge some of the atrocities they committed during WWII.