njwi332

Well, your point somewhat stands but there are many examples of retail, contracting and consulting companies in excess of a billion dollars.

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The OP wasn't about doordash though, it was about uber (poster mentions the ride-sharing part of the business in a comment elsewhere). I don't believe DD is lying about 100% of tips going to drivers, particularly given Tony Xu also publicly denied this behaviour was happening at DD on his twitter

Great idea. Any pointers for someone who might do the same? I.e. data sources you deemed useful besides Wikipedia

Japans death rate is ~11, not 14.

But regardless, no, there is nowhere near as much violent death here in Japan. It is one of the safest countries in the world. The high death rate is due to the aging population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan

Business visas are fine, I've had 5 people join my team from the US in the last few months. The June thing is for tourists, which are still not allowed in.

It's great as long as you work for a US tech company. The selection is pretty limited though. As far as companies with 'US adjacent salary bands'* you've got Amazon, Google, Indeed and now Doordash/Wolt (disclosure, I lead the eng org for DD/W in Tokyo). Also Stripe, I guess.

There are a number of Tier 2 companies which are pretty foreigner friendly but don't have the same level of pay - Rakuten, Line, etc. So if you're willing to compromise a little then there are a lot more options.

*By US adjacent, I don't mean literally as high as in the US, but maybe within 70-90% of a similar role in the states.

I'm pretty sure he was talking about the person at the root of this thread, with the name 'matthewdgreen'

you can live five minutes away by train and enjoy tree-lined streets and cozy bistros with a bit of outdoor seating instead

Do you refer to Daikanyama here? Easily my favourite neighbourhood of Tokyo (so much so that I just bought an apartment to move there in two weeks!)

Yeah, I'm currently going through the process of getting a mortgage for a property in Tokyo. I'm also interviewing about a potential job - nothing unusual there, moving around every 2-4 years is common in the software industry.

I was told in no uncertain terms by my real estate agent "Do not move company until your loan is approved. You're already impacted by the fact you work for a foreign company, and you will probably get declined if you start somewhere new."

The fact that I'd likely be looking at a substantial raise and therefore be in a better position to pay off any mortgage is irrelevant, the bank just cares about stability.

(I'm sure you already understand this, this story is for the benefit of other curious thread-readers)

Even if you don't like Scott Adams (And I don't particularly like the guy myself), I don't think that should invalidate the specific statement that the article quotes, which should be able to stand on its own regardless of the background of the person saying it.

See also: ad hominem, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/character-attack/

Minor correction, it's 就職活動 (shuushoku katsudou) not seishoku. And the age of starting families here is older than you mention at close to 30 [1], especially in recent years. That's not to say it doesn't happen, just that Japanese couples don't, on average, get married much younger than in the west.

You're right about paying people differently based on life circumstances - but this generally happens in the form of substantial tax cuts for couples with a non/part time working wife (e.g. [2]), rather than by paying them more (although there are some government benefits like a child allowance).

Mostly nitpicking here! Appreciate your contributions to this thread, you're right on the money for the most part

[1] https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00759/ [2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-JRTB-17152

They exist - I work for Indeed and there's a 4 day week option that started being offered last year in response to covid and has now become an official policy. The problem is that companies that do it don't tend to advertise it I guess.

I completely agree with you. How do you prevent this happening? I've relocated from a team where I used to be a software engineer on the team (and therefore had a peer-level understanding of the systems) to one in a different company where I'm starting from day 1 as a manager. How do you maintain/build that localized domain knowledge? It doesn't feel like it's solvable by doing a week of coding now and again.

He's not comparing drones to drones, he's comparing drones to say, an F22 or ICBM.

He alludes to an example in the article

none of us are safe - not the random grad student with a Twitter account making fun of bad science

From that I assumed that the sort of people being referred to are those who are debunking or criticising work by already established scientists. I'm speculating here but I would guess it hurts their chances because those who do the hiring don't want to risk taking on someone who might criticise their science in future.

As a counterpoint to the sibling replies, I speak fluent Japanese and was still refused entry to a local izakaya in Hakodate. It wasn't about the language, I made plenty clear that I could speak it well. They just didn't like foreigners. Racism and discrimination is definitely a thing here, and I certainly wouldn't go back to that restaurant.

However it's only happened once in a year of living here and never in Tokyo, only a ruralish city, so I don't take it as an indictment on Japanese people. I'm sure there are plenty of bars in rural America or Australia (where I'm from) that would have been equally unfriendly to someone of Asian ethnicity. At the end of the day you just have to decide not to let it ruin your day that there are some bad eggs in the bunch, no matter which country it is.

*Caveat though that I've heard it is much worse here for people from China than it is for white foreigners such as myself. If it made up a significant portion of my experience it would be hard to live here comfortably.

AWS started because they already had the servers for holiday surge capacity.

That's a myth. Source - worked at AWS for four years, but also common sense. If you rent out all your surge capacity to customers then what happens when the holiday season comes? You kick all your customers off and shut down their business for a while? Not a business model for happy customers and not what happened in real life.

Start with why is garbage. Just watch the TED talk - the main idea there is fine, but there's absolutely nothing extra in the book that isn't covered in the TED talk, it's just a cash grab

Fun fact, 'one sided fight' is often nicknamed/referred to as 'Bite' these days [1]

[1] https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/185815973623/does-r-d-...

Another one I've seen recently is the reaction to covid. I live in Tokyo, and being in tech circles was doing my prep shopping and isolating a few weeks before everyone else. I had one Japanese friend invite me out for drinks like 3 times in a week, I turned her down saying I was isolating due to covid and got a 'wow you're so strict!' reaction. Not two weeks later and the government declares a state of emergency. Suddenly this same friend, and all her friends, are filling Instagram with 'Stay home' stories and virtual workouts. Granted, not everyone in Tokyo took it seriously, but the change in behaviour within the majority of my personal circle was literally overnight.

For another one - bubble tea. A year or so back it went from not popular at all to lines over an hour long outside most bubble tea places, and the word 'tapiru' from tapioca and suru - roughly 'to bubble tea' was one of Japans hot phrases for the year [1]

[1] https://japantoday.com/category/national/nominees-for-japan%...

I'll back that up with data from Tokyo. My girlfriend is a nurse at a hospital in Kita-Senjuu and they also haven't got any covid patients in the hospital. She thinks it's because they have a large maternity ward so they're trying to keep covid patients away from infants, but the point still stands that if covid was truly overwhelming Japan and Tokyo then they wouldn't have a choice about it.

A monolingual dictionary gives 7 definitions. https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8...

I think the one that best applies here is 4 - 技術や製品などが、その登場から十分な時間が経ち、すでに問題点が出尽くし、解決も済んでいる。最先端のものではないが、不測の事態が発生しにくく、安定して動作することを意味する。

This definition is roughly "Enough time has passed since a technology, product, etc, debuted that its flaws are well known, and development has settled. It means it is not cutting edge, unexpected situations (usages) rarely occur/are difficult to create, and the usage is well understood/stabilised."

I tend to see much richer and more precise definitions from a Japanese-Japanese dictionary than from Jisho.

guilt trip employees into learning in their free time

If you went to university, not only did you learn in your free time but you _paid_ to learn in your free time.

Why should the calculus suddenly flip when you get a job and all of a sudden you should only have to learn when someone is paying for you to do it?

FWIW I highly value your posts about life in Japan! I've been studying the language two years now and intend to move there, and the Japan posts in your comment history have given me a lens into life there that I cannot find elsewhere.

So thanks :)

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I think his point is that it was already well known by 2017 and didn't have to struggle to distinguish itself in the current market, because it had built momentum and interest.

I can't offer any direct comparison with Iceland, but the software scene in Australia has been improving rapidly the last couple of years - particularly with US visa laws making it worse for immigrants wanting to move there.

To offer some data for Sydney, Google has of course been around a while, Google Maps is based out of Australia. Atlassian is hiring as much as ever. Amazon has been growing at a rapid clip here in Sydney (I wish I could disclose numbers publicly!) and we have offices in Melbourne and Brisbane, and Microsoft is in the process of opening a dev centre in Sydney right now as well. Still a long ways to go but it's much better than even a few years ago.

This isn't actually correct, or at least it's not a correct interpretation of the data. The absolute number increased, but it decreased as a percentage of population, which is the relevant number here.

Notably, the cost of doing so was over 50 million. So it's perhaps not realistic for majority of companies using AWS that are much smaller than Dropbox.

The article specifically mentions Chasing the Scream in the second half. I do recommend finishing it.