Patio11 AMA about Japan, Technology, Business and Startups

Patio11 AMA about Japan, Technology, Business and Startups(blog.hntokyo.io)

69 points by jason_tko 8 years ago | 20 comments

new299 8 years ago |

"Far better to do it at a startup (or at AppAmaGooBookSoft) than at a traditionally-managed Japanese company"

From what I've seen at least Google and Amazon don't have much engineering effort beyond localization in Japan. I'm curious to know if any of these guys are hiring for Software Engineering or SRE type roles (in Japan).

patio11 8 years ago | |

Yes, AppAmaGooBookSoft are hiring for software engineering and SREs in Tokyo. No, your perception that they do not have much engineering effort is not materially reflective of reality.

Google's open job reqs: https://careers.google.com/jobs#t=sq&q=j&li=20&l=false&jlo=e...

That's the public version. If you want the non-public version, take any one of several thousand people in Tokyo out for a beer.

hkmurakami 8 years ago | |

Can confirm that this is decidedly not the case for either GOOG or AMZN.

Many engineers on Google Chrome team are in Tokyo (Japan has quite a few experts in low level programming, and culturally excel at optimizing for speed).

Amazon Japan has engineers working on original products and features on their ecommerce storefront.

xevb3k 8 years ago |

“My agreement with my employers mostly forecloses personal side projects”

Understandable that he doesn’t have time, but the agreement sounds a little unfair.

patio11 8 years ago | |

I'm satisfied with the agreement, which was the result of two relatively sophisticated parties negotiating spiritedly towards a mutually acceptable outcome.

Without talking about that negotiation, note generally that if a prospective employer says "BTW we want all of your attention on the day job so our policy is $FOO" that you have many, many options for your next sentence, of which "OK then, if that is your policy." is only one.

xevb3k 8 years ago | | |

Yes, it’s understandable, particularly if side projects are not important to you at the moment. But it still reflects poorly on the company (from my standpoint).

As an aside (while it’s the de facto standard) my understanding was that it’s illegal in Japan to restrict your work outside of company time. If anyone has a good reference for this, it would be welcome.

aplorbust 8 years ago |

Also from same author, on the emergence of AWS EC2 and S3:

https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194921&cid=15971343

"... not going to set the world on fire."

But see (also on front page currently):

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-com-announces-fourth-q...

It seems like AWS is doing quite well.

dang 8 years ago | |

Come on, if someone were to cherry-pick wrongness from your history, mine, or anyone else's, it would be doozies all around. Therefore this crosses into incivility, which isn't allowed here. Not to mention it defeats good conversation, which is the point of these threads.

aidenn0 8 years ago | |

To be fair, the slashdot description of it was a grid computing service, but VMs running on EC2 are not running on a grid in the traditional sense.

aplorbust 8 years ago | | |

I understand the differences, however, the term was being used to describe EC2. In another example, I saw Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in an interview refer to "grid computing" as a synonym for EC2 when describing it to a naive audience. Indeed the AMA authors comment about "setting the world on fire" was responding to the first announcement of EC2, not a general discussion of grid computing. He chose to use that term, rightly or wrongly, because like Bezos he saw it as synonymous with EC2.

durkie 8 years ago | |

i don't understand the point of this comment.

contingencies 8 years ago | | |

I don't understand the point of the post.