为什么日本在软件方面不如其在硬件方面般出类拔萃？
Why doesn’t Japan excel in software as they did in hardware?
译文简介
日本一直有一种习俗，每年成千上万的新大学毕业生通过巨大的招聘会寻找工作。
正文翻译
Why doesn’t Japan excel in software as they did in hardware?
为什么日本在软件方面不如其在硬件方面般出类拔萃？
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, Software Developer
Ah… Finally. My time has come.
Where to begin?
In Japan software development is not held to the same standard as other engineering positions.
Japan has always had a custom where every year, new university graduates in their thousands march through giant career fairs searching for a job. This is something I call the March of the Penguins - every one of them is adorned with a new black suit with a pristine white shirt.
There the companies will take their resumes, interview them and perhaps extend an invitation to the next interview. None of these companies care about what you studied or what your passions are. They might perk up if they hear that you are from one of the top flight schools (Todai, Keio, Waseda, Tokyo Tech et al).
The whole idea here is that everything you need to know about doing your job will be taught to you.
Now I know people working at somewhat (emphasis on somewhat) internationalized companies like Mercari or Rakuten (the Japanese eBay and Amazon respectively) will tell you that this is not how tech companies hire.
The sad truth is that they do. While there are enough foreigners who will stand up to being told to hire and train clueless graduates and mold them into proper software developers in more international companies - the huge majority of software development firms don't operate like that.
Naturally, many Japanese software development firms have engineering teams of pitiful quality.
Software development is looked at as any other skill that can be picked up in a few months to a year: accounting, secretarial work, project management, business analysis etc.
They don't speak English
Naturally when you cannot read or speak English, the tools you use to develop software as well as the methods you use to develop them will be those that have managed to percolate downwards from English sources due to the magnanimity of people willing to volunteer their time to translate documentation and articles.
At any given time, the cutting edge of software development in Japan is 6 months to 7 years behind the rest of the world.
Software development is a reversed pyramid scheme
Most technology consulting firms who are awarded contracts do not actually have developers - or have only a handful at hand. They will sub-contract their work to firms down the totem pole who will in turn sub-sub-contract their work to a lesser firm.
The actual developer working on your product could be a sub-contract 5 contract levels removed from you.
Good luck managing changes in business requirements.
All this works because the people who award the contracts are as technologically illiterate as the ones proposing them. If there ever was an apropos time to use the word circlejerk this would be it.
Consumers have extremely conservative tastes
Anyone asking this question by now will have seen the absolutely antediluvian website designs that are still being employed by Japanese firms. (Behold the largest online travel agency site in Japan: www.jalan.net).
We have actually done user testing and A/B testing with non-trivial sample sizes.
Japanese websites don't look like trash because the designers wanted to do this. They look this way because the Japanese audiences like this. They like the huge and distracting flashing banners. They like the overwhelming amount of text. They like what you and I might call crass and unpolished advertising masquerading as website content.
So you can either create modern designs that will bring in international attention, but alienate domestic users, or serve your existing customers as you have been doing for decades.
That's an easy choice for many companies.
啊哈......终于，轮到我来秀了。
从哪里开始呢？
1 在日本，软件开发与其他工程职位的标准不同。
日本一直有一种习俗，每年成千上万的新大学毕业生通过巨大的招聘会寻找工作。这被我称之为“企鹅游行”——每个人都穿着一件新的黑色西装和一件质朴的白衬衫。
在那里，公司会收下他们的简历，对他们进行面试，也许会发出参加下一次面试的邀请。这些公司都不关心你学过什么，或者你的激情在哪些方面。如果他们听到你是来自顶级学校（东大、庆应、早稻田、东京理工等），他们可能会兴奋起来。
这里的整个想法是，你需要知道的关于做你的工作的一切都将被教给你。
现在，我知道在Mercari或Rakuten（分别是日本的eBay和亚马逊）等有点（强调：有点）国际化的公司工作的人将告诉你，这不是科技公司的招聘方式。
可悲的是，他们确实如此。虽然有足够多的外国人会站出来告诉你，在更多的国际公司中，雇用和培训毫无头绪的毕业生，把他们塑造成合适的软件开发人员--但绝大多数的软件开发公司并不是这样运作的。
自然，许多日本软件开发公司的工程团队的素质也很差。
软件开发被看作是可以在几个月到一年内掌握的任意其他技能：会计、秘书工作、项目管理、商业分析等等。
2 他们不会说英语
当你不能读或说英语时，你用来开发软件的工具以及你用来开发软件的方法自然是那些愿意自愿花时间翻译文件和文章的宽宏大量的人设法从英语来源渗透下来的。
在任何时候，日本的软件开发前沿都要比世界其他地方落后6个月到7年。
3 软件开发是一个反向的金字塔计划
大多数获得合同的技术咨询公司实际上并没有开发人员--或者手头只有少数几个。他们会把工作分包给图腾柱下的公司，这些公司又会把工作分包给更小的公司。
在你的产品上工作的实际开发人员可能是一个与你相差5个合同级别的分包商。
祝你在管理业务需求变化方面好运。
之所以所有这些行得通，是因为授予合同的人和提出合同的人一样都是技术上的文盲。如果有一个合适的时间来使用"小圈子"这个词，那就是在这个时候用。
4 消费者的口味极其保守
任何问到这个问题的人现在都会看到日本公司仍在使用的绝对“前卫”的网站设计。(请看日本最大的在线旅行社网站：www.jalan.net）。
我们实际上已经用非平凡的样本量进行了用户测试和 A/B 测试。
日本的网站看起来像垃圾，并不是因为设计师想这么做。它们看起来像这样，是因为日本的受众喜欢这样。他们喜欢巨大的、令人分心的闪烁的横幅。他们喜欢铺天盖地的文字。他们喜欢你和我可能称之为伪装成网站内容的粗俗和不加修饰的广告。
因此，你要么创造出能带来国际关注的现代设计，但疏远国内用户，要么像你几十年来一直做的那样为你的现有的客户服务。
这对许多公司来说都是一个简单的选择。
Interesting answer!
Regarding Japanese consumers’ taste in websites… you wrote that Japanese consumers prefer crass/loud websites. That certainly comports with the Japanese websites I've seen, but do you think it is really those consumers’ preference, or just what they've become accustomed to?
It's confusing to me because Japanese people seem to generally have tastes that I'd describe as rather minimalist and subtle in many areas: restaurant decor, hotel rooms, parks, gardens, museums, menus, clothing…
It seems to be only in advertising and commercial sites (whether online or real-world) that Japan prefers loud and garish things. Why is that? ¯\\\\\\\\_(ツ)_/¯
有意思的答案!
关于日本消费者对网站的品味......你写道，日本消费者更喜欢粗俗/花哨的网站。这当然与我所看到的日本网站相吻合，但你认为这真的是这些消费者的偏好，还是只是他们已经习惯了的东西？
这让我很困惑，因为日本人的品味似乎一般都很简约，在许多领域都很含蓄：餐厅装饰、酒店房间、公园、花园、博物馆、菜单、服装......
Thorsten Schmidt
I think the idea that Japanese people prefer “minimalist and subtle” things is based on hearsay and myths. If you live in Japan, you will understand that people who like these things are a small niche minority, similar to how there might be a niche minority of connoisseurs of 18th century Icelandic literature in the US.
Just walk through any Japanese city, browse department stores, supermarkets, watch any Japanese TV channel, go to any Hotel etc. etc. - you will find that loud and garish things are the norm, especially compared to Western Europe.
The image of “minimal an subtle Japanese culture” is basically limited Western travel magazines or coffee table books that cater to the this mythical image of Japan but is not reality. It is a way to “sell” Japan because that’s what Western people’s escapist dream of Japan is. But nothing more.
我认为日本人喜欢"简约而微妙"的东西的想法是一种道听途说和神话。如果你生活在日本，你就会明白，喜欢这些东西的人是一个小众的少数，类似于在美国可能有一个小众的18世纪冰岛文学的鉴赏家群体。
只要走过任何一个日本城市，逛逛百货商店和超市，看任何一个日本电视频道，去任何一家酒店，等等 - - 你会发现，喧闹和花哨的东西是常态，特别是与西欧相比。
“极简微妙的日本文化”的形象基本上仅限于西方的旅游杂志或咖啡桌书籍，它们迎合了日本的这种神话般的形象，但这并不是现实。这是一种"推销"日本的方式，因为这就是西方人对日本的逃避主义梦想。但仅此而已。
>> So you can either create modern designs that will bring in international attention but alienate domestic users.
This certainly is not an either or situation. You can have both. Serve the international clients the international version of the website in English, and serve the local clients whatever they want to see. I have been visiting BBC for the past 15 years, and very rarely have I even seen the page served to British readers living in the UK. I am always served the international version. Same holds true for MSN. MSN has at least a couple of dozen versions, for UK, Australia, Pakistan, India, UAE, etc. etc. That’s the best thing about Internet. Based on the IP of the visitor, you serve them the page which would be most relevant to them.
>> 所以，你要么创造现代设计，带来国际关注，但疏远国内用户。
这当然不是非此即彼的情况。你可以两者兼得。为国际客户提供国际版的英文网站，为本地客户提供他们想看的东西。在过去的15年中，我一直在访问BBC，我甚至很少看到为居住在英国的英国读者提供的页面。我得到的总是国际版本。MSN的情况也是如此。MSN至少有几十个版本，包括英国、澳大利亚、巴基斯坦、印度、阿联酋，等等。这就是互联网最好的东西。基于访问者的IP，你为他们提供与他们最相关的页面。
Sure. But the issue is that almost all large sites are contracted out to third parties. Each version of the site will incur massive costs that will be seen as a financial burden that is nonsensical.
Nothing is an either or situation with infinite resources.
当然，但问题是，几乎所有的大型网站都被承包给了第三方。每个版本的网站都会产生大量的费用，这些费用将被视为无意义的财务负担。
在资源无限的情况下，当然没有什么是非此即彼的。
Sense or non sense of a situation depends on whether you have that many foreign clients. If a company believes that it can actually attract enough foreign customers to offset the investment, then that certainly would be a wise move. Why not make a name for yourself and your country by attracting foreign clients to your website if you truly have something to sell.
By the way, maintaining an English version of a website whose content does not change often, for example, an ecommerce website, does not cost a fortune. It’s more or loss a one time investment.
有意义或无意义，取决于你是否有那么多外国客户。如果一家公司认为它确实可以吸引足够的外国客户来抵消投资，那么这当然是一个明智之举。如果你真的有东西可卖，为什么不通过吸引外国客户到你的网站来为自己和你的国家扬名呢。
顺便说一下，维护一个内容不经常变化的网站的英文版本，例如，一个电子商务网站，并不花费巨资。这或多或少是一次性的投资。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处
It does cost a fortune here which is why it's so difficult to justify the investment to begin with.
I can actually give you somewhat decent figures being on the inside, a site like the English version of Jalan would have been quoted roughly 40–60 million USD.
No company would throw that kind of cash around for uncertain investments.
这里确实需要一大笔钱，这就是为什么一开始就很难证明投资的合理性。
实际上，我可以给你一些像样的数字，因为我是内部人士，像Jalan的英文版这样的网站会被报价大约4000万至6000万美元。
没有公司会为了不确定的投资而抛出那么多的现金。
That’s where outsourcing comes in. You will be able to find people in India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh willing to do the job for 1/20th of the price that you have quoted. Now please don’t tell me that Japanese website owners have never heard of outsourcing. Based on your responses, what I have been able to guess is that Japanese brands, other than Rakutan Kobo (they have a presence in Canada, and I have recently purchased a Kobo Forma for reading) simply lack the desire to open up their businesses to foreigners. It’s the same here in Pakistan. Even though most of the Pakistani websites are already in English, they simply refuse to ship stuff abroad. They only sell to Pakistanis and ship within Pakistani borders, absolute refusal to sell to foreigners.
这就是外包的意义所在。你可以在印度、巴基斯坦或孟加拉国找到愿意以你所报价格的1/20来完成这项工作的人。现在请不要告诉我，日本的网站所有者从未听说过外包。根据你的回答，我能够猜到的是，除了乐天工房（他们在加拿大有业务，我最近购买了一台工房Forma用于阅读）之外，日本品牌根本没有向外国人开放其业务的意愿。在巴基斯坦这里也是如此。尽管大多数巴基斯坦网站已经有了英语版本，但他们根本拒绝将东西运往国外。他们只卖给巴基斯坦人，在巴基斯坦境内发货，绝对拒绝卖给外国人。
You need to work in a large Japanese company to understand that proposing a project of jalans scale to be outsourced to India would be laughed out of the boardroom.
你需要在一家大型日本公司工作，才能明白提出将jalans这种规模的项目外包给印度，会被董事会嘲笑的。
It doesn't matter how much you try to save on software development, it is a big expensive investment to make your business (not just your website) international. I am not working at a large Japanese company, but rather a small Canadian company, and I understand why the idea of outsourcing something of this scale to India would be laughed out of a boardroom.
First, do the database, templates, system/error messages support content in other languages? Are we able to easily add and upxe that content? Who will architect it to work with our existing system? Second, who will translate or create the English content specifically for that audience each day or each week? Who will manage English communications?
I would not bet something this significant on outsourcing. I would only hire people with proven experience and solid references, and it is easier to verify these credentials with local candidates.
不管你在软件开发方面如何努力节省，要使你的业务（不仅仅是你的网站）国际化，这是一项很大的昂贵的投资。我没有在一家大型日本公司工作，而是在一家小型加拿大公司工作，我明白为什么把这种规模的东西外包给印度的想法会被会议室里的人嘲笑。
首先，数据库、模板、系统/错误信息是否支持其他语言的内容？我们是否能够轻松地添加和更新这些内容？谁来设计它以与我们现有的系统一起运行？第二，谁将每天或每周专门为这些受众翻译或创建英文内容？谁来管理英语交流？
我不会把这么重要的事情押在外包上。我只会雇用那些有成熟经验和可靠推荐信的人，而且更倾向于选择本地候选人便于核实这些证书。
1 thing is, almost Japanese websites target domestic market only. International audiences are not big enough, or not important enough, to create another version of website with different styles in English or other language.
有一点是，几乎所有的日本的网站都只针对国内市场。国际受众不够大，或者说不够重要，所以很难用英语或其他语言创建不同风格的另一个版本的网站。
I’ve noticed that the Jalan website actually is a lot easier to navigate in English when I was showing my foreign student how to book a hotel room. Although strangely enough it had less good deals on it.
My suspicion is that they probably had an overseas contractor for the English site. But who knows.
Interestingly apple’s Japanese website still looks remarkably similar to its other ones, and they’re still popular. So at the very least having a ‘clean’ webpage doesn’t put off Japanese customers.
我在给我的外国学生演示如何预订酒店房间时，注意到Jalan的网站用英文版浏览起来其实要容易得多。虽然奇怪的是，它上面提供的好交易比较少。
我的怀疑是，他们可能有一个海外承包商负责英文网站。但谁知道呢。
有趣的是，苹果的日本网站看起来仍然与它的其他版本的网站非常相似，而且它们仍然很受欢迎。因此，至少有一个 "干净"的网页并不会妨碍日本客户喜欢上它。
A fascinating comparison can be had by looking at the English translated version of Jalan too. Not only is the text in English, the entire design of the site is redone in a modern style, highlighting the exact differences between tastes.
看一下《Jalan》的英文翻译版本也可以有一个有趣的比较。不仅文字是英文的，整个网站的设计也是以现代风格重新制作的，突出了口味的确切差异。
Thank you for this insight. I haven't got a clue on behind scene of Japanese software industry. What I have been observing about poor Japanese software development so far is only on the surface.
Well, at first, Japanese prides themselves in doing something difficult that not many others can do. They seemed to enjoy the steep learning curve process. This is why Japanese UI design (including their toilet control panels), are often very confusing and inconsistent.
But then, the hardship vs reward just stop there. Elsewhere, we gave users who prefer complexity more power and customisation, and greater freedom to explore options as a reward. In Japan, not so much. It is usually just complex for the sake of complexity.
Japanese indie games for instance, are typically an awful bunch of narrated slideshows of illustrations. A game about a Ronin adventure relies more on story writing than interactivity. When your hero fights and kill an opponent, a background sound effect of sword slash plays, and your character sprites, slash an enemy's picture into half. You have to use quite a lot of your own imagination to fill in the gaps.
Contrast that with Indonesian indie game scene. A typical action games will be made in 3D platform, using unity with collision detection mesh and physics engine.
Japan is advanced nation indeed, but a lot of it are still done manually due to poor control systems (which is usually done by software). There are no e-tickets for trains in Japan, Disney don't accept e-tickets, because it is run by a Japanese licensee. Some aspects of Japanese life are just ridiculously very lagging behind others.
谢谢你的洞察力。我对日本软件业发展背后的动机没有任何头绪。到目前为止，我所观察到的有关日本软件开发的不良现象都只是表面现象。
好吧，一开始，日本人为自己能做一些别人无法做到的困难而感到自豪。他们似乎很享受陡峭的学习曲线过程。这就是为什么日本的用户界面设计（包括他们的厕所控制面板），往往非常混乱和不一致。
但是，困难与回报就止步于此。在其他地方，我们为喜欢复杂性的用户提供了更多的权力和定制，以及更大的自由探索选项作为奖励。在日本，没有那么多。它通常只是为了复杂而复杂。
例如，日本的独立游戏，通常是一堆可怕的叙述式幻灯片的插图。一个关于浪人冒险的游戏更多的是依赖故事的编写，而不是互动性。当你的英雄战斗并杀死一个对手时，会有一个背景的剑砍的声音效果，你的角色会出现，把代表着敌人的图片砍成两半。你必须使用大量自己的想象力来填补空白。
这与印度尼西亚的独立游戏场景形成鲜明对比。一个典型的动作游戏会在3D平台上制作，使用unity的碰撞检测网和物理引擎。
日本确实是一个先进的国家，但由于控制系统不完善，很多事情仍然是人工完成的（在别的地方通常是由软件完成）。在日本，火车没有电子票，迪斯尼不接受电子票，因为它是由日本的许可人经营的。日本生活的某些方面只是可笑地非常滞后于其他方面。
It’s funny, because the idea of being nearly a decade behind everyone else, and the multiple subcontractors, is very similar to how the US government operates.
I was military for 20 years, and now I’m a models & sims engineer on a gov. contract. At least in my operational domain, the gov. is about 5–10 years behind industry when it comes to best-practices and security.
When a contract is awarded, there are a variety of rules and regulations that dictate which companies get X amount of money, i.e. small, veteran-owned, minority-owned, etc. Not to mention the amount of “nepotism” that comes from ex-military personnel being hired at contracting companies.
I spent eight years in Japan, and it was funny how modern the country was in some ways, and how stuck in the past in other ways. For example, paying your mobile phone bill was done in person, so something that you could do online or at least at a kiosk in the US would take an hour or more in Japan.
这很有趣，因为落后别人近十年、以及将工程层层分给多个分包商的说法，与美国政府的运作方式非常相似。
我当了20年的兵，现在我是政府合同上的模型和模拟工程师。至少在我的业务领域，我可以说当涉及到最佳实践和安全时，政府比工业界落后5-10年。
当一个合同被授予时，有各种各样的规则和条例规定哪些公司可以获得X数额的资金，即小公司、退伍军人拥有的公司、少数族裔拥有的公司，等等。更不用说承包公司雇用退伍军人所产生的大量"裙带关系"了。
我在日本呆了八年，有趣的是，这个国家在某些方面是如此现代化，而在其他方面又是如此停留在过去。例如，支付你的手机账单是需要亲自完成的，所以在美国你可以在网上或至少在自助服务机上完成的事情，在日本需要一个小时或更长时间。
I actually like the older kind of website design myself. Modern websites are so clunky, scxt-heavy, and feel annoyingly mobile-first on a desktop. I actually appreciate this one Japanese website I use because it feels comfortable to use on a desktop computer and loads up reasonably fast even on an older machine. The Japanese preference makes sense if you don’t like all the wasted empty space, extra scrolling, slow-loading interactive scxts, and mobile-first design because you still browse the web on a PC. Call me old-fashioned, but I mostly want websites to be quick, informative and functional… not to be some bloated, vaguely usable and aesthetically pleasing entry in a web designer’s art portfolio like most of them are these days. I really hate all these dumb trends like putting a bubble around text to make it look like a text chat, rounding corners, sliding the whole page around with your mouse to scroll down, etc.
其实我自己也喜欢老式的那种网站设计。现代网站太笨重了，脚本很臃肿，在桌面上感觉很烦人，总是手机优先。我其实很欣赏你使用的这个日本网站，因为它在台式电脑上使用起来感觉很舒服，即使在老式机器上加载速度也相当快。如果你不喜欢所有浪费的空白空间、额外的滚动条、缓慢加载的互动脚本和手机优先的设计，那么日本人的偏好是有道理的，因为你仍然在PC上浏览网页。你可以说我老土，但我主要希望网站是快速的、信息丰富的和充满功能性的......而不是像现在的大多数网站一样，成为网络设计师艺术作品中一些臃肿的、低可用性的和盲目美观的条目。我真的很讨厌所有这些愚蠢的趋势，比如在文本周围放一个气泡，使它看起来像一个文本聊天，圆角，用鼠标滑动整个页面来向下滚动，等等。
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Most don’t interact with the interwebs using a computer. Most everyone here uses their smart phones and apps. I guess Japan has a lot of game development still. And a lot of apps for smart-phones. They are horrible computer users because they can’t use alpha-numeric keyboards for touch-typing.
大多数人不使用电脑与网际网络互动。这里的大多数人都使用他们的智能手机和应用程序。我想日本仍然有很多游戏开发。还有很多智能手机的应用程序。他们是糟糕的电脑用户，因为他们不能使用字母数字键盘进行触摸输入。
This agrees with everything I have seen in Japan. In 2010 I was working for a company with an office in Tokyo, and I attended a VC conference there. The Japanese VCs told us flat out “We don’t invest in software companies.”
这与我在日本看到的一切一致。2010年，我在一家在东京设有办事处的公司工作，我参加了那里的一个风险投资会议。日本的风险投资商直截了当地告诉我们："我们不投资软件公司"。
What does Web design have to do with software development? I wanted to know why Japan couldn't make Google's Android system, but after all, does it mean that the Japanese love the old, crappy web design?
Your answer is upvoted, but I am sorry that your answer seems to lack probability.
Still, I appreciate your sincerity.
网页设计与软件开发有什么关系？我想知道为什么日本做不出谷歌的安卓系统，但这跟日本人喜欢古老的、蹩脚的网页设计有什么关系吗？
你的答案得到了很多支持，但我很抱歉，你的答案似乎缺乏相关性。
不过，我还是很欣赏你的诚意。
And yet one of the best programming languages I know (Ruby) was designed by a Japanese software engineer known as Matz in the west.
然而，我所知道的最好的编程语言之一（Ruby）是由一位在西方被称为Matz的日本软件工程师设计的。