Re: [tlug] Looking for Summer Internship in Japan

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Raymond Wan writes:

 > Sure.  Maybe I'm being a bit simplistic but hopefully not too much so
 > by saying this.  Suppose you have a certain number of IT companies
 > when there are X number of people.  If the population doubles then
 > maybe the number of IT people doubles as well? 

That's way too simplistic.  The big factor in the growth of software
manpower (and womanpower) in Asia is education rates, not fertility
rates.

 > Then, are the number of IT companies such as Microsoft and Apple
 > going to double?

Depends on how you define "such as".  There's only room for ten in the
top ten, you know.  It's not obvious that Microsoft and Apple or even
Google can suck up "all" of the top talent because a lot of the top
talent is averse to having a boss, or because they've got a "thing"
they need to do first.  But few of them are going to be double-threats
like Linus, who can not only come up with great ideas and hack them
into submission, but also herd cats (FVO of "cats" that includes VC
firms -- even Linus hasn't managed that trick, he's just a very well-
paid-and-sucked-up-to employee).

 > consumers (users) doubles as well...but I don't think so.  I mean,
 > I hope I'm wrong, but I think Microsoft and Apple can supply to
 > more customers fine without having further competitors out there!

I don't just hope, I *think* you're wrong.  I know a half-dozen
programmers who have retired early, children safely-ensconced in
$50K/year private universities and wives in $5M residences, on their
earnings from free software.  Will they ever make it into the top ten
with MSFT and IBM?  No.  But there's plenty of room for more like
them.  That's not going to help the drones, of course.

 > I think this issue has just been hidden from many of us because a lot
 > of Chinese, Indian, etc.-based companies previously wrote software
 > that didn't compete outside of their respective countries.  Now, not
 > only are their students seeking IT degrees overseas, but their
 > companies are making software that is competitive.  And seeking
 > contracts with USA, Japanese, etc. companies as vendors.

Facts are more or less correct, but I think you're missing one huge
factor: in the last 20 years it's become possible to sell software
*to* those countries (in part because of Unicode), and that helped
introduce the big companies in America and Europe to the little
programmers in Asia.  They then started to pull them back to their
home offices in the 80s and 90s, because there just weren't enough
excellent home-grown programmers to go around.  Then they started to
go home (very consciously so in the case of the Taiwanese, don't know
about the Indians, my impression is they're more likely to stay
abroad, but I don't have any stats or serious informants to back that
up).

 > I'm not in the Japanese IT industry, so yes, maybe there is
 > something inherently wrong with it.  But something similar is
 > happening elsewhere so some of the factors cannot be specific to
 > just Japan.

Well, the thing about Japan is that it has a very good education
system and a lot of incentive for the top 20% of kids to become very
perfectionist.  It's hard to understand how that would go wrong unless
there is something systematically broken.