Software Developers in China? My experiences in Japan.

[GaryM]

If all goes according to plan I will be moving to work in China within a few months.

I am particularly interested in the quality of local staff, work dynamics, and levels of expertise. Just for comparison, here are some of my experiences working in Japan. I observed practices in a number of companies and also ran my own teams over a 10 year period.

Generally software development teams I came across in Japan were strongly hierarchical. On computer games for example, there would be one lead programmer and approximately 7 or 8 "junior" programmers. The role of the lead programmer was to "integrate" the work produced by the junior programmers. Very little cross communication occured between programmers, only up and down the hierarchy.

When I worked outside of the games industry and ran my own team, I found out that I had to tell one guy, what the guy who sat next to him was doing (despite the fact that they were best friends). A significant role as manager entailed my acting as a conduit for communication between programmers. On other occasions I found that one or two developers working for me would be quite reluctant to tell me what they were doing. As a Western developer this was qute bizzare, where constant discussion is common (both laterally and vertically) and empire building is strongly frowned upon.

I found many of the Japanese developers to have graduated from technical colleges rather than science graduates from good universities who went into software development. The average quality of programmers was quite low, with the approach closer to that of an artisan rather than an engineer. On the positive side, the good programmers were incredibly knowledgeable about the smallest details of their chosen area of specialization (almost to an obsessive degree).

Generally speaking, software development was risk averse, rather than creative. If no one had done it that way before, then that would be a reason for not doing it, irrespective of whether or not it was a good idea. This even from the games industry, which you would have thought might be towards the more creative end of computer programming.

A number of my Japanese colleagues (themselves software developers) were quite self-critical, saying "Yeah... Japanese people are not very good at software development". This is an over-simplification. I think that the group dynamics of software development are better suited to innovative software development in the West, but if you wanted to optimize performance on a given platform, I would have thought that a group of good Japanese developers would excel.

It surprised me at just how significant cultural dimensions effect what one would have thought to be an engineering domain, based on objective analysis and established best practices. At least in engineering, the stereotype of the Japanese as incremental improvers rather than innovators appeared to hold true. Note that this is not true of the game designers and directors. I met a number of them who were strongly anti-conformist and highly creative.

Does anyone on these forums have comparable experiences in China?

[T-revor]

Interesting topic. I'm a software developer in the U.S. and have managed and have been managed by other software developers in South America, Malaysia, Thailand and India. I see where you are coming from but have no specific experience with Chinese developers.

It sounds like the traits of your Japanese developers may be shared by Indians as well:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/50884/how-do-programmers-in-the-east-see-programmers-in-the-west

Speaking of Indian developers, the author says, "Most people get into IT for money, not because they like coding, or have an inclination towards computing."

In the states, it's just the opposite. The best coders are the ones who LOVE it and most people are developers because they love the problem-solving creativity that it offers.

If you don't get much traction on this topic here, I'd suggest Programmers Stack Exchange. Good luck with all your endeavors!

[GaryM]

Interesting link, I particularly like the comment from the Pakistani guy; "The guys from the US are honest and like honesty." Yeah....

That reminds me, one for my first jobs managing a team in Japan involved me having to tell the most senior Japanese developer that he could not develop his own computer game in work time. He was quite angry when I confronted him. Even then, it only stopped when I rearranged the desks so that I could see what was on his screen at all times.

Despite me asking the developers to tell me when they had completed the task allocated to them, I had to go around asking them, as none of them would volunteer this information. In the end I came to understand why the Japanese teams had such strict hierarchies. A lack of honesty may not be the right term, but definitely the teams responded best to strict monitoring and precise task management. However it was impossible to solve the horizontal communications problem other than by assuming this role personally.

I guess software development in China will be closer to the Japanese model than the Western model.