Global Voices Online

An entry [ja] by blogger gothedistance translating and introducing passages of the New York Times article High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers climbed the rankings a few weeks ago to become a popular article [ja] at Hatena bookmarks, Japan's most popular social bookmarking service. The article describes a growing shortage of engineers in Japan resulting from so-called “rikei banare”, or “flight from science”. Young people, the article explains, are more interested nowadays with fields like finance or medicine, or creative careers like the arts, then they are with engineering. While the shortage has been recognized for decades, only recently have companies been starting to feel its consequences, with one estimate putting the shortage of engineers at almost half a million.

Blogger gothedistance generally agrees with the contents of the New York Times article. It would seem that there is a shared recognition of the situation described in the NYT article among most Hatena users (many of whom are said to be programmers and people in IT-related fields), and many comments on the entry expressed agreement and sympathy with the blogger.

Commenter mkusunok, also known as blogger Masanori Kusunoki , writes:

NYT侮り難し。書いてあること全部正しいし、ヤバ過ぎて日経には書けないよねー

The NYT is impressive. Everything that is written [in this article] is correct, and this something that is so terrible that the Nikkei [a Japanese newspaper] can't write about it.

goyoki comments:

高齢技術者の高待遇ポストが少ないのは問題だと思う。技監やフェロー、CTOなんかは普通は管理職扱いだし、例えば５０代上級プログラマなんてのは日本では半端な待遇で激務、なんてイメージしかわかない

I think the problem is that there are not many posts with good working conditions for older engineers. Engineers-in-chief, fellows and CTOs are generally handled like managers, and I can only imagine that senior programmers over age 50 would be exhausted with this level of halfway treatment.

Some went as far as to express opinions like this one, posted by elm200:

このエントリと直接関係無いけど、まだこうやって日本の記事を書いてくれる New York Times はありがたい。BBC News なんてほぼシカト状態からね。”China” の五文字を見ない日はないのに

No relation with this particular article, but I am really thankful to the New York Times for doing this kind of thing and writing this article. Because BBC mostly just ignores [this issue]. Although not a day goes by without seeing the five letters of “China”.

In his book “Economics of excess and destruction” (過剰と破壊の経済学), blogger Ikeda Nobuo earlier wrote the following about the peculiar “general contractor-style multiple sub-contractor architecture” (ゼネコン型の多重下請け構造) of Japan's IT industry:

(親会社が開発・設計を行い入札で安く請け負う企業に発注するアメリカの企業に対して)トヨタは開発段階から「デザイン・イン」などによって下請けと情報を共有する(中略)。トヨタと下請けを結びつけているのは、アメリカ的な契約でも資本関係でもなく、属人的な長期的関係である。(同書 P128)

(In contrast to American corporations, where the parent company carries out development and design and then places orders with companies contracted cheaply through bidding,) from the development stage onwards Toyota shares information with subcontractors through “Design-In”. […] This connection between Toyota and the subcontractor is neither an American-style contract, nor is it capital ties, but rather is a long-term relationship through personnel. (p. 128)

In his blog, Ikeda Nobuo argues that the root cause of the problem indicated in the New York Times article is to be found in this relationship:

この閉鎖的な産業構造は、長期雇用や企業別組合など戦後にできた制度によってつくられたもので、ある種の製造業には適していたが、オープン・プラットフォームのもとでモジュール化された技術を組み合わせるには適していない。

This insular industry structure was established as a result of the system of long-term employment and enterprise unions created after the war, and while such a system is appropriate for certain types of manufacturing industries, it is not suitable for joining together modular technologies based on open platforms.

正社員だけを過剰保護する雇用慣行のおかげでSI業者が人材派遣業になってしまったため、企業のコア部門にITのわかる人材が育たず、情報システムでイノベーションが生まれないから若者のIT離れが進む・・・という悪循環が急速に進行している。

The SI [System Integrator] industry has become a temp-services industry as a result of the employment practice of excessively protecting only full-time positions. Because of this, no personnel in core departments of the industry have been brought up to understand IT, and since there is no innovation in information systems, young people are losing interest in IT… this vicious circle is rapidly getting worse.

Drawing from an awareness of the issue in his daily live, gothedistance then identifies a structural problem of Japan's IT industry, that “the industry called SIer (System Integrater) is not characterized by IT services, but by the human resources industry.”

In an earlier entry , he explains this in the following way:

日本のITビジネスは脆弱なビジネスモデルです。最も品質を問われるべきソフトウェアにおいて派遣による偽装請負なんかがまかり通っているのは、日本だけです。70〜80年代にプログラマの絶対数が足りなくてとにかく人をかき集めて現場に派遣するようなスキームが横行したのと、時間がかかればかかるほどコストがかかり結局その分売上が立つという人月商売モデルの２つの悪因が両輪となって、今のような奇形児になりました。簡単に言うと、腐れエンジニアをかき集めて仕事を進めるスキームになり、腐れエンジニアもできるエンジニアも同じ「１人月」だということですね。

Japan's IT businesses have a fragile business model. It is only in Japan that fake contracts with temp agencies go unmentioned in the software [industry], where there should be the greatest demand for quality. The scheme in the 70s-80s, when there was a lack in the absolute number of programmers, of gathering up people and dispatching them to the scene, and the person-month trade model in which the more time you spend, the higher your profits will be, these two factors were like the wheels, leading to the deformed child that we have today. Simply put, it is a scheme of gathering rotten engineers and moving ahead with the work, where rotten engineers and capable engineers are treated as the same “person-month”.

Next, he refers to an article by Matsubara Tomo, introduced by blogger codemaniax :

ソフトウェア開発ビジネスで、成果責任を負わない派遣形態がかくも横行しているのは日本だけである。

In the software development business, it is only Japan where a structure of temp agencies has flourished in which no responsibility is bourne for actual results.

派遣ビジネスはソフトウェア開発作業を成果で請け負うのではなく、一ヵ月いくらというように、技術者の時間を売る。派遣指向のソフトウェア会社にとって最大の関心事は、人月単価と、人の稼働率であって、稼ぎが減る開発プロセスの改善や、余計な金を使う技術教育は、できればやりたくない。特に品質は、技術者だけの問題とみなされ、経営者は関心を持たない。極端な話、派遣プログラマーが自分で埋め込んだバグの摘出に時間を掛ければ、会社の実入りは増える。

Temp business do not contract software development on the basis of actual results, but rather sell the engineers' time at some rate per month. The most important concern for software companies that are oriented at temp agencies is the person-month unit and people's operation rate; if possible they want to avoid improvements of the developmental process that decrease earnings, as well as avoid technical training that makes use of surplus capital. Quality in particular is regarded as a problem of the technician alone, something about which managers do not have an interest. In the extreme case, this means that time spent picking out a bug buried by a programmer from a temp agency results in an increase in the actual profits of the company.

Elsewhere, in a thread about the NYT article on Slashdot Japan, the following two comments received a score of 5. This one :

まずは、技術職の給与を見直し、生涯賃金が一般職と同等、もしくは上に設定し一般職に振り回されない体制を作ることができれば改善できるのではないでしょうか？

To begin with, if it was possible to review the contribution of engineering work and create a system that sets lifetime earnings at the same level as that of general office work or higher, a system that is not swayed by office workers, that improve the situation, wouldn't it?

And this one :

今の政治の流れでは海外の労働者に今後ゆだねていくことになるのでしょうが、技術蓄積を行わないままでは、賃金も技術も海外に流出。と思うのですが、この想いをどうやれば現実に反映できるんだろう。

It would seem that with the current trend in politics, [work] in the future will start being entrusted to foreign workers, but if we remain as we are, without accumulating any technology, then wages and technology will flow overseas. That's what I think, but I wonder what will be done to realize this idea.

It seems that there is an irritation that this sense of crisis, which is shared among the younger generation, is not managing to have any significant influence within society.

Translated by Chris Salzberg.