Patio11 AMA about Japan, Technology, Business and Startups

[new299]

"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]

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]

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]

“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]

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.

[aplorbust]

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]

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]

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.

[durkie]

i don't understand the point of this comment.