FWIW here's a story about the scene, by a native Japanese.
It was more than 10 years ago when I joined Fujitsu's 3G cellular network project as a subcontractor. It was a huge complex project and I believe was one of the first 3G networks deployed in the world. So I expected I would work with teams of descent engineers.
Except most of them were not.
The subproject had dozens of 'engineers', but many of them had just finished vocational schools that didn't teach them even programming in C. To make it worse, the existing code base was the exemplar of bad code, e.g. each function had more than 3000 lines, function names were a letter and some digits and we had to consult some other documents to find out what they were expected to do, etc as well as more architectural design problems. In fact there I was able to find every horror story about software development.
Why did such a mess happen? One of the reasons was that the contractor company (who then outsourced some senior positions to subcontractors like me) were paid by the headcount of engineers it offered to the project. No kidding. So, in order to maximize the profit, the contractor made up a legion of those incapables who were paid less. Expectedly that made things worse, and Fujitsu thought it needed more engineers to solve the problems. Vicious circle.
I had tried to make the situation better, but the root cause was not in the technical side and I had no clue. The only nice thing for me was that during the personal research to improve the project I got to know Erlang, which was of course never ever used in the project because of the similar reasons mentioned in the article.
It was more than 10 years ago when I joined Fujitsu's 3G cellular network project as a subcontractor. It was a huge complex project and I believe was one of the first 3G networks deployed in the world. So I expected I would work with teams of descent engineers.
Except most of them were not.
The subproject had dozens of 'engineers', but many of them had just finished vocational schools that didn't teach them even programming in C. To make it worse, the existing code base was the exemplar of bad code, e.g. each function had more than 3000 lines, function names were a letter and some digits and we had to consult some other documents to find out what they were expected to do, etc as well as more architectural design problems. In fact there I was able to find every horror story about software development.
Why did such a mess happen? One of the reasons was that the contractor company (who then outsourced some senior positions to subcontractors like me) were paid by the headcount of engineers it offered to the project. No kidding. So, in order to maximize the profit, the contractor made up a legion of those incapables who were paid less. Expectedly that made things worse, and Fujitsu thought it needed more engineers to solve the problems. Vicious circle.
I had tried to make the situation better, but the root cause was not in the technical side and I had no clue. The only nice thing for me was that during the personal research to improve the project I got to know Erlang, which was of course never ever used in the project because of the similar reasons mentioned in the article.