After having lived and worked in Japan, this doesn't surprise me. Software engineering education is really weak there, managers who became managers because of their seniority tend to impose their own antiquated decisions and do not listen to best practices. The other problem is that status wise, it's considered lower level to be a software engineer than to be a mechanical or electrical engineer, so the smartest kids do not study computer science (this might have changed since).
This is also an interesting contrast to the (I assume higher quality) kind of work being put out by their other engineering departments- how can they make other sound engineering decisions on the rest of the car and it's manufacture, but fail at the software?
Is it something specific to software vs. traditional engineering in Japanese culture, or is it something inherent to software in general? Given the parent's complaints about workplace culture in general, shouldn't the entire car be badly designed?
I worked in new auto development at Toyota (Japan) for four years in mid 2000s, right before this happened. The unintended acceleration problem has also perplexed me, because in my experience any safety issue was always given top priority. But I did experience limited familiarity with software/firmware. Usually that was looked at as part of the component, for example the engine control module in it's physical plastic housing. Remember the production auto will have Denso (or similar) delivering that ECU to the factory as an "assembly" and hundreds or thousands of these are assembled into the car and function together. At the end of the assembly line, various tests are run on the system and vehicle, but these appear to be of the "input/output" that someone else described. So why isn't software done better?
I'd say one problem is the testing process is not robust enough for software/firmware as it is for mechanicals. The tests revolve around driving the car, and variations on driving, and have evolved over years and decades. Heavy software control is newer, and in my experience was often not fully understood. Chief Engineers tend to come from mechanical. And there are always hundreds of problems to solve and limited time, and the black-box nature of firmware makes it hard to develop tests for.
A development review meeting tends include various mechanical departments, like Drivetrain or Engine or Chassis, many times they bring physical prototypes to the meeting and the problems and proposed solutions are comprehensible. The build testing procedures subject the car/parts to various mechanical tests, and long-lead tests are performed which stress parts till breaking. It's something you develop experience with an can get your head around.
Firmware bugs are not like that -- having just gone through this with my current consumer electronics startup I experienced the black box component first hand. I remember one software based problem we reviewed at Toyota, where something happened like: when the car has been sitting for >3 hours at <50F weather, and the ignition is started when the car is at a 15 degree angle (side of road) and driven on to a flat plane within 15 seconds, the "check engine" light turns on. Even though we had no test for that, we heard about it for customer complaints came through. But the fix is to have the supplier (in this case, but could be the Toyota engineer) fix that problem, with most of the discussion centered on timing and certainty of fix. I don't remember any discussions about global variables or lines of code.
my perspective from some friends that bought a Japanese software startup and moved over there to help run it a few years ago:
promotion is based on age and length of employment. employment is essentially for life. you can't really be fired and you if you quit you may never again be hired (and i can't imagine whistle blowing would bring you any better). seniority reins supreme and unquestioned. there is a huge focus on hard work and long hours but also on loyalty and face.
contrast this to where and how you're working and think about the differences it would make. my friends were constantly frustrated that, try as they may, they could not elicit feed/push-back from anyone that worked under them. part of this is them being stupid foreigners that can't "read the air" properly, but part of that is people being extremely hesitant to touch anything that could be considered a break in seniority or disloyal. and this was a start-up. these were the f'in cowboys in comparison.
from what i gather, this system worked out pretty good with the long, patient and deliberate development cycles in hardware. when a product cycle takes ten years it might not be that bad to have people running it 'cause they've been there 10-20 years. but it doesn't work very well in software.
Exactly why I'm commenting so much on this. I always tell my team "Pay attention to detail, quality, method. Be more like the Japanese", to now see that even the Japanese (and their quality poster-boy no less) have trouble applying their quality philosophy to software. Not sure where that leaves my advice.
It doesn't change your advice. Toyota has a well-deserved reputation for quality in a lot of areas: customer service (they've been replacing frames on trucks for a few years at no cost to the consumer), construction, reliability, maintainability. That they have flaws in one area just means that they need to apply their practices to that area too.
There was an article about this (in New Yorker, I think...) a few years back, t how Japan has this strange relationship with software.
How it is a hardware-first country. Many reasons were given -- cultural, how "real men build real things", infatuation with appliances, which are seen as being "hardware" in a way, perhaps the langauge barrier i.e. existing software tools using English for menus and inputs etc.
And it is kind of interesting, looking back at a country that many in the 80's feared with surpass and leave the Western world in the dust technology-wise, we haven't seen that much software produced there. Can you think of large well known software from Japan (excluding console games). Vine Linux, SoftEther VPN, TrendMicro, anything else?
One wonders if they see Western software companies and if there is any desire to catch up or try to keep up.
Maybe anyone from Japan can provide a better perspective?
I'm not from Japan, but I work in the US for a large Japanese company. I know that they have a large software engineering team in Japan, but if it isn't hardware related they seem to have a hard time producing quality software. They seem to have realized this, and now focus on producing hardware and have started up 3 different software teams across the US to build software for said hardware.
They occasionally send some of their engineers to our offices (for 6-12 months usually) to learn about our culture. There is a clear disconnect when they send these people. They work hard, no problem with long hours, but they have a very hard time getting into the collaborative nature of our teams, and I don't think it is just the language barrier. I guess I take it for granted usually, but it made me realize how much time we spend discussing things between developers, questioning management, writing furiously on the whiteboard, arguing, trying things out, failing, trying something different, finding problems with other people's code, fixing said problems, etc. It can take a bit of thick skin to absorb such criticism and engage in this process, but I think it is crucial to good software development. Someone who just sits quietly in meetings, then waits for a task to be assigned, and works at that task until it is complete is somewhat missing the process, because sometimes it turns out the task your manager assigned doesn't make any sense, or can't be done with this framework, or that you would have to use 100 global variables to accomplish the task this way.
I am merely speculating but it's possible that a very rigid social and management hierarchy where it is more important to work hard and respect your position in the company than to solve the problem the right way if it involves bucking authority, could negatively impact the ability of developers to innovate and/or produce a quality product.
That's certainly not a shining example of software quality. I also don't think it's fair to generalize about software quality for an entire country based on 1 or 2 examples.
I would say games are probably where Japan has most excelled in software, at least in the 80s and 90s. But the code is probably very bad practice by modern standards (hand coded assembly hacks, all game state in global variables). When you only have a few KB of RAM/ROM there is a lot less scope to mess up (although I have come across bugs in cartridge games myself).
The console frameworks and API's are all produced in an SDK that other developers use .. so its just as valid an example of a successful Japanese software product.
> it's considered lower level to be a software engineer than to be a mechanical or electrical engineer, so the smartest kids do not study computer science (this might have changed since).
Which is very interesting, because in US it is completely opposite (and frankly it is not good either). Is it because US deindustrialized itself last 40 years?
It was not the opposite in the US 30 years ago, when I chose EE over CS, because EE was clearly more respected as being the more intellectually demanding. This had a lot to do with the capabilities of hardware at the time and the locus of value. IBM sold its hardware for millions. It gave away the software. The hardware was the differentiator; software was generic. EEs who could improve the expensive hardware were a lot more valuable than programmers who could improve the free software. In fact, since doubling a hardware resource such as RAM far more than doubles what you can then build with software, the hardware guys were more important than the software guys--even to the software.
As hardware limits were relaxed over the years, what you could accomplish in software, even with cheap hardware, grew so enormously that the primary value was increasingly in the software. This was such a rapid transition in the computer industry that it nearly destroyed IBM, it propelled Microsoft to power, and I ended up with a career in software.
Toyota and other Asian "hardware" vendors are in some sense where IBM was. They sell prize-winning hardware and whatever software that comes with it is essentially free. (Apple is a lot like this, which is why their hardware keeps getting better and their software--well, did I mention the hardware is thinner?)
The Toyota "platform" still can't do much in software, but it's growing exponentially. Eventually the software in a car might matter more than the (commodity?) hardware, but that's not the world in which Toyota managers were formed. They are obsessive about hardware, but software is an afterthought. It's for guys who couldn't cut it as "real engineers", as was the case in the American "computer industry" until the 1980s.
I also lived and worked in Japan. I was a strategy consultant, and I was told by some big Japanese and Korean companies (whom everyone has heard of) to emphasize my hardware background and not be seen spending too much time hanging out with the software guys if I valued my reputation.
Apple is not like that at all. Their software is excellent. My guess is that a large percentage of their customers keep buying their hardware because of iOS or OS X not because it's thinner.
Did you mean "Deindustrialization or deindustrialisation is a process of social and economic change caused by the removal or reduction of industrial capacity or activity in a country or region, especially heavy industry or manufacturing industry."
?
That doesn't sound applicable to the USA, which currently produces more goods than ever before, and more than any other nation except China.
I can state that this matched my experience though I was in the US - this was in the 90s, and in the automotive industry. I used to work at Motorola Automotive and Industrial and our team built the Computer-Aided Manufacturing systems that managed the production lines. It always felt like a tier-2 job compared to process engineering.
Given how they had the researcher effectively locked up in a hotel room with strict security measures, I'd say it's because they're terrified of corporate espionage and suchlike.
