Source: I've worked in software in Japan for 15 years; 5 at a Japanese bank and 10 as a CTO of my …

Yet, Japan had no issue building a wide range of popular console video games but had far less success in PC games. Language seems like a better explanation as US and Japan had quite different UI constraints in their native language.

I’m having a hard time squaring the circle of “consensus based design doesn’t work for software but it does work for cars.” By all accounts, here in the US, we regularly bounce software architecture decisions around a room and land on a best design based on inputs from many. Likewise, our cities and cars are founded upon (id even say drowned by) consensus based design. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the thesis here, but it seems contradictory. I do think PG has a point with an ingrained culture of quality being hugely important. I just don’t think that necessarily contributes to bad software. In fact, I’m quite certain it doesn’t, since companies like Nintendo manage to produce absolutely beautiful pieces of software regularly.

What about video games and Nintendo? There are also specific names that like Miyamoto and Sakurai that come to mind who rose up.

> there is a high penalty for making mistakes I experienced this working for the US arm of a Japanese company. To report a bug would cause the programmer to lose face, so we had to waste a lot of time going through all kinds of contortions to lead someone to the bug without calling it out. We wrote a lot of "feature requests" that were really bug reports.

Most Japanese didn't historically own desktop computers due to the average Japanese home not having enough square feet to easily accommodate them, which is why they adopted smartphones ten years earlier than every other country except Finland. If they had had a couple more decades to play with computers before software took off as a big industry, maybe the culture would have shifted somewhat.

Well, maybe they might have been slower to innovate in software, but I think a middle way between their conservatism and the free-wheeling ways of Silicon valley would have served the industry well. Imagine if software engineering was approached in The Toyota Way[1]. As it is now, software engineering us not respected as real engineering because we neglect to apply general engineering principles. We throw away battle-tested solutions and learnings very few years in favor of shiny brittle toys, in the name of "disruption". I guess the only thing that would change things is something I call some kind of consistent regulation. Too much gate-keeping like in traditional engineering or medical fields can stifle innovation. However, software used by a certain minimum number of users, and software used in certain fields like medicine, transport, finance, need to be subjected by regulatory agenci…

How is it that Japanese manufacturing practices made such a deep impact on the Agile software development movement in the West (The New New Product Development Game, Kaizen, Kanban, reduce muda, shu-ha-ri, etc. etc.), yet failed to improve work practices at home?

Being culturally Japanese didn't prevent Japanese companies from achieving dominant positions in electronics, automobile manufacturing, video games, shipbuilding, steel production... Why is software so special? I would argue that the kind of risk aversion that holds back software companies is just as evident in most of Europe as it is in Japan. It is also the norm in a bunch of American companies in the tech industry, especially the older ones. And China, which is also often brought up as a society where individuality is not valued in business (due to "Confucianism" and similar tropes), is not held back by similar risk aversion and has a massive software industry that can compete internationally.