Well, I liked they used MonkeyUser comics. I feel those guys "get it." Sort of like a more tech-relevant Dilbert (without the racist screeds).
I was a software engineer for a long time, and a "first line" manager, for a long time.
Most of the points are correct, but some did not apply, in my company.
For one thing, I worked for a Japanese corporation, and clean code was a really big deal to them. I had a project canceled, once; partly because the code wasn't up to snuff.
If you work for a Japanese company, get used to meetings. They absolutely love meetings. Especially in-person meetings (rack up those frequent flyer miles!).
That said, I really enjoyed the job. It taught me to write Quality code (which means absolutely nothing, for most tech companies), and they treated me and my team with respect. That's not something that you'll get, in most modern tech companies, and it meant a lot to us all.
It's an artifact of their consensus-based decision-making process (they have lots of process).
Meetings are a crucial part of obtaining and expressing consensus.
It can get pretty crazy, but they get things done.
Whenever we look at the way that another culture does stuff (not just other nations -other companies, as well), we tend to look at it through the lens of "That's not something I could do!". We need to remember that their culture is acclimated to doing things the way they do it; for better or for worse. They actually can have a difficult time, adjusting to the way we do things in the US.
We had a liaison that wanted to help things be more "agile," so our infrastructure/process guy suggested daily morning standups (you know, informal, 15-minute meetings in the morning).
He turned that into once-a-week 1-hour sit-down meetings before lunch on Fridays, with a rigorous format.
Consensus-seeking reduces variance. This is the approach to take when failure is expensive. Blindly applying this approach leads to design by committee and wasted productivity.
I will say that the Quality of the stuff this company made was staggering. Not a huge money-maker, though. Their process had levels of overhead that would have most folks on this site, huddled under their standing desks, whimpering.
I was a software engineer for a long time, and a "first line" manager, for a long time.
Most of the points are correct, but some did not apply, in my company.
For one thing, I worked for a Japanese corporation, and clean code was a really big deal to them. I had a project canceled, once; partly because the code wasn't up to snuff.
If you work for a Japanese company, get used to meetings. They absolutely love meetings. Especially in-person meetings (rack up those frequent flyer miles!).
That said, I really enjoyed the job. It taught me to write Quality code (which means absolutely nothing, for most tech companies), and they treated me and my team with respect. That's not something that you'll get, in most modern tech companies, and it meant a lot to us all.