One area I’m interested in is how people find jobs. The “traditional” way to find a job of sending out your resume to lots of companies and hoping for the best is clearly broken. Despite this, people all around the world, but especially in Japan, cling to it. So I got excited when I heard about Forkwell, a service that is trying to change this

Forkwell is a aims to be the LinkedIn for geeks. Although most of the users are currently in Japan, the service has a global focus, offering it in both English and Japanese.

At the core of the system is the ability for user’s to register skills they are proficient in, such as git or ruby. The peers of the user can then indicate that he is infact proficient by +1’ing the skill. This way, users can show off their skills.

Yuka Ouka, one of the directors of Garbs, the company that built Forkwell, is also a frequent participant of Tokyo Rubyist Meetup. I interviewed Yuka last week about the service, and translated it from Japanese to English below.

How did you come up with the idea for Forkwell?

Originally, Forkwell was going to be a social recruiting service. Recently in Japan, companies looking for engineers ask their employees to recruit their friends, and if the friend is hired, the employee will get a bonus of say three hundred thousand yen. So, we thought we could do this as a social networking service.

In America, there’s a similar service called Top Prospect. With the service, you login using Facebook or LinkedIn, get a list of jobs, and if you introduce someone to one of those jobs successfully, you will a bonus. We wanted to do something similar to that in Japan.

However, Top Prospect turned out to be unpopular, and the idea of sending job introductions out of the blue didn’t seem appealing at all to the people I talked to. Instead of being so direct about it, we thought having a social networking service more like Facebook or LinkedIn, where job information could be introduced in a more casual manner would be better.

While originally we’re going to focused on facilitating employee referrals, which we are still planning on doing, we thought it was important to start off by having something that was fun for engineers to use. So that’s why we started off by releasing features like skill tags and +1 for skills.

Why did you decide to release Forkwell in both English and Japanese?

We wanted to make a global service, not something that was used just in Japan. Recently we’ve seen the release of lots of SNS services targeting geeks, like coderwall and geeklist. In Japan too, services like hat.io by Recruit have come out. Geeks don’t use LinkedIn much, because it feels like it’s just for suits, so I think everyone sees that there is an opportunity to make a LinkedIn for geeks. We want to be a part of this, and have people from all over the world use our service.

How are you planning on promoting Forkwell abroad?

Right now, Akira Matsuda [Japan’s top Rails contributor and director at Garbs] is at RailsConf, and he’s giving out stickers. We also received investment from a venture capital firm, so we’re considering hiring a company to promote it abroad.

How are you planning on monetizing Forkwell?

Companies looking for engineers will post jobs. Forkwell’s users will then be able to add a comment to the position and share it with friends. For instance, if a company posts a job looking for a Ruby on Rails engineer to help them make games, I might share a posting within Forkwell saying that I’ve worked for them before, and it’s a good company, so if you’re a Rails developer, why don’t you apply. If one of my friends then applies for the job through Forkwell, I can write a reference for him. If my friend is hired, I’ll receive the reward offered by the company, say 300,000 JPY, and garbs will get thirty percent, so in this case, 90,000 JPY.

What motivation do companies have to use Forkwell?

Recently, Japanese companies often ask recruiting agents to introduce employees. These agents collect people who are looking for a job, and will introduce those people to companies, regardless of whether or not they are actually skilled for the position. So it’s up to the companies themselves to decide whether or not a person is skilled enough. I’ve heard from companies that only about one out of a hundred people that agents introduce are skilled enough. Despite this, if the companies hire that one person, they still need to pay 30% of the first year’s salary. So the cost-performance for these agents is really bad.

We saw this problem, so we’re focusing on introducing skilled engineers. Additionally, Forkwell is a lot cheaper than these agents.

Why would an engineer use forkwell?

For talented engineers, it is important to see what kind of environment they’ll be working in. For instance, for a Rails developer, he’ll want to work at a company that is using git and the newest version of Rails, and do development in an agile fashion. But it’s hard to see what a normal company is like. If they use Forkwell, you can see that your friend, or friend of friend works at that company. If a skilled engineer is working at that company, then the company is probably a good place to work.

In Japan, it seems like engineers don’t recruit their peers so much. Why do you think this is?

I think they are apprehensive about taking on the responsibility of recruiting someone. For instance, if they recruit a friend, and then the friend quits soon after, they feel responsible for it. In Japan, there isn’t a culture of going through people when applying for jobs. In America and Europe, rather than directly sending your resume by email, you might ask your peers if they know of a good company. Once someone introduces a job, then you’ll apply for it. With this method, because the introducer is thinking about both parties, I think it is rarer for people to get hired to a position that doesn’t match their expectations, or a company to hire someone who wasn’t as skilled as they thought he was. We want to encourage this method in Japan, and thought by building Forkwell we could help make the process smoother.

Compared to before, the culture of changing jobs in Japan is changing…

Companies like Gree and Cookpad, who are making their own web services, are recruiting people who used to work as “SIers” [System Integrator - a generic title for engineers who work at a company that does outsourced projects]. Right now, its just the top engineers who are changing jobs, but starting from this year or next, I think we’ll see this trend spreading downwards. We hope that Forkwell will add momentum to this movement.

What’s been the biggest challenge for you with Forkwell?

There aren’t any services like Forkwell in Japan, and even abroad, services like this aren’t so common, so people don’t readily understand it. It has been especially challenging to explain it to people who aren’t engineers, as I need to explain how geeks think, and what kind of service appeals to them.

My first job was for a Japanese startup. The company had a stellar development team, and in a couple of months of working there I learned more about developing software than I did in my entire computer science degree.

The rest of the company was, well, it was hard to tell. You see, even though the company was only about thirty five people, we had a development team, an operations team, an operator team, a sales team, and a human resources team. Furthermore, there wasn’t much collaboration between the teams. Part of this was language issues (the development team was filled with English speakers, whereas the rest of the company was Japanese), but I also remember a manager telling me something like “it’s my job to insulate you from all the chaos outside the department so you can concentrate on coding”. At the time, I didn’t think too deeply about the implications of that statement, because I was grateful that I could do a job I liked, surrounded by other professionals I respected, and although I was a bit disappointed I didn’t get to interact more with the rest of the company, I coded on in happy oblivion.

Meanwhile, the company wasn’t doing so well. It’s telling that almost every party we had at the company was a going away party. Slowly our numbers dwindled. As the company struggled, it decided it’s new mantra would be “cut costs”. Measures like having the employees clean the toilets instead of paying for a janitor (so everyone could pitch in!) were put into place. Frequent all-hands meetings were held and we were presented with reams of financial data in incomprehensible formats. But the organization structure remained the same, and day-to-day life remained largely unchanged.

At the same time, the company decided to create a new product. I first heard about it by being asked to develop the server side component (a client application had already been developed by an outside contractor, but that’s another story). Looking at the effort create the product, plus the cost of running the service, the product didn’t make sense to me. So I came up with a spreadsheet that had a user growth model in it, and calculated the potential revenue. It appeared to me that even ignoring all the sunk costs up to that point, it would take us years to recover the additional costs we would incur in completing the development. I shared it with the president, but was shrugged off, and didn’t ever get a response to it.

Although I was never directly told “that’s not your job”, I also wasn’t encouraged to pursue my interest in the business side of things. This just frustrated me even more. Here I was wanting to make to help the company more money (or at least not loose money), and yet the only thing I was allowed to help the company with was coding, and it was clear to me lack of coding talent was not the source of the company’s problems. Soon after that, I left to start my own company.

As a startup, your top priority must be innovation, and innovation in today’s startups comes not from deep mastery of any one domain, but rather the coming together of many skill sets. By not encouraging your employees to broaden their horizons, you will fail.

While I was initially a bit aprehensive at the classroom like setting for the last Tokyo Rubyist Meetup, thanks to all the great people who attended, we were able to turn it into a lively event. Anchoring the night were presentations about Heroku and Travis CI.

First up was Ayumu Aizawa, who gave a talk about Heroku’s latest and greatest features.

For me, the most interesting part was the question and answer session (starting at about 17:20), where among other things, he described how he got hired by Heroku. Basically, it boiled down to that he just asked if Heroku needed an evangelist in Japan. This is a great lesson for developers everywhere: if there’s a job you want to do, don’t let the lack of an advertised position stop you. Conversely, the lack of other applicants will make you all the more likely to get it.

Next up was Randy Morgan, who introduced Travis CI and talked about how he got involved with the project.

As I was telling Randy later, I think Travis CI has the potential to be as revolutionary for developers as GitHub or Heroku, so check it out if you haven’t yet.

Thanks to RedHat for providing the venue, and nekop for helping to get everything set up.

One of the biggest challenges in moving from a software developer to entrepreneur has been changing my perception of the value of software. As a developer, the underlying assumption was the more functionality software had, the more valuable it was. This proposition was comforting, as it meant the value I was creating was directly proportional to my effort creating it. Unfortunately, it was categorically wrong.

Instead of being intrinsically valuable, the value of the software to customers dictates the value. If we were to express it as an equation, we could do so with the following:

software value = value to a customer × the number of customers

By looking at value in this way, when we have a goal for the value of our software, we can then plot our possible routes to success. For instance, if we set the value to one million dollars then we get the following.

The most important thing to note is the scale of this graph: both axis are logarithmic, so if we increase the value of our software ten times, we need ten times less customers, and vice versa.

The Relationship Between Software Value and Difficulty

High value software is intrinsically more difficult to create than low value software, as is obtaining a large number of customers more difficult than a small number. If we construct a naïve model for difficulty, where the total difficulty is the sum of the difficulty of creating value and that of increasing the number of customers, we can add an arbitrary measurement of difficulty to our graph.

Although the value of the minima depends on the ratio of the two difficulties, it lies somewhere in the center of the graph.

Implications on Funded vs Bootstraped Startups

One fundamental difference between funded and bootstrapped startups is how they approach risk. The primary goal of a funded startup is to maximize return on investment. In exchange for this, they can take large risks, and don’t need to see immediate returns. However, bootsrapped startups need to focus on minimizing risk over maximizing return, and should see a return on investment as soon as possible.

Following from this, a bootstraped startup should focus on striking a balance between customers and value. This is exactly the advice we’ve heard time and again from the likes of 37signals, one of the most successful bootstraped software startups.

Your value proposition is at the core of your startup. By being aware of it, and the implications of it, you can dramatically increase your chances of success.

Eric Ries defines a minimum viable product as

that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort

As a developer, it is tempting to start by building a working protype with a minimal features. However, this is rarely the right way to go, as the first step is to validate the concept of the startup. If you try to do this with the prototype, prospective users will give you feedback aimed at improving the product, rather than the concept itself. For instance, it doesn’t matter if a feature is missing or there is a bug, if you are building something no one actually wants.

37Signals says you should ignore details early on and work from large to small. This same advice is applicable to an MVP. Much like they argue against using Photoshop for doing mockups, because it makes it too tempting to add too much details, but rather advocate doing simple line drawings, your first MVP shouldn’t actually work. Instead you should start by creating a landing page that describes how the product works and a signup button. Then you can direct traffic to it using AdWords, and see if anyone actually clicks through. This forces you to spell out your value proposition, and gives you impartial feedback.

Validating your value proposition is a hard thing to do. As a developer it’s easy to ignore that a product needs to be sufficiently valuable to be successful. If you’re building something for the fun of it, it’s fine to skip this validation, but if you are trying to build a startup, it needs to be at the top of your list.

Tonight I had a chance to talk with one of my personal heroes, Eric Ries. While talking to him, I realized one of the pitfalls of the Lean Startup.

At the center of the Lean Startup is the idea of the build-measure-learn cycle: that from a hypothesis, you can build something, measure the results, from them validate your hypothesis, and then iterate again. As a software developer, the idea of turning a startup into a scientific experiment is very seductive.

The allure of the idea is that it turns something that is hard for us to understand (people) in to something that is easy for us to understand (numbers). However, this is also the very thing that makes it so dangerous, as it gives us an excuse not to talk to customers, something that many of coming from a developer background tend to shy away from.

When I was first looking for a job in Japan, I was surprised by the lack of entry level positions. In fact, I think the job I got was the the only position recruiting a “junior developer”. After understanding how Japanese companies recruit university students, I now understand why this is the case.

Japan has a peculiar system known as 新卒一括採用(しんそついっかつさいよう) where university students are recruited on mass. Rather than being hired for any specific position, students are hired under the special banner of “new graduate”. The first three months of employment normally entail learning the company culture, after which they’ll be dispatched to specific positions.

Companies will recruit students while they are still in university. Students will normally begin the job hunt during third year, with the hope to secure a job offer by the end of academic year. If they receive a job offer, normally the only thing they need to do is ensure they graduate, which in Japan is basically guaranteed.

However, if they don’t secure employment by graduation, they enter something of a no-man’s land. They are neither “new graduates” nor “mid-career”, the two acceptable designations when job hunting. So extreme is the bias against these people that students who have not received an offer may delay their graduation or go on to graduate school simply to give them another chance.

Given this situation, it’s not surprising that I wasn’t able to find entry level positions: by in large they simply didn’t exist. So if your not Japanese, how can you land your first job here?

Come to Japan

Being in Japan is pretty much a prerequisite to getting a job here. There are many opportunities to be had here that you won’t find on any job board, and even if you do manage to find a position online, anyone who is already here will automatically be more attractive than you.

Academia

Compared with the corporate world, it seems to be relatively easy to get a research position in Japan. This is out of my area of expertise, but if you currently have a field of research you are in, you might try asking any professors in Japan in the same field if you can get a position with them.

JET Programme

This is a government run programme that brings international people to often-rural areas of Japan to encourage cultural exchange. Most positions are for teaching English, but depending on your Japanese and other skills, you might be able to land an administrative position. Most of the people I know with fluent Japanese started out on this programme, so it could be a good springboard into Japan.

Internships

As far as I’m aware, Japanese companies don’t offer internships to students after graduation. The internships that are available to students tend to be part-time office work. Even if you were eligible for such an internship, I think there are probably visa-issues that would arise from doing it. So unless you are doing an internship through some special programme offered through your university, I’d steer clear of them and instead focus on finding normal employment.

I received an email from a fellow Canadian asking me about my experience coming to Japan and finding a job as a Ruby developer. Because this might be interesting for other people, I’ll answer it in public.

How I came to Japan

During the first day of the first computer science course I took, I happened to sit next to a Japanese woman. Over the semester, we became friends, and I remember many a lunch we had together, where she would tell me about life in Japan. Because Vancouver has many immigrants, growing up I had friends who had come over with their parents, but she was my first friend who came to Canada by herself. My friendship with her was the start of my interest in Japan.

Throughout university, I made several more Japanese friends. I also found out about the Co-op Japan Program, through which I could do an internship in Japan. I thought that program sounded interesting and decided I would do it. However, after investigating it more thoroughly, I discovered I would need to delay my graduation a year for a chance to do it.

In the summer of 2005, I got a new roommate in the shared house I was living in. He had just come back from a year in Japan on the Working Holiday visa. I decided that I’d skip the Co-op Japan Program, and try going to Japan on a Working Holiday after I graduated instead.

That same summer, I also got a Japanese girlfriend. She was in Canada on a Working Holiday. We continued our relationship until she had to return in February of the following year, and then decided to continue in a long distance relationship until I went to Japan in the summer.

How I found a Job

With the Working Holiday visa, you are not allowed to have a job offer before you go to the country you are doing the holiday in. However, about a month before I went, I decided to get a feeling for the job situation in Tokyo. Most of the job postings either required a high level of Japanese or extensive software development experience, neither of which I had. Furthermore, the postings themselves all sounded generic and uninteresting. However, I found one posting that sounded different – a company called Ubit was looking for a junior developer to develop a mobile CMS using the Ruby programming language. I sent the company the following email:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am applying for the position of Junior Developer. In mid-August I am coming to Japan on the Working Holiday Visa, and while looking for potential jobs I came across ubit. Although I was not planning on applying to jobs until I arrived in Japan, I did not want to risk having the position close, as ubit appears to be my ideal company. ubit attracted me because it is a small company, with motivated and talented employees.

I have just completed my BSc in Computer Science, and am going to Japan with the hope of finding related work. Although my Working Holiday Visa is good only for a year, I am interested in continuing working in Japan by obtaining a regular working visa. I want to work in Japan because it is a very different culture from Canada, but has similar standards of living.

Last summer, I worked for [redacted], a company that develops web services such as message boards and web surveys. I improved and maintained the services using primarily php and mysql. The company took an anarchistic approach to software development, not using any software development methodology. Because of this, I felt though they made short term gains, their software quality and productivity suffered over the long term. Thus, I am excited to see that ubit emphasizes software development methodologies.

これまで３ヶ月日本語を勉強してきました。 私の日本語はまだまだ不十分ですが、英語と日本語を話す人と仕事をして、これからも勉強したいです。

Thank you,
Paul McMahon

Looking back at this email five years later, having had experience recruiting people, it does not surprise me I managed to get an interview. For a small company, the most essential thing to demonstrate is that you want to work for that company. I genuinely was excited at the prospect of working for Ubit, and I think my email conveyed that.

A month later, in August of 2006, I arrived in Japan. I moved in with my girlfriend, and soon after, had my interview at Ubit. While waiting to hear back from Ubit, I did touristy things during the day, coming home to prepare dinner for my girlfriend in the evening. Because we were sharing an apartment on the outskirts of Tokyo, our rent was quite cheap, and I didn’t feel in any hurry to get a job. However, as weeks dragged on, with no outright rejection, but no offer either, I started half-heartedly applying to other positions. I never heard anything back from the other companies, but about a month after my initial interview with Ubit, they made me an offer.

I started working at Ubit from October 2006. The company pretty much matched my expectations. In the first three months working there, I learned more about software development than I did in my entire University education. Most of all, I was glad to be surrounded by passionate software developers – people who strived to improve their craft and themselves.

In February of 2007, my Working Holiday visa came up for renewal. In Japan, the Working Holiday visa lasts up to a year, but you need to renew it after six months. As I already had a full time job, with Ubit’s support, I applied for a normal working visa. I got the visa without any issues. It’s been my experience that if you have a University degree and company willing to sponsor you, you should be able to get a working visa in Japan.

In December of 2008, I left Ubit with two of my colleagues to start mobalean. The experience I’ve had starting my own company is enough to warrant its own post, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Advice for Finding a Job

Learn Japanese

When I came to Japan, I had minimal Japanese skills. While it is possible to get a job in Japan with little to no Japanese, the greater your Japanese skills, the more options you have. If you aren’t fluent, consider spending your first year or two studying Japanese. Alternatively, the JET program is a good way to learn Japanese – many of the foreigners I know who are fluent have come to Japan through this program.

Be in Japan

The best way to find a job in Japan is to be here. Not only does it allow you to interview directly with potential companies, but also allows you to get involved in the local community. The working holiday visa program is a great option as if you get a job offer, you can start working right away.

Get Involved in the Community

You won’t find most of the best positions on job sites. By getting involved in the local community, many more options will open up. I organize Tokyo Rubyist Meetup, which is a great place for international developers to meet local ones, but there are also many other such events happening in Tokyo.

Contribute to Open Source

By contributing to Open Source, you can show not only you have development skills, but also that you have a similar ethos to your fellow developers. As a Ruby developer, your github profile is your resume.

In addition to my tips, Jason Winder has recently posted on finding a job in Japan.

Companies Hiring non-Japanese Ruby Developers

The following companies are currently advertising Ruby positions and I know they are either actively searching for international developers or are open to hiring them.

• Cookpad
• Cerego
• Pikkle
• Danny Choo

Comments?

If you’re working in Japan and have any more advice, please add it. I’d be happy to answer any questions as best I can either here or via email.

I updated my blog from my own homebrew Rails application to Octopress, a blogging framework backed by the static site generator Jekyll. I first read about Octopress a couple of weeks ago on Hacker News. Although Octopress appealed to me on a technical level, in that it matched what I was already doing, having blog posts as files on disk, what really got me excited was the design of the default theme.

The default theme has a wonderful property: it flows. If you are using a full screen browser, try making the window narrower. First, the sidebar will be repositioned to the bottom. Then, if you make it even narrower, the top navigation will collapse into a pulldown navigation menu. This technique allows the same layout to look beautiful on a range of devices, from a PC down to a smartphone. The theme alone made me want to switch my blog to Octopress.

As developers, we appreciate good design. We also tend to suck at it. When an open source project comes along with good design, it sticks out from the crowd. So if you are looking to boost your open source project, team up with a designer.

Last Friday, March 11th, there was a 9.0 earthquake in Northern Japan. Despite Tokyo being several hundred kilometers from the epicenter, it’s effects were felt even here (although to a much lesser extent than in Northern Japan). As someone who is interested in technology, over the last five days, I’ve collected the following observations about how technology as it relates to the quake.

Early Warning Systems

As in Japan earthquakes are a part of normal life, the country is designed to handle them. Beyond the buildings themselves being built to withstand quakes, there is an early warning system for earthquakes. When an earthquake is detected, there are warnings broadcast on televisions and even to mobile phones. However, although my mobile has received many warnings of earthquakes since the initial one, I never got a warning for the big one itself. Apparently the quake was detected by the early warning system and broadcast to TV, so I’m not sure why I didn’t receive one.

Communications

Soon after the quake, everyone tried to reach out to loved ones on their mobile phones. This brought down the cellular network, making it virtually impossible to get in contact via mobile until Saturday morning. As many people now only have mobile devices, long line-ups formed at payphones.

Despite the troubles of the cellular network, the Internet functioned perfectly. Knowing the news of this quake would soon reach my family in Canada, I preemptively sent them an email informing them of the quake and that I was alright. Soon after, I received a Skype call from my parents, and since then have talked daily with them by it.

Television

I don’t have a television at home, but I do in my pocket. Though I rarely use it, like many Japanese mobiles, my phone comes equipped with 1seg, which allows me to watch TV on my phone. As I walked home from the office after the quake, I saw many people watching the events unfold on their mobile device. The portable nature of a mobile phone, plus the battery, make it superior device to a normal television in an emergency.

As watching television on your phone isn’t the best viewing experience, I’ve instead turned to the Internet. The major Japanese networks are using Ustream, which was already quite popular in Japan, to stream live broadcasts. NHK World has been broadcasting in English, but although they cover press conferences live with translation, the overall focus is more of an international nature. For up to date news, I turn directly to the Japanese channels. Although my Japanese isn’t so good, the news they present is targeted at people living within Japan.

The overall demeanor of Japanese media is in line with that of the general population – cool and calm. This is in stark contrast to international media which seems overly sensationalistic.

Social Networks

For timely information, Twitter has been my number one source. As it is a real time information
source, it’s let me stay up to date with the situation of other people around Tokyo.
One specific example where it was useful was when I mentioned that gas at my apartment was out. Immediately, I received a reply that I needed to press the reset button on the meter. In yet another example of earthquake preparedness, the gas meters in Japan are designed to automatically shut off in the event of a large earthquake. By pressing the button and waiting, as long as no leak is detected, normal operation resumes. If not for making this aside comment on Twitter, I would have been without hot water and home cooked food for at least a couple days, as I would have assumed the outage was normal.

As Facebook isn’t as real time as Twitter, I haven’t found it so useful for staying up to date. It does help me communicate with friends in Japan who don’t use twitter (such as one who had the same gas issue as me – unfortunately she waited a day before posting anything and thus went much longer without it) and family and friends abroad.

Geiger Counters

Amongst the fears over the Fukushima reactor, many people have set up Geiger counters and put the output up online. Some have the counter connected directly to the computer, others are putting its display on Ustream, and others still manually updating the data. Although some have detected spikes of several times the normal levels of radiation, none have detected anything even approaching harmful levels.

I think the biggest danger from this incident is not some giant death cloud of radiation enveloping Tokyo, but rather from irradiated food or water getting into the system undetected. I hope individuals like the ones doing this already are enough to make the government and companies ensure this does not happen.

Electricity

Nuclear power and it’s safety have been discussed extensively by people far more qualified than myself to understand it, and as such leave it’s merits and risks to others. However, no matter the eventual outcome of the situation, it will have a profound effect on Japan. There are seventeen power plants around Japan, and the acceptance of them will no doubt be questioned by the communities living near them.

Japan already has an electricity shortage. Before the quake, Japan was excessively using power on stuff like neon signs, vending machines that talk to you, and pachinko parlours. However, even though this waste has been cut back, and many companies and factories have yet to resume normal operations, there are still scheduled blackouts throughout Tokyo and the surrounding areas. Dealing with this reduced capacity, especially as the crisis subsides and people want to resume their normal lives, will be perhaps Japan’s biggest challenge.