If Asians Said The Stuff White People Say

[ieoeja]

17. That was funny. But as a White guy who started his IT career in the '80s...

... I experienced a LOT of bigotry against White people by Japanese.

It was extremely common for the period. I know a company founded by three White guys who gave their company an Asian sounding name precisely for this reason. I had Japanese programmers refuse to work with me because, as a White guy, I "wouldn't be able to understand" (actual quote). Management frequently told us they were sending our jobs to Japan because the Japanese were better programmers.

Then those programmers became as expensive as American programmers. And just like that, poof, they got dumb. I think I recall some bullshit about the Japanese becoming more complacent as they started making more. So off to Korea the jobs went. Til they got expensive. Then off to Malaysia, Indonesia, Manila and China.

On the plus side, by that point they stopped even trying to bullshit about it. "We're hiring them because they're cheaper, not better."

So, sorry, Japan. Turns out you were just cheap. Not better.

And no shit. Every such transition was painful as hell training them up to our standards. Which begged the question, which I asked in a meeting once, "we go through such pains to train them up on the technology, but accounting practices haven't dramatically changed in decades, so why don't we offshore accounting instead?"

Amazing how quickly the bean counters determined that it would be impossible to offshore bean counting jobs.