Why I Will Never See Eye to Eye with a Former IT Salesperson Turned Commentator

Another Claim That Japanese Engineers Have No Value

For the first time in a while, I was browsing YouTube’s recommendations when a video by an IT commentator appeared.

He used to work in sales at a major IT company. I have never particularly enjoyed his commentary, and this time he was once again making his familiar argument:

“Japanese engineers have no value.”

“The work done by systems integrators is meaningless.”

“Japan only uses American technology anyway, so it does not need engineers of its own.”

Here we go again, I thought.

I have spent many years in the Japanese IT industry, so I know painfully well that the systems integration business has plenty of problems: layers of subcontractors, incomprehensible Excel documents, workplaces where coordination skills are valued more highly than technical ability, and enormous projects where the number of meetings keeps growing even though nobody seems to know what is being built.

There is no shortage of material to criticize.

But jumping from those problems to “Japanese engineers have no value” is another matter entirely.

This is not really a technical argument. I think it is a view of the IT industry from the sales side.

Saying We Do Not Need Conventional Forces Because We Have Nuclear Weapons

“Japanese companies merely use American cloud services, SaaS products, and platforms. Therefore, they do not need their own engineers.”

Whenever I hear this argument, it sounds like someone saying that a country no longer needs an army or navy because nuclear weapons exist.

We have AWS. We have Microsoft products, Google services, and Salesforce.

Excellent.

But who adapts them to a company’s actual operations?

Who connects them to its existing systems? How will authentication work? Who will migrate the data? When something fails, who will isolate the cause? How will the system meet security requirements? What happens when performance is inadequate? If the design of an overseas SaaS product conflicts with the way a Japanese company operates, which side should change, and how?

If buying a product instantly produced a complete system, IT engineering would be the easiest job in the world.

In reality, that is when the work begins.

Buying fighter jets does not eliminate the need for an air force. In the same way, buying an excellent IT product does not eliminate the need for engineers.

The more sophisticated the tool, the more you need people who understand it and know how to use it properly.

The Curious Claim That Technical People Do Not Understand Business

This kind of argument often comes with another familiar set of claims:

“Japanese engineers care too much about technology.”

“Technical people cannot generate revenue.”

“Technology that does not sell is worthless.”

“They need to think more about business.”

From a sales perspective, that makes perfect sense. Will it generate revenue? Can we win the contract? Will it count toward this quarter’s numbers?

Those questions matter. A company is not a research club. Without revenue, it cannot pay salaries.

But extending that logic into a universal principle for the entire IT industry produces a strange contradiction.

The giant American technology companies cited as success stories are themselves some of the world’s largest collections of technology obsessives.

Google, Microsoft, and Amazon did not reach their current positions through sales ability alone.

Search engines, distributed systems, cloud computing, databases, compilers, operating systems, AI, semiconductors, and networks—these companies invested extraordinary amounts of money and talent over many years in technologies that an ordinary business might dismiss by asking, “How much are you going to spend on that?”

As a result, they gained control of major platforms, which later became enormous businesses.

People say, “Do not obsess over technology,” while presenting American companies that were extraordinarily obsessed with technology as their examples of success.

There is a fascinating contradiction in that.

From Sales, Engineers Can Look Like a Cost

This is probably why that commentator and I will never see eye to eye.

When you view IT from sales, the product appears to be at the center.

You sell AWS. You sell SaaS. You sell licenses. You win contracts.

In that world, engineers can easily look like a cost required to install the product that was sold.

From the engineering floor, however, the picture is reversed.

The product is a component.

AWS, SaaS, APIs, and AI are ultimately just materials. Engineering is the work of combining them and turning them into a system that actually runs a customer’s business.

From a sales perspective, a project may reach a natural milestone when the product has been introduced.

For an engineer, that is when the real work begins.

An exception not mentioned in the specification appears. A legacy system returns bizarre data. A failure occurs only in production. An external API that worked yesterday suddenly changes. The security team adds another requirement. Then somebody asks, “Can you fix it by tomorrow?”

None of this is likely to appear in the Excel sales report.

“Japanese Engineers Are Hopeless” Is a Convenient Business

It is also easy to understand why these extreme arguments keep appearing in YouTube videos and books.

“Japanese IT has both strengths and weaknesses” does not make a compelling video.

“Japanese engineers are finished” is far more powerful.

Create anxiety, and you can place a product behind it.

“You are in danger if you continue like this.”

“This is what you will need in the future.”

“Increase your market value.”

“Think globally.”

From there, the discussion leads neatly to consulting, courses, books, and career services.

It is the old business model of saying, “You are all doing it wrong. I will show you the right path.”

This scolding style seems particularly popular with certain older audiences.

But after many years in system development, I do not know what to do with the claim that engineers have no value.

Even today, someone is writing code, repairing infrastructure, protecting a database, responding to an outage, or forcing two enormous services built by different companies to work together.

If that work disappeared, the systems that allow commentators to broadcast their opinions on YouTube would stop working too.

Of course, everyone has freedom of expression. I also have the freedom not to listen.

I selected “Not interested” on YouTube, so I doubt I will see his videos again.