The true reason for Japan’s critical developer shortage

It's a great time to be a programmer in Japan. Everyone is hiring and there simply is not enough talent available.

But why is that?

The truth is that until about 10 years ago, programming was considered kind of a blue-collar, low-skill job. It was OK to start your career as a programmer, but if you had not moved into management by the time you were 30, clearly you weren't that bright.

The startup boom has changed that, and developer salaries (and respect) has improved significantly.

But the education system has not caught up, and far too few people know how to code.

Today we sit down with Masa Kato, founder of Progate, and discuss how Japan got herself into this situation, and what Progate is doing to fix it. The problems run deeper than expected.

It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.


Show Notes

Why Japanese elementary students are learning Javascript
The problem with computer science in Japan
Why Japanese universities resist change - even when they know they need it
The flaw in most online programming courses
Can online education ever really be global?
Why B2B edTech companies have trouble in B2B markets
How English skills are holding back Japanese startups


Links from the Founder

Everything you wanted to know about Progate
Friend Masa on Facebook
Follow him on Twitter @cmasad43

Leave a comment
Transcript
Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs.

I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me.

You know, I spend a lot of time talking with startup founders in Japan. I also spend a fair amount of time talking with policymakers and academics, and even executives of large companies who want to support startups in Japan.

Two of the most concerns I hear revolve around the lack of qualified developers in Japan and how the Japanese education system doesn’t really prepare students for a world that demands that they innovate.

Well, today, we’ll be tackling both of these issues head-on. In a few minutes, I’d like you to meet Masa Kato, the CEO of Progate. Progate is an online platform that is teaching young people to code, and yeah, yeah, there are a lot of startups doing that, but these guys are onto something.

As Masa will explain, he actually started Progate when he was majoring in computer science at the University of Tokyo, and he didn’t start Progate as a side project, he started it because even though he was majoring in computer science, he wasn’t learning how to program in his computer science classes.

Now, all of this will make much more sense when Masa explains it to you, but this foundation might be why Progate has seen so much success so quickly. Progate is now being used in high schools and elementary schools all over Japan, and they have expanded into overseas markets as well, but things didn’t work out exactly as they plan and they had to change their business model to survive.

But you know, Masa tells that story much better than I can. So, let’s get right to the interview.

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Interview
Tim: So, I’m sitting here with Masa Kato who wants to teach the world to code. So, thanks for sitting down with me.

Masa: Thanks for having me.

Tim: Masa, you are the founder and CEO of Progate. I explained it a bit in the introduction, but why don’t you tell us a bit about what Progate is?

Masa: So, basically, we are a company that teaches programming and we teach it online. The content we teach is mainly web-related, so it’s about teaching people how to make websites, make web services.

Tim: So, HTML, CSS, this kind of –

Masa: JavaScript and Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and all that, yeah, and we started this company five years ago.

Tim: Okay, so is Progate, is it an app, is it a video?

Masa: So, we do have an app as well, but we started off as a web service, and instead of using videos,