"Far better to do it at a startup (or at AppAmaGooBookSoft) than at a traditionally-managed Japanese company"<p>From what I've seen at least Google and Amazon don't have much engineering effort beyond localization in Japan. I'm curious to know if any of these guys are hiring for Software Engineering or SRE type roles (in Japan).
“My agreement with my employers mostly forecloses personal side projects”<p>Understandable that he doesn’t have time, but the agreement sounds a little unfair.
Also from same author, on the emergence of AWS EC2 and S3:<p><a href="https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194921&cid=15971343" rel="nofollow">https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=194921&cid=15971343</a><p>"... not going to set the world on fire."<p>But see (also on front page currently):<p><a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-com-announces-fourth-quarter-210100782.html" rel="nofollow">https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-com-announces-fourth-q...</a><p>It seems like AWS is doing quite well.