CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
While establishing  a "cause & effect" here seems very hard, from my personal experience working in software field in Japan, I think the winning concept here is actually the <i>combination</i> of removing middleman and paying good salaries.<p>Japan is very very behind in IT/digitalization compared to most western countries. This doesn't just mean it's behind in product portfolio and quality, but that perception of software engineer & managers and still quite behind. The respect that a lot of software engineers enjoys in US/EU is not quite there yet in Japan(and salary often reflect this).<p>The C-suite usually doesn't have a firm understanding of software/IT world, and instead ends-up hiring a lot of "Scrum-experts/Agile coaches" and hires software engineers from consultancy or recruitment companies for cheap.  There's ofc companies that doesn't fall in this category, but for middle-sized companies in Japan (which is the bulk of the economy), this is the true state of things. Middle-men in Japan have therefore been way more encroaching on this, and they have the incentive to <i>not</i> improve the respect/social standing the software engineers have.<p>"Removing managers" in this article does not mean the same thing as it would in US/EU, conditions are different.