>> ...so all the departments are trying to beat each other and hence 
>> working aginst each other, rather than working together towards a 
>> common goal?
> 
> Not only that, but seemingly horizontal communication to different 
> departments is actively discouraged in Japanese culture - so you end up 
> having to go up several layers of management and then back down another 
> part of the tree to get an answer.  And it's not as if managers are 
> really that interested in (or have time for) the discussion of detail 
> design.  So as you can imagine, each department is quite isolated.

That is utterly clustered. o_O

> The customer will have at least asked for some minimum set of 
> parameters, like brightness, contrast etc.  So the major design 
> decisions are based on this.  Usually however they will ask for much 
> more detail, often running into hundreds of pages with references to 
> thousands more pages in other documents.

Heh, yeah. The spec for our project DB system was "we need a project DB 
system". So some kid who's not even a company employee went and sat in a 
darkened room and came up with some VB thing that he thought was pretty 
cool.

4 years later, we're still using it. WTF?

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