札幌：好調なＩＴ産業？

Another fairly recent article in the Hokkaido Shimbun 「好調なＩＴ産業」、2008年1月9日、木曜日、北海道新聞（経済）stated that a recent annual report on the state of IT in Hokkaido (sorry, link in Japanese) that the IT business in Hokkaido is growing at a healthy pace. The number of IT employees is growing in proportion to the annual sales figures, and has been doing so since the past 6 years.

Hm...

From my vantage point, I can understand that IT as a business in Sapporo may be doing well, and there may be a great demand for software developers. I hesitate to use the term "systems engineer", but that's a rant for some other day.

However, AFAIK, things are not as good as the newspaper paints it to be.

First off, the pay scale here in Sapporo for IT has to be the lowest in the Japan. It sure seems that way, looking at my measly paycheck. Try stretching that for a family of four, when the cost of fuel and oil is rising seemingly unchecked, and the effects rippling quickly outward to the prices of groceries and household goods. You know, I had a better salary when I was simply a junior developer back in San Francisco over 8 years ago. I am certain that there are many facets to managing and keeping human resources for a Japanese company, but I still don't get why the salaries up here in the north are so pitifully low.

The aforementioned article does get one thing right, however: it is orders from the greater Tokyo metropolitan that support IT in Sapporo. I fully understood that before deciding to move up here from Tokyo, but I didn't realize that the business model of fishing for gigs in Tokyo and then developing/testing up here in Hokkaido is practically all there is to the game up here. Seriously, there is little beyond that happening up here.

Which is a bit of a shock, coming from Silicon Valley as I did. There are lots of ideas, schemes, grand plans everywhere in the Valley. Start-ups, innovations. Not so here in this little corner of Japan. I almost choked when I overheard someone expressing their desire to market a "security product" consisting of a Javascript hack to obfuscate an email address in order to prevent a bot or script from screen-scraping. Yes, a pure WTF moment. But again, this point could lead me to write some whole other rant, so I will not delve further.

I expect that IT in Sapporo could be suffering for lack of developers due to the fact that most of the good ones probably left for Tokyo. As it is, I hear that coding is now regarded as one of the ３Ｋ jobs: difficult, dirty and dangerous. Well, that may be right, but I still feel that there is some way to create an opportunity, to re-invent myself so that I can have that "lifestyle" job and continue to live in beautiful Sapporo.

Nope, don't wanna wear a suit and tie. Nope, don't wanna have to be sitting at some office desk from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. just to make some boss feel like he's getting his money's worth out of me. This lack of vision is stifling. Doesn't anyone value the artistry and creativity of software?

And no, hacking up Javascript to hide email addresses from bots is not security!