James's Weblog

Wow. It’s been two months since I left Sony.

(For anyone unaware, I had spent the past three years working at Sony Electronics in San José as a developer technical support engineer for their CLIÉ handheld line of PDAs. My duty was to answer—rather, to try to answer—programming questions from third-party software developers.)

Some people probably are still wondering exactly why I left a well-paying job and—for lack of a better term—pulled a Karen, especially in today’s harsh U.S. job market.

I don’t think I can express fully my three years of frustration there, but here’s a sampling:

I joined Sony because I wanted to avoid the fledgling, volatile, ultimately-doomed dot-coms. I wanted to work at a large, stable, proven company. (If you know me, you probably know that I don’t like change; I’m an ardent supporter of the status quo. Slow and steady wins the race.)

Although I spent three years hating my job, I don’t regret working at Sony. My job had its share of good moments, it was overall an interesting experience, and indeed Sony was large, stable, and proven. My main problem was that I had underestimated the morass of corporate bureaucracy.

1. Sony is a world-wide corporate giant but at its heart is still Japanese. Any decision worth making is made in Tokyo. Most of the hardware and software is designed and developed there. The rest of the world often gets table scraps: uninteresting, unimportant projects. Busy-work. The best moments of my job were during the slow periods where I was free to work on my own stuff. The worst moments were when I was working on someone else’s useless project that never got to see the light of day. Through it all, I didn’t have the responsibility nor the access to information and tools to do my job properly.

Meanwhile, the designers and engineers in Tokyo did their own thing without listening to anyone else. To its credit, this strategy had worked for Sony in the past, where Sony created new markets not by listening to what people wanted but by telling people what they’re supposed to want. This is fine for revolutionary products, but for the past couple of years most of the CLIÉ handheld models have been only evolutionary, and for those cases it’s just stupid not to listen to your customers.

Watching a company throw away perfectly good opportunities is just sad. I didn’t like where the product line was headed, and I hated how Sony focused its efforts on useless new endeavors instead of fixing existing problems.

2. Huge corporate bureaucracies have long corporate ladders. People can’t wait to climb them. Corporate ladders conveniently orient climbers so that the faces of the people below are aimed at the asses of the people above. At Sony, people’s lips seemed to like the taste of ass so much that it’s no wonder the cafeteria got away with serving such lousy food. Naturally, in my three years there, I didn’t go anywhere.

3. Huge corporations have huge teams of lawyers. When I joined, I signed a typical contract that gave away my claims to any work-related software that I would write or envision. Fair enough. But what happens when I have an idea and Sony doesn’t want it?

I designed a software library that I thought would be useful to third-party software developers. I proposed the project to some of the higher-ups in Japan (after all, we can’t make decisions on our own). They thought it was interesting but decided not to pursue it. I decided to pursue it on my own outside of work, but I wanted to do the Right Thing and first make sure everything was legally square. After all, who wants to be sued by a huge team of lawyers?

I talked to one of the intellectual property lawyers from the local San José office about assigning ownership back to me. I got the run-around for a few months. The lawyer from the local office didn’t have the authority to waive ownership, so he had to talk to another lawyer in San Diego. The lawyer in San Diego didn’t have that authority either, but he didn’t want to bother his superiors over such a little, insignificant project. Everyone got annoyed at me for trying to channel this through the legal system. People told me, “You know, you just should have done it on your own without telling anyone.” Sigh.

The lesson I took away from all of this was independent thought at Sony is fruitless. The heads in Japan don’t listen to anyone. You can’t get ahead without being a bootlicker. Any ideas you devise are at risk of being thrown away, forgotten about, wasted; Sony owns them all anyway, and it has no infrastructure for you to do anything about it. Why bother thinking at all?

I couldn’t take it anymore.