Charles Darwin once described the peculiar species that evolved in isolation on the Galápagos Islands—perfectly adapted to their closed environments but utterly defenseless against external competition. This is precisely the portrait of Japan's tech industry over the past two decades. The country can produce industrial robots with micron-level precision and Toyota cars that never break down, yet in the landscape of the digital economy, it is a barren wasteland: no Google, no Facebook, no TikTok, no WeChat, no Taobao—only a series of isolated islands built by local system integrators (SIers).
For a long time, this phenomenon of "hardware giant, software dwarf" has been attributed to the insularity of Japanese culture. But the real root lies deep within the relations of production: in Japan's software supply chain, the "user" is no longer the object of service but merely an abstract symbol in a contract clause.
Now, this metaphor is crossing the ocean to China.
Although China's consumer internet has proven its vitality globally, in the deeper, less visible "deep waters of digital transformation"—from the backend systems of large enterprises to complex industry solutions—a structural convergence is emerging. We are astonished to find that the path that once trapped Japan's software industry, characterized by "high outsourcing, low accumulation," is quietly being replicated here.
The Vanishing Ghost
In the skyscrapers of Tokyo's Otemachi, consultants in suits plan the digital future on polished PowerPoint slides; while on the other side of the city, dispatched engineers crammed into cramped cubicles stare at screens full of code. Stretching between them is a thick, hundreds-page "Requirements Specification Document."
This is a modern version of a "caste system": the upper class thinks but bears no consequences; the lower class executes but understands no business. Japan calls this model SIer (System Integration), once hailed as the pinnacle of industrial division of labor.
However, this ghost that once trapped Japan is now making a comeback in our software industry in an even more extreme form: a full regression from "project outsourcing" to "labor dispatch."
Once upon a time, companies purchased software to buy a "solution"; now, more and more orders are merely for renting "headcount." On financial statements, this is dressed up as "flexible employment" and "cost reduction and efficiency improvement," but on the engineering front, it means "the infinite dilution of responsibility."
When software development is no longer settled based on "delivered results" but billed by "person-days of work," the contract between the developer and the end-user is completely torn apart. For dispatched engineers, their client is no longer the business user who actually uses the system but the administrative manager who signs the attendance sheet.
This misalignment of incentives leads to a fundamental alienation of software functionality: the system is no longer designed to empower frontline users but to satisfy the "controllability" of administrative management.
To manage this fluid, untrustworthy group of dispatched personnel, companies must establish cumbersome approval processes and record-keeping mechanisms. Consequently, software is filled with reports designed for "reporting upward" and confirmation buttons designed for "absolving responsibility."
True user experience is drowned under the logic of administrative control. Here, there is only the consumption of work hours, no accumulation of value; only the arrogance of management, no dignity of the user.
The Tyranny of Mediocrity
Why, in a market with the world's youngest and most creative pool of engineers, do many B-end software technology stacks exhibit a strange premature aging? The answer lies not in technical capability but in transaction costs and the transfer of power.
Under the financial pressure of "cost reduction and efficiency improvement," a quiet purge is underway. Those "technocrats" who pursue excellence but are highly paid are forced to "graduate"; they are replaced by "administrative bureaucrats" skilled at controlling budgets and polishing reports.
For the administrative managers who take over control, technology is no longer a core competency but a huge, uncontrollable black box. They fear the uncertainty brought by innovation and even more the political responsibility of project failure. In their logic, outsourcing business to labor dispatch teams is not only the best financial choice but also a shrewd "risk outsourcing."
This outsourcing contract essentially becomes a firewall for accountability.
If an in-house team fails in innovation, the manager is hard-pressed to escape blame; but if a problem arises with an outsourced project, "supplier incompetence" becomes the perfect and compliant scapegoat. This mechanism of "internalizing benefits, externalizing risks" makes mediocrity the safest survival strategy within the system.
At the execution level, this risk-averse logic creates a classic "lemon market": since buyers are only willing to pay for "person-months" (time) and not for "excellence" (results), high-skilled talent is driven out, and system design is forcibly lowered to the "minimum maintainable level."
Thus, technological obsolescence is preserved as a feature—it means that even if the original team is replaced as "consumables," any cheap dispatched worker from a training camp can take over at any time.
This forms a perfect loop: administrative bureaucrats, for the sake of good financial reports and political safety, expel technical elites and introduce a fluid army of dispatched workers; to accommodate this army, technical standards are actively castrated. In the end, the company gets a mediocre but controllable machine but loses a beating heart.
The Eternal Intern
Software engineering has an often-overlooked iron law: an excellent system is the product of the co-evolution of the team, the code, and the user.
In an ideal model, engineers become increasingly familiar with users through continuous iteration, deepening their skills by filling every "pit"; the system, in this process, accumulates business-specific characteristics like tree rings. This "entanglement of people and system" is the true moat of software value.
However, the prevalent outsourcing and dispatch models brutally sever this symbiotic bond.
On project sites, personnel rotate like a revolving door. When a group of "newcomers" with no knowledge of the business history takes over a system, they see only obscure code, not the living logic behind it.
They don't know that a seemingly redundant field exists to accommodate the most critical client; they don't understand that a strange architectural design is meant to handle seasonal traffic spikes. Lacking knowledge of users and memory of history, they cannot grasp the "Why" of the system, only mechanically executing the "What."
This cognitive misalignment leads to the industry's most severe "institutional amnesia." The codebase becomes a "shit mountain" that no one dares to touch; value stops growing, leaving only meaningless accumulation.
The most brutal cost of this model is the systematic squandering of human capital.
In Japan, this has solidified the "IT civil engineering" class; in China, a similar group is rapidly expanding. Due to the lack of soil for long-term business cultivation, engineers cannot grow through the compounding of experience. They are forced to wander between different projects, repeating 1 year of experience for 10 years.
This is why we see a strange phenomenon: the system is constantly "aging," but those who maintain it are forever young.
This break in the career ladder creates a group of "eternal interns." They have no sense of belonging, no technical accumulation, and of course, no future.
When the age of 35 arrives, they are seen as "old batteries" with diminishing cost-effectiveness and are ruthlessly replaced, while the industry gradually hollows out through rounds of low-level repetition.
The Illusion of Compliance
When an organization is filled with fluid, uncommitted "eternal interns," how can managers ensure that the vast system doesn't spiral out of control?
The answer can only be replacing trust in people with cold, impersonal processes.
To manage this large "mercenary army," a survival philosophy rooted in traditional bureaucracy is transplanted into software engineering: process is more important than results; absolving responsibility is more important than excellence.
In Japanese corporate culture, as long as the process is compliant, even catastrophic failures can be forgiven. Managers know well that relying on a group of disloyal outsourced workers to pursue "excellence" is unrealistic. Therefore, the goal is downgraded to "controllability." Thus, we see a proliferation of "defensive management."
In the requirements phase, documents grow thicker and thicker, not to clarify business logic but to prevent contractual disputes—documents transform from carriers of knowledge into handover sheets of responsibility.
In the development phase, approval chains are stretched endlessly, not to control code quality but to ensure every step is documented and traceable.
This management model of "killing inspiration with process" not only creates rigid systems but also leads corporate digital transformation astray.
True digitalization should be business-oriented—empowering the front line through data flow, letting those who hear the gunfire make decisions. But under the dominance of the "illusion of compliance," we see a large amount of "pseudo-digitalization" aimed at management.
These systems are designed as electronic approval flows; the value of data is confined to reporting hierarchies. They are like "digital concrete slabs"—smooth and compliant but barren.
This model, originating from Japan, is steering digitalization in the wrong direction and is fundamentally incompatible with the AI era.
The proliferation of AI technology can greatly expand a company's service radius, pushing demand toward massive scale, real-time, and personalization. Software iteration cycles will no longer be measured in months or quarters but will evolve weekly or daily.
In this "overclocked competition," the management-oriented defensive system appears clumsy and laughable. The outsourcing model relies on lengthy contract negotiations and requirement confirmations; when requirements change weekly, every "change request" to the outsourcer is a death sentence delaying the opportunity.
The essence of AI is "removing management" and empowering individuals. Systems built by armies of outsourced workers and wrapped in layers of defensive processes are fundamentally anti-AI. They cannot carry the seed of AI, which needs flexible soil, and instead accelerate the aging of the enterprise.
The Crossroads
We face a dangerous misalignment: the current system is specialized in producing "porters," while the only scarce resource in the AI era is "gardeners."
The rise of generative AI is rewriting the rules of software engineering. Standardized, divisible, low-responsibility-density coding work will be taken over by AI at zero cost. What will truly be scarce in the future are architects and product people who can understand complex business and solve problems through "human-machine collaboration" amid uncertainty.
Unfortunately, the existing outsourcing and dispatch systems specialize in producing the former while stifling the latter. You cannot delegate innovation through an outsourcing contract, nor can you cultivate "super individuals" capable of harnessing AI on an assembly line.
This is not an irreversible cultural fate but the result of long-term selection by wrong incentive mechanisms. The hollowing out of Japan's software industry has proven that when a market only prices "headcount" and not "value," it inevitably degenerates into a Galápagos island.
China spent two decades building a highly commercialized internet path, but in the deep-water transformation of digitalization and AI, if it cannot reverse this "de-skilling" incentive mechanism, the industry will face a chronic Japanese-style degradation.
Do we continue to choose Japan's "safe mediocrity," or dare to embrace "high-risk innovation"?
Whichever we choose, undoubtedly, in the ongoing race of artificial intelligence, tickets will only be issued to companies that have "gardeners," not "porters."