Reminds me of when my past employer sent me to Japan to debug a firmware issue for a potential customer. Every day for a week I had to spend two hours talking to their engineers talking about my debug decision tree for debug work for the rest of the day. And that was with an English/Japanese translator to help communicate. Most people adapt their debug strategy as they collect more data but they wanted it all planned out ahead. A very different way of doing it.

The bug was very specific to their use case and they wouldn't help us replicate it in our labs so I never figured it out until a year later helping another customer. It was a bug in counter wraparound handling.

I have been working as an IT guy in Japan for almost two years now, and that's pretty much my experience. Everything has to be explained in ridiculous amount of detail and hanko-stamped by 20 bosses before you can start doing anything.

Which is quite ridiculous when your work strategy needs to change as you collect more data, as you said.

I'm learning to just do my job without telling them anything, and later writing all the required documents.

So the question is how do these companies still manage to sustain competitive pressures ? I guess the answer is that once you have a moat, internal efficiency is not that big of a factor.

I work for a public research institution, so I can't tell you about private companies. My guess is that, because everybody does the same, the don't feel any pressure to improve.