Working at a Japanese Company (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Working at a Japanese Company (2015)

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92 pointsdamian200031 comments

The working culture is the thing I hate the most about Japan. I've read the history. I'm interested in the culture. I've spent time learning the language. I consume lots of Japanese media. I've visited for a short time. However, I just don't think I could ever make the dive into living in Japan unless I was working remotely for an American company (and getting paid like an American) and somehow still maintained a visa to be in Japan.

Same, although I'm keeping open the possibility of an internal transfer within my current company. I figure a Japanese office of an American multinational won't be as bad, right? Right??

It depends on the company. Some "foreign" companies closely follow the structure and culture of their HQ (Goldman Sachs, Google). Some are essentially Japanese companies that happen to be owned by a foreign entity and share their brand (e.g. Yahoo Japan years ago -- now Yahoo isn't even the major shareholder). Some are in between (e.g. IBM Japan).

Also, nowadays salaries at foreign companies tend to be more in line with the market.

I've been living in Japan for a decade and I've always wanted to work for a foreign company. But I never managed to get an offer from Google, Amazon, etc. One year ago I interviewed for a senior developer position at a certain American company, went thru 4 rounds and finally got an offer... of around 60k USD.

Working in IT in Japan is a bit of a joke in general.

It is about 2-4x LESS than what you would get pretty much anywhere else in the world. They have long overtimes and in many places quite a conservative attitude toward decision making i.e. not fun. And the startup culture is really poor.

Beats me why anyone would want to work for a Japanese company anyway, since the situations described in this article have been common knowledge for decades now. I did the contractor/English teacher thing in the deluded hope for a full-time, more rewarding position. But it will never happen (ESPECIALLY if you're an English teacher, which ranks somewhere below toilet cleaner on the Japanese social scale). Eventually I got tired of the full-time position offer which always seemed to get postponed another 3 months, quit, and got the hell out of there.

Beats me why anyone would want to work for a Japanese company anyway... I did

So why did you? Given that the situations in the article have been common knowledge for decades?

While there are many companies in Japan where people do work a ton of overtime, there are also companies where people work little to no overtime. For instance, I'm currently doing consulting for a Japanese start up where most people leave around the official clock out time, and I've been one of the last to leave an hour after it.

Software developers in Japan have traditionally been undervalued, as it has been seen as a job as anyone can do with a little training. This has meant while there have been some really great Japanese software developers, there have been many more totally incompetent ones, bringing down the average level of software developers here.

In recent years though, there's been a mini-boom of startups here. These startups realise the value of talented developers, and are trying to attract them through hirer salary and better working conditions. While the pay isn't as good as the US (the weak yen makes them look even lower) and the working conditions aren't as good as Europe, things are defiantly heading in the right direction.

If you are someone who's been wanting to work as a developer in Japan, I've put together some resources here: http://www.tokyodev.com/jobs/

Very similar to patio11's writeup. Note the same caveats apply, more or less: this is working at a big Japanese company, which is far from all of them.

Link to patio11's post? I'm curious..

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/

Warning: it's very long.

Thanks!

patio11's one is way better written though.

FWIW: I'd describe it as "traditionally managed" rather than "big." There exist many Japanese companies with, say, 50 employees. Some of them are managed like young American software companies. Many are not.

This is not merely anecdata: the most obvious external evidence of traditional Japanese management is work hours by professional staff and that metric is inversely correlated with size of business when you average it across all firms in the country. Firms with 100 workers work longer days than salarymen at megacorps (again: on average). This is one reason they're seen as rather less desirable to work for.

I agree with this. Big companies in Japan do tend to be more established, and thus more likely to be "traditionally managed," so it's tempting to generalize to all big companies.

As one of the anecdata at a company of around 70 people, almost everyone is on flex time, aside from specific departments like customer support. There is no pressure to work overtime, though many end up doing so in order to meet specific deadlines. In addition, everyone freely uses vacation and sick time. In fact, I have previously been told that I should use more of my vacation days.

Edit: I should note that there are only a handful of people here who would meet the description of a typical salaryman.

> Working with a Japanese company may seem like a good fit if you speak Japanese, but with the vastly contrasting work cultures and the fact you’re a foreigner in a Japanese world–you might want take a look at other options.

If you honestly think you speak and understand Japanese, but you don't understand or are not already better and more completely aware of what is being discussed in this article - then you don't actually speak or understand Japanese as well as you think you do (or as well as the many 'nihongo ha jouzu desune!' acclamations might have led you to believe.)

Japanese is a language. If you can communicate using it with a native speaker with minimal difficulty and confusion, then you can speak and understand the language.

Somehow related

"Tell me what the software engineering industry is like in Japan"

https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/3q03wk/tell_me_what_...

How do you date someone in Japan if you're always working?

Ever wonder why Japan has a very low birthrate? I'm sure these things must be connected to some degree.

To some extent. There are many factors though: (a) children often live with parents to a higher age, (b) Japanese are quite conservative about sex in general, (c) there are plenty of alternative options for guys in the cities.

> (b) Japanese are quite conservative about sex in general,

Your other two points may be factors to some extent, but this point does not match up with my own experience, and I'm wondering how on earth you might have got this impression.

Well, there's multiple answers to this that I am aware of, and probably more that I am not, but:

Scenario A, working as a Salaryman at a Large Company:

While you spend most of your time working, it's still not all of it - there is occasional free time, and anyone that is willing to date a salaryman will be aware of the demands imposed on you by your career.

Additional, if you have not manager to find yourself a serious prospect or wife by the time you are nearing the end of your 20s, it is your bosses responsibility to play matchmaker. This isn't an arranged marriage, but there some pressures to settle down, and culturally it would be seen as a failing of your boss for you to make it well into your 30s unmarried.

Scenario B, not working as a Salaryman at a large company: Your work schedule is much more similar to that of what we see in the Western world. There are jobs available that are going to be a more typical 40-50 hours a week, even in professional fields - not everyone has to go work for a megacorp.

And, on the other side of things, sometimes you don't. Marriage and birth rates are dropping. More and more young men and women do not date at all - even those that are not working obscene hours. Many NEET (Not Employed, in Education, or Training) and 引き籠もり (extreme shut-ins, usually an overlap with the NEET) are not dating either. And while there is still more sexism in Japan than many other first world countries, women are finally being allowed more in the way of career progression, and many are choosing to ignore marriage, etc, and instead focusing on being successful. There are entire industries devoted to replacing the need for relationships - host and hostess clubs, where you pay exorbitant amounts of money to just talk with people of the opposite sex as if they were a romantic partner (with no actual sexual activity), 'cuddle bars', video games that encourage you to go on date-like activities with a virtual SO in the game (yes, literally taking your girlfriend on your 3DS out to eat), etc etc etc.

Dating is a problem in Japan, and not just because of extreme work hours.

My experience as a salaryman was pretty much Scenario A. I dated a bit during those years; the modal date was probably "I'll meet you at 3 PM on Saturday at the train station, we'll do a late lunch, movie, dinner, and some karaoke. This will be the only time we see each other this week."

Repeat for virtually the entire relationship. (It took me a few years of maturity and a little bit of post-salaryman-clarity-of-hindsight to realize that I was probably as emotionally distant as I was physically not present, which was something I would not have agreed with if you had told me it at the time.)

This is not wholly dissimilar to the traditional expectations for amount of time a Japanese husband is expected to be able to devote to his wife and children during regular working weeks. (I'm reporting, not endorsing.)

Just curious—is this the same at every company in Japan? Or is this just an anecdote? Or somewhere in-between?

Reading about the Toyota Way, and the cultural focus at that company, I find it difficult to believe that Toyota would just let this go unseen in the midst of 'continuous improvement' and 'respect for people' in other parts of their operation...

Japan is a big country with a diversity of people and companies in it. This post accurately captures the traditional expectation for work culture among a segment of the economy, which is largely professional full-time male employees of an elite fraternity of Japanese megacorps and their corresponding governmental counterparts. Many Japanese firms are not members of the elite fraternity of megacorps; many people resident in Japan are not professional Japanese men who are full employees (正社員) at their company. Salarymen peaked at about 30% of the labor force and have been declining; if I had to hazard a guess in 2015 it would be in the 20~25% range, but it depends a bit on how you define the edge cases.

I'm socially constrained from talking about Toyota in much detail. Can I talk about Google, instead? Ridiculously profitable company with teams of tens of thousands of geniuses running around busy inventing self-driving cars and being basically shadow-infrastructure for literally the entire world. Would you assume Google is not a total clusterflop? I would assume Google is not a total clusterflop. But then I e.g. talk to people who tried to interview there, and my confidence is shaken.

So Toyota. Yeah. Great company full of very dedicated people. Their cars are fantastic.

> But then I e.g. talk to people who tried to interview there, and my confidence is shaken.

Yeah, interviewing in the tech industry is a big problem. The basic problem with embarrassing interviews, I think, is that they're done by people whose job is not to interview. They're just a side thing for engineers. Which means that a) there's a good chance they're just not any good at it, but have to do it anyway, and b) there's no structural incentive to do it well or prepare thoroughly (quite the opposite: there's an incentive to instead spend time you would've spent on interview preparation on your main job, since you do get evaluated there).

So just because a Google engineer performed very poorly as an interviewer, doesn't necessarily mean that they're a bad engineer. They just may be very bad at interviewing.

Also, people are a heck of a lot more likely to talk about an interviewer that did terribly than one that did perfectly fine, and this is especially true for Google since it'd be at odds with their reputation, so there's probably a selection bias at work.

Agreed, I tend to assume most companies beyond any complex size (100? 200? a few hundred) are, in fact, almost completely dysfunctional, operating only on the chance ad-hoc ties of culture and individual stewardship that have had a chance to avoid being crushed by incredible complexity and traditional ineptitude of managing people at scale.

However, Toyota originated lean. Something's not wrong about that.

Why socially constrained?

Mr. McKenzie lived in Gifu for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifu_City#Industry Gifu is about half the size of San Francisco, and presumably the members of various trades in that city are just as much a small town as various trades are in San Franciso. Someone as gregarious as Mr. McKenzie certainly did not spend his time there flying solo. These are things Mr. McKenzie has said publicly, and they provide plenty of material with which to make a high-quality guess as to why Mr. McKenzie might be socially constrained and why he might prefer not to answer that question directly.

I was particularly unaware of the context. Thank you.

I worked at a particular BigCo in Nagoya. You know how Silicon Valley is a small town where everyone knows everyone? Nagoya is a much smaller town. I would prefer employees at BigCo in Nagoya continue to remember me as "fine chap, despite the obvious issue" and not as "that #^#{%^ing American backstabber", partly because there may yet come a day when the Ministry of Justice calls around for a character reference and partly because I'm modestly invested in the values system of BigCo despite having left it.

The only thing that could mitigate long working hours for a payslip is creative freedom. Though that's probably impossible even outside of Japan.

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