The Konami exodus
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
Having newspapers write an article about it is probably one of the more effective ways of dealing with this.
1. People don't get murdered, instead they die of "heart attacks," or they "accidentally fell down a stairwell" and the perp goes free.
2. They can keep you detained without representation for quite some time, in the meantime you are worn down physically and psychologically till you just want to make it "go away" so you sign a "confession" letter.
[1]http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/10/japan-forc...
[2]https://gaijinass.com/2011/01/02/7-brutal-realities-regardin...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2012/11/japan-end-abu...
That's what this thread is about, isn't it?
Wikipedia in Japanese - Criminal Trial Judgements (判決確定数 - number of judicial decisions, 有罪 - guilty, 無罪 - not guilty)
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E3%81%AE%E5...
At the bottom of the table it links all the data to
Looks pretty unofficial but that is Japan Ministry of Justice website and is linked by the more official looking one
http://www.moj.go.jp/housouken/houso_hakusho2.html
Ministry of Justice White Papers in English
http://hakusyo1.moj.go.jp/en/nendo_nfm.html
Judgement rates 2005-2014 in English
However, as you're insisting that Japanese-only sources are necessary to consider the claim to be reliable, perhaps you can provide the necessary Japanese sources which contradict it?
This isn't a court of law, and you're not the defendant. There is no "burden of proof."
>I'm only asking for a single credible source from inside Japan, and in Japanese.
Sources from inside Japan and in Japanese have already been posted here. If you find those inadequate, what Japanese language news sources would you recommend? Perhaps you could search those and tell us what they have to report, if anything, on the matter.
>. What if the Japanese criminal justice system is just really well run? That is an equally credible conclusion until proven wrong.
In any other context, with any other country, the police being able to detain and interrogate suspects for weeks and a judicial system with a 99% conviction rate would be assumed to be evidence of unchecked state power. And, of course, "well run" and "systemically corrupt" are not diametrically opposed.
I understand from past comments that you're passionate about fighting against what you perceive as false cultural stereotypes about Japan, which is fine, but in this particular case the assumption being made is that Japan is no different than any other state in the ways that power and opportunity can breed corruption. It can't be "equally credible" to assume that Japan is somehow an exception to human nature.
Did you really just sneak back into this thread after a week just to drop a snarky one-liner?
So Japan's acquittal rate is only 15 times lower than one of the most prison-happy countries in the world.
> Secondly, Japanese suspects confess. The theory is that they're coerced, but that requires one to accept a lot of speculation about the psychological impact of prolonged interrogations.
...Which speculation is that, exactly? Are you saying you don't believe that people will do almost anything to escape after being tormented for days or weeks? Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, please.
> you need to be suspicious to even be on their radar.
"The innocent have nothing to hide." Uh huh.
A hypothetical system that is in theory wide open to abuse, but where, in practice abuse rarely happens, should be compared favourably with another which has strong theoretic abuse controls, yet in practice is abused systematically. At least until such time as systematic violation is common in the former and the latter lives up to its ideals.
If you assume for a moment that the allegations are true, that powerlessness is exemplified in this thread–you have someone from Japan basically saying that if you're even under suspicion you probably did something to deserve it. Coming from somewhere like the US that scares me more even if that fear is irrational in a practical sense.
I've spent time living both in the US and outside of it. Yes, the US has unique problems it's dealing with, but jeeze so does every other country. I'm always shocked when people paint the US as some sort of hellhole. I just assume these are people without first hand experience.
>> I've spent time living both in the US and outside of it
Me too. I invite you to spend one day reading and watching global stories and deliberately replacing the words "USA" (implicit or explicit) with "Australia" or any other country of your choice. You'll come to realise the extent of USA's cultural importance when you are reading so much about "Australia". You'll begin to wonder why we seem to care so much. Love or loathe USA, we are fixated on this one country. I believe this is all to the advantage of most Americans now, but that advantage is declining.
If a country sets itself up as a bastion of freedom they're going to be scrutinised when they fail to meet the standards they set for themselves.
> adding a second charge
Okay.
Interestingly enough (having now done some minimal research), for terrorism cases, you can be detained up to 28 (!) days without a charge in the UK. https://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/sites/default/files/...
So, did you really interpret me as saying Japan didn't have a problem? Is there somewhere where I could clarify my stance (a bit too late to edit the post now, but for future reference)?
True, there's a lot of discretion in the Japanese prosecutorial system. Ditto USA. A big difference is that in Japan this discretion is mostly wielded judiciously.
Crime rate is also extremely low in Japan. I don't have evidence that the legal system is the reason, but I believe it's a significant contributing factor.
So where are all these righteously aggrieved innocents you worry about? They don't seem to show up in the stats.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... tldr: {jp:47, uk:163, us:693}
There are numerous cases of false allegations, and recently one guy who was being chased by the police despite claiming his innocence (and all his close friend and co-workers said that was not the kind of guy to do this) just fell to his death while trying to escape this situation.
"Only 6.3% of the unnatural deaths in Aichi [prefecture] are investigated by a medical examiner, a minuscule rate even by nationwide standards in Japan, where an autopsy is performed in 11.2% of cases."
My money is on the high degree of integration of the Japanese society. They are homogenous and everyone is well kept in place by their social network. That's why they don't become criminals as much, compared to US where crime correlates with disenfranchisement. The more a population feels the game is stacked against it, the more it will do crime, but an integrated society feels much more fair.
But indeed, if you look at the data for cases that go to court, the conviction rate is high. http://hakusyo1.moj.go.jp/en/64/nfm/n_64_2_2_3_1_0.html
But that was my point in GP.
With apologies to Terry Pratchett: Japan's philosophy is that if you're going to have crime, at least it should be organized crime.
My fiance did a high-school exchange in Japan and mentioned that people with tattoos weren't welcome at onsen because that usually means Yakuza in Japan, and businesses want to steer clear of all of that. If businesses are making rules like that, it's pretty clearly a non-trivial issue.
> Finally, there is the prevalence of confessions. Ever notice how so many of Nick's clients have already confessed to crimes by the time he takes on their case? Known as "the king of evidence" by the Japanese system, confessions obtained in custody by prosecutors and police are the basis of the majority of convictions. Few rules govern what goes on in a Japanese interrogation room. Suspects are held for long periods before being charged or brought to trial, and the law offers them little protection. Critics argue that the system is open to abuse, and that false confessions are often extracted through coercion.
> Take the case of Toshikazu Sugaya. He matched the profile and blood type of a child murderer, but the police lacked any evidence. "They barged in and told me to sit down," recalls Sugaya. "Then they kept saying, 'You killed that kid, didn't you?' I said 'No, no,' but they didn't believe me." After a 13 hour interrogation without food, water, or a lawyer, Sugaya confessed. Armed with this confession, the prosecution successfully convicted him and he was sentenced to life in prison. It would be nearly 18 years before modern DNA evidence would completely exonerate him.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/is...
That's right, Phoenix Wright is probably a form of social criticism disguised as a game.
Granted, I have no idea how it works in Japan.
Unions can indeed have issues (on one end corrupt leadership that just pads their bank accounts or screws those that they're supposed to represent, on the other end over-privileging of a certain field), but turning into "unlabelled mafia" is not a core trait.
Bigger companies are usually pretty professional about these things. (Completely different domain, but just look at Apple and Samsung being in court while Samsung still being a supplier for Apple.)
For bank tellers, I believe this is tracked via the federal agency FINRA, through AWC submittals. For the Wells Fargo employees, you likely are thinking of the brokers who were ordered by Wells Fargo management to fraudulently open accounts. Allegedly, many of these brokers then found out later after they were terminated from Wells Fargo that the bank marked their termination on a U5 form in a manner that all but ejects them from the financial services industry, forever [1]. In both of these cases, they are via mandatory regulatory notifications, and not like the Japanese cases discussed here where it sounds more informal.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/business/dealbook/wells-f...
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/28/499805238/episo...
I'd make that trade any day, but then again that's just one industry and I'm just one person.
When you combine it all and compare the amount of benefits and safety nets provided to other countries it kind of feels like you're being screwed. I guess getting paid more is nicer but raising children here and realizing that they may not make nearly as much money while having such small or irrelevant safety nets is a sobering experience.
So I call bullshit. Marginal income tax rates are always higher than effective income tax rates. The only way you are paying a 50% tax rate is if you pretend ALL of your income is taxed at the 43% I mentioned AND you count FICA as a tax.
Every time someone take about simplifying the tax code, I bring it up. It will hurt me as well (I'm poor) but it is ok.
If you're in the tax bracket to pay 40%, I'd say I want to raise your taxes you pay but I also want to raise the taxes your overlords pay.
I want higher taxes so we can offer the same services to the wealthy that we offer to the poor. It is the right thing to do. We don't have too many wealthy people in this country. We should be able to include everyone. Can't afford to include people who make too much money? Too bad. The program can't exist.
I would want to create a consensus towards "no income checks". The government should not have any program that qualifies people based on income or assets. Be it Medicare, social security, or Medicaid, food stamps, college tuition, rent subsidies, school lunch or whatever. You should not be able to exclude anyone because they make too much money or have too much money.
Of course, economists will say this is stupid and inefficient and irrational but I say economists are not even people. Nobody is rational in the real world.
It's not that complicated. In order for you to have a 40% effective tax rate (including Federal, State, Local and FICA), assuming you ONLY took the standard deduction and you file single, you'd need an income of just over $450,000/year.
https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#VL01ZILZtI
That assumes you have 1 exception, no deductions for retirement (which would actually reduce your effective rate) and only taking the standard deduction (you can't get lower!)
In fact, if you want to tax EVERY POSSIBLE tax into account (sales, property, fuel, etc), you'd need to make $300,000/year to achieve a 40% effective tax rate across all taxes.
So either you make a mountain of money, you have a terrible accountant, or you are lying.
If you earn much more than that, generally companies find other ways to pay you (equity, deferred compensation, etc.) that have more administrative overhead, but less of a tax hit.
And yes, FICA is definitely a tax. A regressive one since the rate goes down the higher your income is, but it's still a tax.
Well yes, if you are in the top 1% of wage earners in the US your effective tax rate is going to be pretty high. In fact, you'll pay around $200,000 in taxes on that, give or take (if you live in a high-tax state like California). But that's literally affecting 1% of the population, and they're probably doing ok.
> If you earn much more than that, generally companies find other ways to pay you
Most companies give equity in the form of RSU's rather than options, so income taxes hit immediately upon vesting.
> And yes, FICA is definitely a tax.
Yes they are a payroll tax, but just "adding" them into your income taxes is extremely misleading. Income tax is just that. FICA is a payroll tax.
Incorrect.
The highest marginal rate kicks in, for married-filing-jointly, at just over $470K; the next highest at over $416K. You have to making close to $1M in taxable income for a married couple to be paying the top marginal rate on most of their income, and over $800K to paying at least the second-highest marginal rate on most of your income.
At $500K, you're just barely paying at least the third highest marginal rate on half your income.
That is as it should be. Is there something wrong? The only problem is that people above you are able to weasel out of their taxes, but the fact that you're in the top bracket means you're rich, you made it. Congratulations! Enjoy the high quality meats! Consider lobbying your Senator to close the loopholes.
If you are paying 50% tax, then you are being ripped off by your country because you are not gaining anything in exchange for paying all that money AND giving up all those protections.
We have those protections in the UK and they are similar across all of the EU. The highest rate of tax in the UK is 45% and you only pay that on anything you earn over something like £150k ($200k) per year. You have to pay ~2% to national insurance as well, but this is much much cheaper than private healthcare in the US. Local tax is pegged to the value of the house you live in and is typically between £0.8 and £1.5k ($1k-$2k) per year.
Close-to-50% total taxation is unfortunately pretty common in the West welfare states and yes, you're not getting your taxes worth.
> and yes, you're not getting your taxes worth.
Thats debatable :) The US has a live expentancy as low as Cuba, very high crime rates, very high violent crime rates, low trust in society, massive homelessness, bad schools (but good top universities), bad care for the mentally ill, horrendous working conditions, ...
As far as quality of live per GDP per capita goes, the US is among the least efficient of all industrialized countries. Just think about the fact that Cuba manages to archieve the same live expectancy as the US with 1/6 of the GDP per capita of the US!
It's not a trade, it's just a temporary result of a market imbalance. When that stops to be case, programmers will get the same bad treatment like everybody else.
So I'd make rather live in a country with more sane and fair laws for all, and not extrapolate too much from what a specific field or two (even if it happens to be mine) might temporarily command.
That temporary result has been going on for a few decades now. And it's only getting better for the engineers, because more and more tech companies need more and more employees and for the most part, CS degrees still remain difficult to get (relative to some other degrees).
So I agree it's temporary, however it will probably last until after my retirement short of another .com bubble.
Software developers at the top end are better positioned than many for that but even if your job isn't directly exposed that's going to contribute to pressure against wage increases and respect, especially since senior management is going to keep seeing comparatively high labor costs.
At the end of the day, I'm not going to plan my life around my job suddenly becoming less valuable.
That really was not the case before the Netscape IPO or for about 5-6 years after the dot-com bust.
And I've worked in both the US and Canada and I'd say there isn't much difference beyond the paid time off for parental leave.
Unions forced the typical work week down to 40 hours from 60-90. Certainly they could make a company stop harassing a few ex-employees.
I think you're giving unions too much credit for microscale protections.
I the GPs point is that having the power to change culture over the course of decades does not guarantee the ability to fix a single problem for a single individual.
This happens in Germany but it just means that if someone has a simple neutral letter of reference, the person herself is a terrible worker.
You are making the scale from 0 to 10 into another scale of 5 to ten. Employers are not stupid and in fact they have developed their own codes to express whatever they want to express to other employers they have good relationships with.
The same happens in China where it is offensive to say: NO! So , instead of telling it, they wait and tell you Yes(!!)
There is an indirect code to translate the time and emphasis employed by the a yes into a no everybody agrees with.
It is obviously not a flawless protection, especially not in terms of backroom business and that sort of quiet slander. But it does have the potential to counter some of these aggressive methods.
In Italy we had the popular article 18 of the workers' statute that stated that if someone got fired without a dismissal for cause the company was obliged to rehire the worker.
Maybe not, but there most certainly are penalties for such behaviour, see: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/09/blacklisted...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/21/building-in...
Important to note that this "blacklist" was "clandestine " and "a closely guarded secret", i.e. the people doing it knew that it was entirely illegal.
If you slander your previous employer, then you deserve it if your career comes to an end.
A successful lawsuit against a previous employer wouldn't be likely to make you untouchable. However, I could see how an unsuccessful one would.
This is why Uber spend so much money fighting cases about the classification of their drivers work status in virtually every country they operate in. Most western countries have laws designed to prevent companies exploiting employees by reclassifying them as contractors, especially for low paying or low skilled jobs. The recent Uber employment case in the U.K. Is a great example, and is precisely the kind of problem unions were historically good at dealing with.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/...
"But IT has unique demands requiring it!". That the same trick is used from literal sweatshops and up must therefor also be a coincidence.
Serious question, what if I made a small side business just for fun where I paid school children peanuts to run errands for me? Soon, those kids grow up and are still working for me and are now angry with me that I am paying them peanuts when their livelihoods and families depend on me. Yet I don't have enough to give a "living wage" with benefits - I just wanted a fun little side business for the school kids - not support everyone's entire family...
Soon he drops out of high school and demands to be paid a living wage with health benefits since I am now his source of income. The other egg gatherers unionize with him and threaten to strike if I don't. I fire them all and scrap the business instead because I can't afford to pay them all a living wage with benefits without making my eggs way more expensive than the competition.
If an employee is doing good work, the customer paying for it will let us know. If an employee isn't, the customer will let us know. Most of the time, we'll find a better fit for that employee. Rarely, we'll let them go. When an employee wants to move on, they can find another position within what we offer or they can find new business and bring that in. They'll get a share of that.
For workers, what makes this ambivalent dictatorship arrangement categorically better than a union hall?
It is also a bit funny to demonize unions in a conversation about a company that uses its own largess to ruin the lives of former employees.
As a thought experiment, just how would a union decide to protect or not protect a worker in a certain situation? By adherence to union rules? These are often inflexible, counterproductive, and morale destroying. Have you ever worked in a shop where you were not allowed to plug or unplug an appliance because thats a job for the electricians union? I have. It took several weeks to install a copier because of the unions involved. The movers couldn't unplug the thing, so they left when they saw it was plugged in. That company is no longer in business. What happened to the workers?
Perhaps the workers could be protected by always siding with the worker, even when the worker is not good at what they do or is abusive? Sounds like some police unions.
Every single Union I've seen forces you to give up YOUR RIGHTS. I've read the paperwork.
Moreover, you can say during an interview, and other private communication, that you worked at Konami, without having that appear on your public resume.
There are easy ways to comply with Konami's demands, only not really.
The truth.
Konami treated Kojima like shit, Kojima left and took most of the talent with him. What Konami has left is a pretty cool engine and a hot IP, no creatives. MGS fans know it and don't respect Konami's next project even a little. Zombie-survival alternate universe, really?
In contrast I don't even know what Kojima's next thing is, it'll probably be pretty cool though. Kojima is good at over the top absurd and awesome.
Also, it's a fucking travesty that Fox Engine won't be used for anything important ever again, because for an open-world engine it runs like a dream. Too bad the online multiplayer is a non-stop cheatfest.
Even after seeing both trailers, I also don't even know what Kojima's next thing is
Kojima is a lot like Steve Jobs, in a way. He has a vision of what things could be, that often transcends the current genre categories. Or in other words he knows what we want even before we know what we want.
(hopefully less dying of treatable cancer because of fruitatarian beliefs though)
Although unlike Jobs he definitely does also have a track record of getting stuck in development hell too.
But spirits of enemies killed in combat, levitating psychics, phisically impossible robots and horseriders literally made of fire are okay with you?
This isn't a series like Assassins Creed, Final Fantasy or even Star Wars where countless people have had their hands on the lore this is a single creatives vison.
I get the point though. I'm also bummed out by the exodus. I love MGS and I want to see what he can do on that engine given enough time. MGS5 was great but felt like Konami told him to cut it short and GTFO.
It's a real shame that Konami is probably going to euthanize it after a few quickie moneygrabs from the handful of interns they have left from Kojima's team.
A lot of open-world engines have pretty severe stutter problems (examples: Fallout 4, GTA:V, etc), and Fox Engine's performance is fantastic. With MGSV I get 60 fps locked with 1440p and 1.4x DSR at max settings on a GTX 1080. And it actually does look really good too - a chopper extraction with a sunrise over the desert will startle me every now and then with how great it looks.
I have a few complaints but they're fairly minor.
* Some weird bayer-mask alpha blending effects (example of a similar problem in Witcher 3: http://i.imgur.com/8neiqOg.jpg ), which are solved by running at 1.4x DSR, which is easily doable with this engine
* 60 fps locked physics - c'mon, really?
* Clipping planes cause bullets to abruptly stop working at 250m range, which MGSV tries to hide with map design by breaking line-of-sight, but it's noticeable in some desert/plains areas with longer sightlines
* Online play has rampant cheating. Gotta design in security from Day 1 if you're going to do it... and FOB combat was obviously hacked in by a couple interns way after the fact as a money-grab.
It's certainly not up to the graphical quality of Witcher 3, but it's not bad either, and performance is very good for the quality (especially given that open-world engines are tougher to do well).
With FreeSync or Gsync or Mobile GSync it would be very playable on an APU or a low-end discrete laptop graphics chip. Can't wait for consoles to start driving FreeSync adoption in the HDTV market as well.
It would maybe have been fun as an alternate mode in MGSV (nonstop arena/free-roam mode plus zombies) but I don't think there's a whole game worth of content there.
Konami is blatantly salami-slicing their content. Ground Zeroes was $30 for a product the length of a demo (literally less than three hours of content). MGSV was rushed if not outright unfinished (you can clearly tell money fell apart and they pushed it out the door, 1/3 of the game is tacked-on bullshit "same mission as before but harder difficulty") and they wanted $60 for it anyway. If Survive is another full $60 title then Konami's total ask will have been $150 for content that adds up to maybe one $60 game in total.
Basically it's the same thing Bioware did with Mass Effect 3 DLC - except Konami is charging $30 a pop instead of $5 a pop.
Oh yeah and Konami tried to add in ludicrously-priced microtransactions too with the FOB system (it's like another $20 to get your online base fully set up so you can produce resources at full speed). Fortunately FOB online combat is terrible so you're not missing anything if you don't do it. It's like EVE Online had a baby with Destiny where the prize is grinding for S-rank soldiers for your FOB.
I know when I'm being milked. I waited for a Steam Sale and bought MGSV for $30 maybe a year or so ago. I didn't buy Ground Zeroes either until it went on a Steam Sale recently (I want to say it was $5).
I'm satisfied with what I got at those prices. I would pay another $5 for a zombie-survival-mode DLC, maybe $10 if it was nice and polished, not gonna pay $30 or $40 let alone $60.
(I would also pay another $5 for them to get rid of the numbered "special mode" missions and just allow me to toggle Extreme/Subsistence/Total Stealth modes on any mission in the game or while free-roaming, there's your easy money for the day, Konami)
Will truth prevent Konami from using mobster methods to intimidate employees and other companies ? I really doubt it.
Am I missing something? Perhaps it's more common in Japan's video game industry to work in the same place for life?
Yes: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/
Definitely more liquid than manufacturing, finance, insurance, IT consulting, publishing, aerospace, shosha, semiconductors, etc.
In exchange for that, most companies reward employees with jobs for life, seniority-based career progression, housing and health perks, vacation trips and so on.
IT and gaming are more dynamic than others but the mainstream attitude is still the zaibatsu one.
I personally know people who have been headhunted for their talent/experience (in finance though) so it is a thing. Not as much as in the west, true, but it does happen.
They can expect whatever they like but I'll bet at least a portion of them will end up disappointed. Things are not what they were.
Select industries maybe - my point was that job-hopping, headhunted or not, is not the universal poison it once was, and as a GP purported it to be. It's still more taboo than in the west, yes. But it's not career suicide and the taboo weakens year by year, as it should. Kicking and screaming and all that...
The old habits of life long work with the same company stopped around 2000. It got much better.
Although, it does seem weird that they burned their bridges with the gaming community so very, very hard, and a great deal of the value in their IP with them.
The judge will only want to know one thing: is it true whether or not that person worked for Konami.
Is there no paper trail to substantiate that? Contracts?
Did they have no signed contracts, and get paid in cash?
It's unfortunate that a slew of IPs will go down with Konami, but they haven't been looking great in awhile and this is just a conclusion of the signs in the past. Silent Hill, Metal Gear, Suikoden, ZoE, even those weird late 90s PS1 games like Broken Helix will always be remembered by me.
I had a start up that tried to do this a year or so later, after I left the company on bad term mind you. The lead basically tried to bully me. I just up and left on the same day that he tried that.
I read this and look around where I'm at, palm trees and beach. Oh right I'm in California.
I tried several emails to explain to the lawyer. He made bunch of bs excuses.
So I immediately googled for a cease and desist letter and send it to the buddy.
He basically asked me if I know who he is.
I don't care if your Donald Trump. If Trump couldn't pass the muslim ban good luck with you trying to ~~force~~ coerce me to remove this experience from my linkedin.
After that I never hear from the lawyer again or his company again.
Also by standing up to these bullies in the tech industry who think having lots of brains and very little compassion for others is somehow a divine quality. Trump-like ego-maniacs everywhere I turn in this industry it makes me so sick. Kojima did good by going out on his own and not letting the empty threats of a has-been corporation like Konami shake him from his vision as a legendary creator.
They don't need to, Pachinko (their newer machines use fox engine it seems) exists.
My take is that Konami seems to have lost a lot of their creative mojo during the industry's creative nadir in the early 00's, when sports and gritty FPS franchises reigned.
From the article:
"Konami is on track to post a record group operating profit of 40 billion yen for the year ending in March 2018."
Doesn't sound much like struggling to me. Apparently it's mostly on the back of mobile games though, not AAA console titles.
https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp...
Working at a company is a fact, and can be stated as such. There seems to be no legal basis to stop their name being put on the resume.
In some countries this is illegal - the worst you can say about a person is "no comment."
edit: I always thought this is just culturally. I have no idea, but I don't believe there are any laws that forbid telling the truth about former employees.
Good: "Mr. X's technical competence is excellent. He solved difficult technical challenges quickly and correctly. His performance at our company exceeded our expectations."
Bad: "Mr. X handled assigned tasks adequately."
A long reference almost always means it is good. If it's longer than two pages, it's almost certainly excellent.
In Germany, employees can request a "simple" reference, which basically just certifies employment and does not contain any judgement. What I described above is a "qualified" reference; usually it is seen as a bad sign to produce just a "simple" reference and not a "qualified" reference.
One way to say something negative is to omit certain words, as you said. If your praise is less than exuberant, it is also a warning sign. Some years ago, employers used to mark that someone is in a union by ending their signature with a hook to the left. If you wrote someone is sociable, that was code for being alcoholic.
The funny thing is, the law states explicitly that the letter of reference must be unambiguous, and must not contain any hidden meaning.
I think this whole system is ridiculous and ripe for reform, but I don't think this will happen.
We're talking about an ex-employee here. It's not like giving negative feedback will really help the company. It can only hurt them.
Fortunately, lack of good information strongly implies negative information that is being withheld, so it's all fine.
In my case, my manager was particularly fearful about losing me. When I told him that I was entertaining other gigs he plainly told me that "I will black mark you across the industry if you leave." I was young, naive and scared, so I took it seriously (luckily things have improved vastly since). I now know that I would not put him on my CV; instead the myriads of other employees who have interacted with me. This is why those laws are in-place: preventing hostage situations.
You, as an ex-konami employee, could even let potential employers know about this ahead of time, and back it up with evidence.
But the man is so prolific and Kojima Productions is clearly serious business, it'll probably mean his next projects have the potential to be his best yet.
MGS5 was worked by Kojima and even with all the trouble with Konami, people wanted to show support for Kojima. Gamers did discuss about boycotting the game but since it would have been a disservice for both Kojima and gamers that boycott didn't materialise.
However when Konami for example removed "A Hideo Kojima Game" text from the MGS5 there was a protest by gamers to get it back there.
A team I worked with in South Korea regularly slept at the office because the Korean lead was there slave driving the crunch. South Korea in itself is hard to even launch a game there because they demand percentages and you must have internal teams/representatives, similar with China. China team, the employees were always in a fear state of making the boss angry or doing the wrong thing. I noticed that it led to releases just to meet dates even if the work was incomplete just so the boss would not get mad. Working with them the devs told me they regularly ship when not complete just to satisfy dates and it led to many issues especially at hand off points because they knew it wasn't fully functioning.
I think overall companies in games think they can get away with this ownership/authoritarian type attitude anyways, but it might be easier in Asian cultures where there is a more authoritarian lean.
I know it's generally a bad idea to badmouth employers, past or present, on Facebook or other social media... but punishing employees for merely "liking" a post is more excessive than I've heard before. Maybe it's a cultural difference, but it seems very Big Brother of them nonetheless.
I'm sorry, "could not show this application to the chairman"?
Goes to show you once more how many people on positions of power have the emotional intelligence of a bully teenager but they can't be touched.
> This is more of a policy issue, unfortunately.
and yet here we are, slaves to whims of a few thousand people globally who control 35 trillion dollars in assets.
This virtually guarantees that if you want to make a liveable income, you either need to work for or sell to a truly psychotic group of individuals who control an arbitrarly large portion of wealth thanks to a host of monetary and legal policies.
This subthread doesn't seem too promising, but I'd genuinely like to know.
The chief reason for why free and open source software isn't "communism" in any sense of the package of things that word contains is that in practise it almost always leads to a very controlled extreme planned centralised collectivist systems. Free and open software development and communities on the other hand are based on extremely individualistic non-centralised non-planned and non-governed system.
If free and open software was inherently "Communist" or "Marxist", then we'd have "ONE FREE OS, ONE FREE DESKTOP, AND ONE FREE DESIGN". Instead we have several free software operating systems, dozens of competing desktop environments, and uncountable number of designs for every individual taste. If you want to know more about this point of view, I recommend you read the "Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich von Hayek.
It's true that in free and open source software we people share the code and tools (i.e. the means of production) to some degree. However we people still inherently govern the domains of our work and we get rewarded for the work that gets done. Instead of "money", hackers often get rewarded e.g. by "fame". Eric S. Raymond explains quite well in his book Cathedral and the Bazaar how this works and in great detail too.
But most importantly there is no central planner which would dictate how things work and coordinate the operations. If some guy doesn't like how a free and open software project is being developed, he can fork the fuck out of it and create a competing project. And this makes it sound more like anarcho-capitalism than anything else. We don't have "centralised state" that would set the framework where code is allowed to happen and "market of ideas" operates. This fits into agenda of our current corporatist society quite well and even companies which are in direct competition can benefit from it pouring resources to projects of mutual interest.
It's true that when we inspect how free and open software projects are developed, we at times counter cases of central-planner but often we notice that this entity is restricted by the pressure from the users and the fear of having project forked and lost "fame" / "reputation". This is basically why "dictators" that lead their projects aren't sole rulers of their domains. Most commonly we see governing bodies of few selected individuals aka. oligarchies that manage the free and open software project.
Maybe instead of pay defining where you are within an organisation it's how much vote you get in the business. And obviously you can engage in peer to peer performance review system like Valve. To be honest I'd only ask one question; How much do you want to work with X again? 0 - 10.
Ultimately, a hierarchical society is instinctively easy to grasp, while a more fluid mostly-equal one is not. People still instinctively understand hierarchies better than full-on democracy.
instinctively? Citation needed. If anything, humans are wired to interact in small and non-hierarchical groups.
It might also help to have stronger unions and more businesses structured as worker-owned co-ops, public benefit corporations, and non-profits.
I don't like being entrepreneur in this context personally, but the startup ecosystem is thriving in Paris and Lyon and I sure hope the current generation is about to issue some major players. I personally fail to see how they can be profitable with our tax levels, social obligations and regulations, but it may happen.
List of hot startups in France: http://www.eu-startups.com/2017/02/10-french-startups-to-loo...
From a startup perspective, I think complex regulations are a bigger impediment than taxes; any company that starts as a couple people in a garage shouldn't have to be experts in corporate law in addition to whatever problem they're trying to solve.
I expect in order to have a successful environment for startups to happen, you need network effects of smart people congregating in one place and be a place where creative people would want to live. Having good universities really helps. It seems like France should be able to supply those things, but as I said, I don't have specific recent knowledge about what France is like these days.
> You need network effects of smart people
We definitely have this, especially in the heart of Paris, and in other cities too. I've lived in Madrid and Sydney, therefore I dare giving my opinion, with the limitation that I'm not a serial entrepreneur in each of those cities.
> where creative people would want to live
Well, it's Paris, land of Macron, of Montmartre, and social mixity with black/white/arabs/traders/social-workers/low-income living together, etc. A lot of people live this mixity, fertile for ideas and leverage. The glamour is however balanced by high rental costs (=most often living far in the suburbs) and medium pays (60k€ per year is high for us, but health, unemployment, youth education and retirement are included).
> Good universities
We have plenty of excellent engineering and management schools (Centrale, X, INSA, EM Lyon, INSEAD, Les Mines, HEC), half of them free and nonetheless excellent (In France free doesn't mean students are bad, rather the opposite). We're not well versed in international rankings, so Australian unis may rank above us, but I'm persuaded it's more about tweaking the rankings than student IQ.
Given the impression you give, maybe have a business trip in Paris and interview people in coworking spaces to have alternative opinions? You may love France!
Without capital, a productive effort fails under Stalinism, too.
Notably, we often respect this in our colleagues. We lionize "fuck you money" and appreciate when our friends have earned their way into the ability to act according to their inclinations. However, at least on this board, I think there is an over emphasis on needing to earn or otherwise deserve that bare level of respect.
Workers saying no in greater numbers provides stronger checks on corporate behavior. A sibling comment discusses worker owned businesses, which is a stronger form of this.
and when the "regulators" and "prosecutors" and "judges" aren't vacation pals with the Fortune 500 CEOs...
then maybe we will have some kind of a true free market, and not just an illusion of one run by the American Corporate Mafia :)
All businesses in America are fighting a zero sum game. Values and ethics are chucked out the window once you grow past Mojang's size. Out goes the employee ownership and work-life balance, in comes the desparation to grow into a monopoly. Wall St is a knife fight in my opinion. There will always be a competitor more desperate than you to win, and the market will reward them for it.
Source: I've been self-employed and incorporated for nearly a decade, presently working up to employee #3.
So the next time you are working unpaid overtime and planning the CEO's first class flights to a "client meeting" that is really just a Wall St funded vacation for him...
That's the lie. Its always been the case that a free market needs regulation to prevent it turning into a feudal state. Its just that wannabe feudal states have an interest in making the population think that regulation is bad and in the US at least there is less regulation on political lobbying than there should be. The capitalist and free market mantra is correct but without a regulation and legal arm restraining its worst excess it breeds corruption and corruption is a concern of every system.
... they just aren't enforced at all on the big dogs who are doing all the crazy shit.
You have to be as wreckless as Enron to even get a taste of post-hoc legal smackdown, and even then, the damage is still done.
(Don't tell me US is the same: the transparency with which they wash their dirty laundry in international public waters, and the fact that they have many layers of "social backups" are just two reasons to believe otherwise.)