In Southern Europe NTT is mostly a bodyshop. Their target demographic is junior engineers willing to do unpaid overtime for abysmal pay. Pretty sure remote work doesn't make a big difference.
That’s the reality for big Japanese tech companies.
They pay you in reputation, and reputation doesn’t transfer to other big corps since they see frequent job changes (sometimes capped at twice in a lifetime) as a red flag and won’t hire people.
If the reputation has no utility for the employee, why would the employee accept payment in the form of reputation? Is the employee oblivious to the lack of utility of reputation?
Due to the more or less deflationary economy, Japanese wages have not increased for the better part of three decades. (Deflating prices mean that even with stagnant wages, you're still able to buy more.) Job hopping is unlikely to actually result in increased wages. (Inflation is now coming to Japan due to the general global inflation from the war in Ukraine, so that will be an interesting scenario to watch.)
Japan is a heavily reputation based society. In the way that US uses credit score to determine a lot of things, Japan uses this sort of reputation as a proxy to determine eligibility for many things. As a general example, finding in apartment in Japan requires a guarantor (essentially a cosigner who agrees to act as a fallback option in case you can't pay) and landlords want a Japanese national person or entity to do it most of the time. https://blog.gaijinpot.com/what-is-a-rental-guarantor/
This essay is a perennial HN favorite. And it does seem uniquely Japanese:
> When I started my own company, I was living in an apartment that I had first rented as an employee of a megacorp. The entirety of the credit investigation was me presenting my business card to them. Possessing it implies both sterling moral character, stable finances, and a responsible party to intercede with should there ever be an issue with me as a tenant. (Japanese landlords and lenders will, as a matter of policy, escalate any disagreement with you to your boss, as the social opprobrium you’ll suffer will get you to quickly cave.)
Speaking from experience renting in Tokyo both before that article was written and more recently, as well as in Paris, while they're indeed very different things have also been changing a lot in Japan, partly due to new regulation.
Back ~10y ago, the norm was very much that you needed a personal guarantor, and sometimes you could or had to additionally use an assigned guarantor company which may or may not have additional requirements.
These days, the norm is more that you need to provide a local 緊急連絡先 (emergency contact), and sign up with a guarantor company that acts as insurer and usually have a blanket check. One similarity with France is the general requirement of having a verifiable income of minimum 3x of the rent.
Many other points that the author brings up look very different today compared to in 2014.
Reputation is also highly correlated with company stability in Japan.
Such reputation buys you things like
A) easier time attracting a future spouse
B) respect in certain social circles and transactions, transferrable to your partner and children (yes this is a thing)
C) a network of individuals also “smart and hardworking” like you
Kind of makes me wonder why there hasn't been a brain drain from Japan like there has been from elsewhere in Asia and Europe to the various tech hubs. Is the culture just too difficult to leave behind? Yes, it is a G7 country with first world living standards but expatriates from other first world countries are not rare in the tech hubs.
Except for language, Canada is similar. The US manages a positive brain drain just on more money and opportunities. Canada is great, in a couple of years I might be looking for a job there.
I don't know about NTT, but salaries for software devs are really low in general. Think €30-40k per year. How FAANG are not leveraging such a poorly paid workforce in countries with a great climate, developed, safe, etc, I will never know.
In Romania FAANGs aren't paying better salaries than market average, so the only incentive to work for a FAANG is to have it on your CV, stay 2 years and find better employment.
FAANGs get it really cheap here as they pay 10x lower wages than in the US.
Yeah, FAANG can just hire all the engineers at NTT, all these Indian IT outsourcing companies, European tech companies and other I might have missed. I mean for christ sake this is 2022. If every CRUD micro services peddler and every network engineer who solves 5 firewall opening issues in a day couldn't get USD 200K / year for 6 hr work day, free food and drinks, onsite laundry, massage, haircut and medical checkup. What is the point of even living on this polluted earth.
In US too, it is close to a bodyshop. In fact I had friends there who would get full or partial work from home in 2014 or so. Not sure about pay as I didn't check. I was more enamored by WFH as I had to commute 2-3 hrs/day daily for work in those days.
Another reason why big corp encourages telework (while there are some ventures don't encourage) is because their office in Tokyo is very expensive. Anyway it's good thing.
> I really doubt many people in Japan commute by car.
Having lived in Japan and commuted by car in Japan, I can say that this is definitely not true.
In the inner parts of the larger cities, yes, very true. But in the periphery of larger cities and in every provincial city (which are most of them), there is a lot of car commuting.
For reference, I would say larger cities are Tokyo, Osaka, and Yokohama. Nagoya is probably around the threshold (not so sure, didn’t spend much time there).
Provincial cities like Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Sendai, and Sapporo are very much car-centric, although the public transportation system is quite robust. Most of the public transport in these cities is to and from the inner city and for short jaunts between neighborhoods by folks who don’t drive. For jobs outside of the center city, driving a car would be quite common.
The outskirts of Tokyo, etc. are similar to these provincial cities.
Smaller cities like Nagasaki or Shizuoka are even more car-centric.
Have you been to Japan? It often seems like people who have never been only have this ideal in their minds that everyone in Japan travels by bullet train or local commuter trains.
There are many bus routes, and many people who still own and drive their own cars even in larger cities like Tokyo or Osaka.
Shinkansens run on electricity. Oil is mostly in the manufacturing and plastics industry, unlike other countries where domestic consumption is a significant share. (Tokyo power sector is mostly thermal and nuclear.)
EDIT: these numbers appear to be old, since 2019 they’ve tuned reactors back on and stopped relying on LNG as much. I can’t find good numbers on recent data but in 2019 they imported more gas than any other country.
Fossil-fueled thermal power generation accounted for 71.7% of total electricity generated during the year [2021], down from 74.9% the previous year [2020]. Coal and LNG accounted for 26.5% and 31.7%, respectively, and both fossil fuels are on a declining trend. Nuclear power accounted for 5.9%, up from 4.3% the previous year.
I wonder why geothermal isn't big there. I'd naively assume that they could get a significant portion to their electricity from geothermal. Does anyone know what's preventing Japan from doing that?
Without knowing how good a geothermal resource they have, I imagine it is similar to what prevents it from being popular where I live where there is a fantastic geothermal resource: Economics, know how, FUD
Are you going to expense your lunch breakfast dinner and rent as well? You need all those as well in order to work. If you work from home are you going to expense your electricity? Where is the line?
Yes. My employer (US fintech) gives me a daily meal stipend while working remotely, as well as covers my mobile phone, internet, and a portion to cover my home office. This excludes the annual equipment, desk, and chair stipend I receive.
This was all outlined in our remote handbook provided with my offer letter.
It used to be that meals were tax deductible (which is why Google offered meals) but that got restricted. If a company offers a meal stipend how does that work? Is it just bonus compensation but ear marked for food only?
Depends on the company and how they're paying it out. I've seen food services where a daily credit is issued to your service account (funded by the org), I've seen it as bonus comp, etc. Whichever mechanism is used is usually some sort of crude optimization attempt for what's best for the org and the employee with whatever services and regulatory framework they're working with (wrt to taxes).
> If you work from home are you going to expense your electricity?
Funnily enough, yes.
A very large group of countries have introduced 'teleworking' legislation post-covid, where employers are legally obliged to pay allowances to employees per day of remote work (specifically to offset electricity and internet expenses).
Japanese companies often include both a commuting allowance and a housing allowance as distinct components of your pay; neither is counted as income for the purposes of taxation. Meals at company cafeterias are typically not free (though some places are), but typically very reasonable -- e.g. 300 JPY for curry-rice etc.
The talk should be opened either way. Companies are far too eager to put high RE prices / high commuting costs / long commutes onto people, but no one is asking "where is the line?" when the roles are reversed.
God forbid we play a few things by ear and see what happens.
A fair line would be that you're compensated for things you do that you otherwise wouldn't do. You'd still eat, but many companies do compensate their employees for their meals during working hours.
Just say it if you got something to say, rather than this "hint: it's not what you think it is" shtick.
If the argument is "companies will use remote work for their own benefits", no shit, that's what they've done with literally everything under the sun. It's not news companies are trying to socialize the risks and privatize the profits.
They implied that companies with high-paid employees are ok with working remotely because it increases their talent pool to include places like South America. Why pay $200k for a US software engineer when you can get four in Brazil for the same price?
We could also say that you need the bay area salary to pay a colocation if you need to go into the office – that doesn’t remedy the issue. I’m losing 2 hours per day in my car (with the added pollution for it). There’s no decent solution to use public transport.
At the office, I have the dubious joy of working on an open office – where I can’t focus. So my job is not great. That’s not to speak about the quality of the office ware (bad laptop, bad chair, bad screen, bad mouse…)
I lose family time. I lose quality of life. I’m tired.
Now let’s look at my home office. I have a 40″ screen, an aeron chair, a nice laptop (MacBook m1), a good gamer mouse and mouse pad. All that without my time in the traffic jam. I’m refreshed, able to work better and my boss got more out of me due to this.
Since I’m a freelance, all this is factored in my daily rate. For one, my employer has the dubious pleasure of having me sit on a stool in his office that he pays for. For the other, he doesn’t observe me often, but get more quality effort out of me.
So he lose. Every time.
Let’s be honest: I’m lucky I have a home office. I guess lot of people do like to go see their colleagues – and I’m glad for them. Now, can’t we improve the situation so that everyone can choose to work the way they’re happier?
>Now, can’t we improve the situation so that everyone can choose to work the way they’re happier?
One of the issues I hear is that, at many employers who are saying "Work wherever is most effective for you," a lot of offices are ghost towns. So you may see a handful of people, you're often hoteling, and the cafeteria is scaled back. So people who want to don't really have the option of going back to a pre-pandemic office.
That said, I'm sure I'm in something of a bubble. The few times I've been driving near rush hour for some appointment, traffic has seemed to be pretty much pre-pandemic levels.
FWIW (and this is in Japan) I've worked for companies which would pay the same Tokyo salary regardless of where you lived - so long as you remain in the country. I knew people who relocated to Chiba and even Okinawa.
Isn't it the case that Japanese work culture, "stay until the boss leaves", is what contributed substantially to loneliness in Japan? A lack of work-life balance? It seems to me that remote work could lessen this effect greatly.
Also, you seem to be assuming it will just lead to people working from home alone. Japanese housing is notoriously small, and cafes ever-popular, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to speculate that this could lead to a boom in working from cafes and co-working spaces. Unlike a majority of the rest of the world, too, Japan has far less urban sprawl - so going to such places is less of a hassle.
Seems to me this would do the opposite of what you suggest.
Maybe you mean suburban sprawl? Or maybe you just mean the urban area is less disjointed? Urban sprawl is exactly how I would characterize Japan, but maybe I just have the terminology wrong. It's actually one of the reasons I suspect such dense cities work so well, as the mixed zoning creates self serving blocks of commerce and residential. Like you've pointed out, it could actually make remote work a very vibrant lifestyle, full of coffee shops, cafes, regular faces and casual conversation.
If I had to work remotely for the rest of my life, I'd choose Japan, so that I could walk out my front door and around the corner to pretty much anything I'll ever need. I can't do that in the suburbs, pretty much anything useful is a car journey away. I worked remotely from the suburbs for about 4 years, and it was incredibly isolating. There was no-where to go that fit into even an hour long break.
> Maybe you mean suburban sprawl? Or maybe you just mean the urban area is less disjointed? Urban sprawl is exactly how I would characterize Japan, but maybe I just have the terminology wrong.
No, he's right. Sprawl is inherently a negative term. Japan has large cities because you know, they can't put people in Manchuria (they've tried) or on the Moon, so they have to put them somewhere. So the most efficient way to house large numbers of people is in dense cities.
The US is a great example of both urban sprawl (outside downtown, American cities have town to village population densities) and suburban sprawl. The worst of both worlds, really.
Interesting, I think it's fair to suggest that sprawl has some negative connotations but I don't think it's quite so severe. I would definitely call some of the streets of Kyoto sprawling, as in, they have wandered in strange directions like a creeping vine. I also wouldn't suggest that Japanese cities have expanded carefully, they have taken as much space as they feasibly can in their expansion, and replaced it all with concrete. Perhaps the cities themselves were carefully considered from an urban planning point of view.
But I think in actuality, taking zoning and planning control away from the people who use the zones is what causes most of America's strange layout. People absolutely want medium to high density mixed use communities, and affordable housing, but you're not allowed to build that in America.
> Isn't it the case that Japanese work culture, "stay until the boss leaves", is what contributed substantially to loneliness in Japan? A lack of work-life balance?
I keep hearing this thrown around, and I have no reason not to believe it, as on paper it makes sense.
I’ve never been there, but everything I hear about Japanese office culture sounds terrible: long hours, stodgy environment, forced participation in dangerous binge drinking.
That said, pretty much everything else about Japanese culture seems awesome.
Clearly office work doesn’t help with this. Perhaps the flexibility and the removal of the need for things like capsule hotels will help. Maybe towns outside of the large megacities will see a renaissance ad people under 65 will be living there.
As someone who did just that (went remote, moved to a small town with a Bay Area salary). I can say it’s amazing and highly recommend.
That said, no one else I know chose it. You lose a lot of the city night life and niche things. Instead you gain space, more rural style hobbies, less diverse food (particularly if you eat out), etc.
A lot of people aren’t able to recognize the pros / cons of such a trade.
For anyone reading, I recommend living in a suburban / rural location. Get out and take care of a big garden, go to local events and join a few clubs. Definitely a positive experience.
How long ago did you make that switch? Asking because with things like that, there is always an amazing honeymoon period, but reality settles in a few years down the road.
Not just talking about the urban=>rural switch specifically, but in the opposite direction as well, and when it comes to pretty much any major change of a similar nature in general.
I live about an hour outside a major Northeast city in an ex-urban/semi-rural location. (It's not really rural but I'm one of three houses on about 100+ acres of land and can't really see my neighbors at this time of year.)
I find it's a decent compromise. I have space. I can take walks in the woods or easily drive to small mountain hikes. But I'm only about an hour to go in for live theater, a meal, etc. And there's nothing keeping me from going into town for a weekend if I wanted to.
After spending a few years in a very rural part of CA while rebuilding my cabin, the lack of quality diverse organic produce I'd taken for granted in SF Bay area grocers is one of the biggest complaints I have.
I haven't seen a Pomelo in a store for over 4 years now, let alone an organic one.
How about thinking that this will give them an opportunity for some mental relaxation as well? I live in Tokyo. The commutes are hour long one-way on average. Maybe it will give them more time & mental energy to explore other things.
