4 ms·

This is not irrelevant to startups in Japan, either. If you attempt to fire someone who you (unwisely) brought on as a full-time employee, and they contest the

by patio11 10y ago

This is not irrelevant to startups in Japan, either. If you attempt to fire someone who you (unwisely) brought on as a full-time employee, and they contest the firing, you will be brought before a local government functionary to make your case for it. "They're incompetent at their job." is insufficient grounds for firing. (You need to add "And we spent substantial documented effort retraining them and moving them to other positions, but we have not been able to find one where it worked out.")

mikekchar 10y ago
I have a tiny company (just me and my wife) in Japan and my accountant tells me never to hire a full time employee. What's the startup culture like in terms of hiring? Do people accept contract positions, or do you need to hire them full time?
- patio11 10y ago
  Your accountant gives advice very similar to the advice of my accountant and the accountants of my friends. Japan has, essentially, a bifurcated employment market [+]. There exist people that accept contract positions; contract positions appear to be widely used within e.g. Tokyo startups. There also exist people who would not countenance a contract position. One of the key hiring challenges in Japanese startups is finding folks who are both a) productive and b) willing to participate in the half of the labor market that people-the-system-views-as-productive do not normally participate in. (One is not normally afforded huge flexibility in switching between these systems.) + Slightly more fractured than this suggests.
  - gommm 10y ago
    There's also the fact that people accepting contract positions are at a significant disadvantage regarding banks if they want to get a loan to buy a house. It's considered lower status to not be a seishain. But, on the other hand, when it comes to Software Engineering, salaries for contract positions tend to be higher and, in my experience, being a seishain or being a contract worker has no bearing on the competence of the person.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      As a new (American) grad I briefly looked into working in Japan. The companies I was interested in were posting for Americans specifically, but they were still hiring people on as salarymen. The rates, even COLA-adjusted, were shockingly low. Like, top-flight companies offering bottom 10% salaries in American terms. That whole experience has come to make way more sense as I've learned about the contractor divide, and the expectation that salaried workers will "start at the bottom".
      - mikekchar 10y ago
        Even at the top end, salaries in Japan are shockingly low AFAICT. Especially if you come out here to the countryside, most programmers are working for insurance companies, etc. I know people with 10 years of experience making in the 3-4 million yen (just over $30-40K USD) range. It's one of the reasons I do remote contracts.
Kiro 10y ago
What about letting go of someone due to shortage of work?
- patio11 10y ago
  Run that one by a lawyer, but my understanding is that the bar is approximately "If we do not let them go, we will -- with night-follows-day-certainty -- go under." If it's simply a matter that you hired a plumber and don't have any toilets that need plunging, well, Japanese labor law considers that Management Error and not something which rises to the exceptional bar required to consequence an employee. Hire three plumbers but only have two plumbers worth of toilets? Get better at math.
  - derefr 10y ago
    I wonder if you could simply retain an external firm to act as the Beeminder kind of punishment-trust on a corporate level. Then you could say "if we aren't allowed to fire these employees, [this company who holds 99% of our money] is instructed and required to flush it down the toilet."
    - patio11 10y ago
      In practice the way to do things is to take a large firm and reconstruct it as a supply chain. Think like, say, a hypothetical car company. Instead of making your own engines, you source them from Engines R' Us. You might be ERU's sole customer but that is neither here nor there. If you have a bad year and need less production staff you just tell ERU "Hey, orders next quarter will be down by 60%. Plan accordingly." ERU might have to take drastic measures. Ah, the lamentable if inevitable realities of being a small business. The car company, of course, the car company would never fire the full-time employees.
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        That's a fascinating account, thanks. Certainly not the first place I've heard of that restructures to avoid horizontal or vertical integration, and then funnels everything like it was one company.
derefr 10y ago
What counts as "full time"? Can you just hire everyone part-time at ~39 hrs/wk? (Which, I presume, is the strategy international chains like McDonalds would advise for their Japanese franchises.)
- patio11 10y ago
  A slight misnomer; the relevant question is whether you're a full employee (正社員) or contract employee (契約社員).
SilasX 10y ago
Okay, but even from the Ebeneezer Scrooge perspective, wouldn't it still be better for the business to actually do that -- try to find something they can competently do, rather than just pay to idle them? Or is the the Boring Room what they do with the genuinely hopeless cases?
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  > try to find something they can competently do I think you're underestimating some second-order terms here: - You saddle a team with someone who is obviously 'unwanted', which can sap that team's morale (plus that person has no relationship with the team) - Putting them in the boring room is really a punishment meant to let other people know that they should quietly go (the NY education department also had 'rubber rooms' for teachers in similar situations) - If your intention is really to get rid of someone, any spent time training them in a new role is literally a waste of time -- you'd rather be training someone else who will be there long term
  - SilasX 10y ago
    That would be my second paragraph.

by patio11 10y ago

mikekchar 10y ago

I have a tiny company (just me and my wife) in Japan and my accountant tells me never to hire a full time employee. What's the startup culture like in terms of hiring? Do people accept contract positions, or do you need to hire them full time?

patio11 10y ago
Your accountant gives advice very similar to the advice of my accountant and the accountants of my friends. Japan has, essentially, a bifurcated employment market [+]. There exist people that accept contract positions; contract positions appear to be widely used within e.g. Tokyo startups. There also exist people who would not countenance a contract position. One of the key hiring challenges in Japanese startups is finding folks who are both a) productive and b) willing to participate in the half of the labor market that people-the-system-views-as-productive do not normally participate in. (One is not normally afforded huge flexibility in switching between these systems.) + Slightly more fractured than this suggests.
- gommm 10y ago
  There's also the fact that people accepting contract positions are at a significant disadvantage regarding banks if they want to get a loan to buy a house. It's considered lower status to not be a seishain. But, on the other hand, when it comes to Software Engineering, salaries for contract positions tend to be higher and, in my experience, being a seishain or being a contract worker has no bearing on the competence of the person.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    As a new (American) grad I briefly looked into working in Japan. The companies I was interested in were posting for Americans specifically, but they were still hiring people on as salarymen. The rates, even COLA-adjusted, were shockingly low. Like, top-flight companies offering bottom 10% salaries in American terms. That whole experience has come to make way more sense as I've learned about the contractor divide, and the expectation that salaried workers will "start at the bottom".
    - mikekchar 10y ago
      Even at the top end, salaries in Japan are shockingly low AFAICT. Especially if you come out here to the countryside, most programmers are working for insurance companies, etc. I know people with 10 years of experience making in the 3-4 million yen (just over $30-40K USD) range. It's one of the reasons I do remote contracts.

Kiro 10y ago

What about letting go of someone due to shortage of work?

patio11 10y ago
Run that one by a lawyer, but my understanding is that the bar is approximately "If we do not let them go, we will -- with night-follows-day-certainty -- go under." If it's simply a matter that you hired a plumber and don't have any toilets that need plunging, well, Japanese labor law considers that Management Error and not something which rises to the exceptional bar required to consequence an employee. Hire three plumbers but only have two plumbers worth of toilets? Get better at math.
- derefr 10y ago
  I wonder if you could simply retain an external firm to act as the Beeminder kind of punishment-trust on a corporate level. Then you could say "if we aren't allowed to fire these employees, [this company who holds 99% of our money] is instructed and required to flush it down the toilet."
  - patio11 10y ago
    In practice the way to do things is to take a large firm and reconstruct it as a supply chain. Think like, say, a hypothetical car company. Instead of making your own engines, you source them from Engines R' Us. You might be ERU's sole customer but that is neither here nor there. If you have a bad year and need less production staff you just tell ERU "Hey, orders next quarter will be down by 60%. Plan accordingly." ERU might have to take drastic measures. Ah, the lamentable if inevitable realities of being a small business. The car company, of course, the car company would never fire the full-time employees.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      That's a fascinating account, thanks. Certainly not the first place I've heard of that restructures to avoid horizontal or vertical integration, and then funnels everything like it was one company.

derefr 10y ago

What counts as "full time"? Can you just hire everyone part-time at ~39 hrs/wk? (Which, I presume, is the strategy international chains like McDonalds would advise for their Japanese franchises.)

patio11 10y ago
A slight misnomer; the relevant question is whether you're a full employee (正社員) or contract employee (契約社員).

SilasX 10y ago

Okay, but even from the Ebeneezer Scrooge perspective, wouldn't it still be better for the business to actually do that -- try to find something they can competently do, rather than just pay to idle them? Or is the the Boring Room what they do with the genuinely hopeless cases?

smallnamespace 10y ago
> try to find something they can competently do I think you're underestimating some second-order terms here: - You saddle a team with someone who is obviously 'unwanted', which can sap that team's morale (plus that person has no relationship with the team) - Putting them in the boring room is really a punishment meant to let other people know that they should quietly go (the NY education department also had 'rubber rooms' for teachers in similar situations) - If your intention is really to get rid of someone, any spent time training them in a new role is literally a waste of time -- you'd rather be training someone else who will be there long term
- SilasX 10y ago
  That would be my second paragraph.