14 ms·

> Add that to the Japanese working culture where tenure is merit, and staying in the same company is valued by employers in general. imo this is by far the big

• robertlagrant 3y ago
  This can have negative effects too. While I don't think "society" (who's that?) rewards people who job-hop. However, being willing to move to the employer who values you the most every couple of years is bound to increase your salary, because you're optimising your match to the market. I wonder how Japanese businesses avoid recognising this value, unless they just frown on people moving around.
  • kmlx 3y ago
    true, but japanese society values stability more than anything. as such, the value of increasing salary by job-hopping is dwarfed by the unpredictability it generates. but there are a lot of other negative effects. being stuck in a dead-end job is a common issue for example. of course, i am heavily generalising here, so grain of salt and all of that.
    • my12parsecs 3y ago
      Japan is basically socialism when it comes to values and the actions people take. Limited tolerance for big change or extreme competition, very static communities and low mobility. It used to work uptill the 80's, but in the age of innovation and change, it's backfiring.
      • dragontamer 3y ago
        That's not what socialism means. Socialism is state-controlled means of production, IIRC.
        • a_cardboard_box 3y ago
          Socialism is worker-controlled means of production. State-controlled means of production is socialism if the workers control the state (which is generally not the case for states that call themselves "socialist").
          • red-iron-pine 3y ago
            Youre kidding yourself if you think the average worker in Japan has much say in the company, or how those companies direct the state they're conservative, in the sense they don't like change, but that ain't nothin to do w/ Karl M
            • a_cardboard_box 3y ago
              I don't think Japan is socialist.
            • a1o 3y ago
              There's nothing in their answer that indicates this, you are confusing with the other person.
          • M95D 3y ago
            No, that's communism, or at least what communist propaganda say it is. In communism the means of production are controlled by the state (saying they're controlled by the workers, but it's false). AFAIK, the means of production (large ones, not a one-man-tailor-shop) were never controlled by the workers, except maybe in the extremely short periods of anarchism.
        • M95D 3y ago
          No, that's communism.
          • robertlagrant 3y ago
            Depends who you ask, but Marx used the two interchangeably. Lenin thought that Socialism was Communism stage 1.[0] But I think it's pretty normal to see Socialism as State-owned means of production. Trust your bureaucrats! [0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/communism/Marxian-communism https://www.britannica.com/topic/communism/Marxian-communism
      • themaninthedark 3y ago
        Japanese society is collectivism, not socialism. They have a long history and many traditions around keeping social harmony. This is has both good and bad effects. This gets confused for socialism because when action happens, everyone is on the same page and working to support the action. Before that point, there are lots of meeting and discussions to create harmony and make sure that everyone agrees with the action. Sometimes this is lead bottom up, workers will get an idea and circulate it to get everyone's buy in but without the upper management's approval, no one will try an idea for fear of causing offense. Which leads me in to how they are very authoritarianism, if the boss tells you a poster is blue not green, everyone will agree that it is blue. Only after the boss is gone will people stand around and question the edict. If you look at how Toyota reacted to electric vehicles, someone did not like the idea or their pet project was fuel cells and that is the direction they took for a long time, rather than hedge their bets and split focus that is what they were committed to and now they are late to the EV party where they had a large head start with the Prius.
    • M95D 3y ago
      > being stuck in a dead-end job is a common issue for example. A job would look like a dead-end only if you hate it.
      • filoleg 3y ago
        Hate has nothing to do with a job being a dead-end. A dead-end job just means that there is nowhere to go from there, your progressed as high as you possibly could in it, and staying there won’t help you with your future career elsewhere neither. Kind of an extreme example, but it illustrates the point well: that one forgotten employee from the infamous reddit thread[0] who got hired, the company had a mismanagement shitshow, and he eventually ended up having no manager and no assignments/work for months. He realized they just forgot about him and continued showing up to work to just play games and relax by himself, all while collecting the paycheck for over a year. IIRC he mentioned enjoying this, but worrying about what could happen if they “unforget” about him. That situation was a classic example of a dead-end job, even though OP was having a good time at first. P.S. The original threat wasn’t the most popular one, but the follow up to it with how he eventually got found out (about a year after the original post) was massive[1]. 0. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/s/gUfaIZ65QI https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/s/gUfaIZ65QI 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/s/vj71mPNGAw https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/s/vj71mPNGAw
        • M95D 3y ago
          > A dead-end job just means that there is nowhere to go from there, your progressed as high as you possibly could in it, and staying there won’t help you with your future career elsewhere neither. If you love your job, you wouldn't want to go anywhere else or "progress" in your career. BTW, what is that "progress" in a career? Endless better pay? Longer job title? More work? More difficult work? Switch to management (that's a different career to me)? The example is not relevant. That's not a dead-end job. If there's no work, then that's no longer a job at all.
  • eloisant 3y ago
    Western employers don't deliberately reward people who job-hop, but their actions actually encourage employees to job-hop. - Not investing in people enough (e.g. training) - Prefer outside candidates to internal promotions - Not willing to give significant raises, but willing to hire new people at a higher salary All those actions end up rewarding job-hoppers, even if it's probably not the intended goals behind this employers' behaviour.
    • neilv 3y ago
      > Western employers don't deliberately reward people who job-hop, Don't techbro employers also deliberately reward people to job-hop to them, from where the person is currently, by knowingly providing a big pay bump over the person's current place?
      • filoleg 3y ago
        Kinda yes and no. The “no” part comes from understanding what’s happening. And what’s happening is that for every year you work there, the pay for the level you are at increases across all of them. However, you wouldn’t be getting those increases (you would still get some, just not as significant). Talking about averages, it means that the person who got hired for the same level as you at the same company 3 years later would get paid noticeably more than you currently are (unless share prices skyrocketed, but we are talking about current compensation, not future or past; if shares tanked since you started, the new employee gets an even better deal). Assuming no promotions or anything like that in the meantime (e.g., you are at your terminal level already or you just need more time for a promotion), you are SOL. It was almost comical at times. The mid-level dev i was working with was getting paid not that significantly more than me (an entry level dev at the time), and was only doing a little bit better mostly due to his old shares (or whatever was left of it, as he was diversifying heavily and selling the stock on vest and dumping it into etfs, so he missed out on his massive chest of old shares going 5x). He had been with the company for 6-7 years at that point. Every dev hired at his level at the time i was working with him would get paid about 50% more than him in total comp. So yeah, the other employers would pay him more if he switched, but they aren’t “rewarding” him for job-hopping, it’s more like his current employer just not paying him as much as they would for a new hire at his level, because they are betting on the fact that he would just stay due to inertia or whatever other reasons. And guess what, they were right, as he is still there and the company saved a lot of money on him and others in a similar situation. That’s where the good old boomerang trick of leaving, working for a bit elsewhere, and then coming back comes from. You get your salary “adjusted” twice, and then you come back. Note: this usually only applies reliably up to senior level (aka the terminal level for the vast majority). Once you go higher or into management-type positions, things stop being this simple and work out rather differently.
  • rightbyte 3y ago
    > I wonder how Japanese businesses avoid recognising this value Current employees are experts at the code base and processes. They have way higher value for the company than other equally good in general non-employees, who would have to spend alot of payed time to get into things.
    • BearOso 3y ago
      This is often true. But some times the older programmers can't adapt to the new technology and we get technical disasters like the newer Pokemon games.
      • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        > can't adapt to This is probably more appropriately said as "don't know". To give a past example, Final Fantasy 7 was pretty famous for having bad character models but it didn't take long for the same team to figure out how to make better ones. FF8 had much more real-looking models. Not many games today look significantly better than FF15 on standard console hardware. Probably the "disaster" in the Pokemon game context is that Nintendo didn't feel the need to keep up rather than that they couldn't keep up. I get the feeling that the generation 10 games are going to be a strong counter statement to such comments. Likely in no small part because the people working on it are the same people who released the games which critics like to call a disaster.
        • emmp 3y ago
          Nintendo does not develop the Pokemon games for what it is worth. The quality of Game Freak's output is notably lower than Nintendo first party releases in general from a technical perspective. Even the original Pokemon games are some of the most famously buggy games of any prominence, so it is nothing new.
        • astura 3y ago
          >Probably the "disaster" in the Pokemon game context is that Nintendo didn't feel the need to keep up rather than that they couldn't keep up. Nintendo is the publisher of the Pokemon games and co-owner of the Pokemon IP. However, they do NOT develop the Pokemon games - that's Game Freak.
  • digging 3y ago
    > "society" (who's that?) It's just the average of individual persons in relevant positions of power. That is, if 80% of direct managers use indirect pressure to get employees to work more than they're contractually expected to, "society" expects people to be overworked. (totally random example, not sure if it applies to Nintendo) (we could discuss deeper causes, there's no saying where those managers learned their behavior, but that's not what we're measuring)
  • emmelaich 3y ago
    I big part of that is Japanese shame / honour. This means the 'worst' employee is not as big a negative than in Western culture.
• slothtrop 3y ago
  Once upon a time, things weren't so different here. Maybe there wasn't an explicit value judgement but you could expect to work 30 years in the same establishment.
• hirvi74 3y ago
  > japanese society and businesses don’t reward people that jump from job to job. I can see why this is good and bad, but honestly, I wish more places in the West were like this too. I've had the same job for 7 years as a programmer, and it baffles me how many people find that surprising/unusual. I seriously rather not look for another job, but I due to some upcoming changes at my work, I think I may have to.