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CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries

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Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries

#31
post #7

It's not the whistle that pulls the train! Chances are that Tange hired well qualified employees tht fit the corporate culture (and fired the ones who didn't fit in), and continued to reward as objectives were met. Remind me of Netflix and GE 20 years ago.

GE was financial engineering and cooking the books, though.

Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you what you mean. If you're working somewhere like Netflix I'm assuming the median employee is quite good, so "scaling down" your output to match that doesn't really make sense to me.

I'm guessing he means if you work somewhere that isn't "we only hire the best, and we'll fire you if you're not" like Netflix, the better employees realize they can work half as much for the same pay and just enjoy life more. These employees are optimizing for free time, not salary. As someone who thinks big tech pays ridiculously more than is necessary for a comfortable lifestyle, if I could work 1 day a week for 1/…

Ok that makes sense. But like you say, I'm not sure working so little makes sense.

10x more productive is probably a poor way to phrase what I really mean. 10x more impactful probably captures what I mean better.

Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries

#34
post #22

Sounds good but does this scale in the long term? Looks like a resource placing firm. Not sure about japan, but in India it is expected that on average as an employee you get a 10 to 15% hike year on year primarily due to inflation pressures. How would this company be able to afford this if they are both reducing prices for customers while simultaneously increasing base salaries. Wouldn't the employees leave after 2…

Surely it's a good thing to have employees leave who think $X is less than (X/2)*1.15

Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries

#35
While establishing a "cause & effect" here seems very hard, from my personal experience working in software field in Japan, I think the winning concept here is actually the combination of removing middleman and paying good salaries.

Japan is very very behind in IT/digitalization compared to most western countries. This doesn't just mean it's behind in product portfolio and quality, but that perception of software engineer & managers and still quite behind. The respect that a lot of software engineers enjoys in US/EU is not quite there yet in Japan(and salary often reflect this).

The C-suite usually doesn't have a firm understanding of software/IT world, and instead ends-up hiring a lot of "Scrum-experts/Agile coaches" and hires software engineers from consultancy or recruitment companies for cheap. There's ofc companies that doesn't fall in this category, but for middle-sized companies in Japan (which is the bulk of the economy), this is the true state of things. Middle-men in Japan have therefore been way more encroaching on this, and they have the incentive to not improve the respect/social standing the software engineers have.

"Removing managers" in this article does not mean the same thing as it would in US/EU, conditions are different.

Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries

#36
post #22

Sounds good but does this scale in the long term? Looks like a resource placing firm. Not sure about japan, but in India it is expected that on average as an employee you get a 10 to 15% hike year on year primarily due to inflation pressures. How would this company be able to afford this if they are both reducing prices for customers while simultaneously increasing base salaries. Wouldn't the employees leave after 2…

I think the point would be you are already earning above average for the industry. No guarantee the next job will match that salary for the same type of work. Sure you can go the promotion route but the. You don't need to leave the company to pursue that.

Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries

#38

I'd like to question the premise. How confidently can you associate cause and effect here? Based on what can he guarantee that raises in salary caused the company to grow? If the formula is so simple couldn't other companies copy that and grow 5500%?

>How confidently can you associate cause and effect here? You cannot. It depends if you’re buying commodified labor and selling commodity products. Walmart and McDonalds franchisees are not going to see much difference other than higher labor expenses and reduced sales due to higher prices at competitors.

Is this true?

When I worked as an assistant manager at Burger King, you could see employees that were more productive by a large factor. If paying them more led them to stay longer it would have been a big win.

The best could do the work of 2-3 people, if paying them 1.5x more means they stay, you more profits on lower labor costs.

What is hard to do is create a repeatable process for this. And trusting local management.

Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you what you mean. If you're working somewhere like Netflix I'm assuming the median employee is quite good, so "scaling down" your output to match that doesn't really make sense to me.

I'm guessing he means if you work somewhere that isn't "we only hire the best, and we'll fire you if you're not" like Netflix, the better employees realize they can work half as much for the same pay and just enjoy life more. These employees are optimizing for free time, not salary. As someone who thinks big tech pays ridiculously more than is necessary for a comfortable lifestyle, if I could work 1 day a week for 1/…

Instead of working one day a week, just accumulate enough capital and then quit and do whatever you want?
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