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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

#61

Post by [deleted] »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #59
rileymat2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 managem…

> you could see employees that were more productive by a large factor. And you would never be able to pay enough to keep them and still sell at the low prices. They will move on to bigger and better things as soon as they can, and the proof is the astronomical turnover in almost the entire mid and low tier restaurant market. There’s a reason it has the widespread reputation of being the least desirable, dead end jobs…

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by nsonha »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #58
wait_a_minute wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very interesting. So a person can raise a larger family on an engineer’s salary and be happy in Japan? An American expat.

At many Japanese colleges, graduating with ~$40k/year at an office job is considered success after undergoing "seishoku katsudou" which the junior year college hunting process, as long as the company is of good repute. As japan is very homogenous culture wise relative to other countries, it's very common for people to generally start families before ~25/by the end of their 30s. $40k is a salary under which doing this…

> if engineers in America are ridiculously overpaid, or

why do you only compare to Japan and EU? American engineers get paid more than anyone else (except for EU outliers). I make slightly above 100k in Australia, it's a bit tight with the housing situation and cost of living but it's liveable. Cost of living in the US is lower except for maybe healthcare but engineers get companies pay for them anyway.

I don't have insights into other engineering, but I think software engineers are overpaid. Would I enjoy being overpaid? Of course, but it's hard to say it's fair pay considering what people in other professions are making.

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

#64

Post by yocheckitdawg »

wait_a_minute wrote: post #54
hardwaresofton wrote: post #50

Some context on the japanese job market from what I've seen: - The entire japanese job market's wages are depressed[0] - In 2019, pressure had to come from the PM (not the local unions) to raise the minimum wage to 1000 yen/hour (~$9/hour)[1] - Engineers are underpaid here, possibly more so than the EU in relation to the US. This is amplified for japanese companies (whether "black"[1] or not) - With nationalized heal…

This is very interesting. So a person can raise a larger family on an engineer’s salary and be happy in Japan? An American expat.

One thing I have been wondering about from the outside is if part of what keeps Japanese lifestyle's relatively cheap is that the population is so homogenous (& seemingly law-abiding) that there doesn't appear to be the same emphasis on living in a "good area" as in other countries for personal security reasons.

I wonder if this acts as a somewhat hidden subsidy to life whereas for people in many Western countries it is normal to think "there is no way I am living in area X/Y/Z" due to security concerns for them or their families, in Japan you basically don't need to take that into consideration at all. Everywhere is pretty safe (relatively speaking).

This is all speculation and I don't live in Japan, don't speak Japanese, and have never even been to Japan. So it is all based on reading other's views/articles etc.

Even if I am completely wrong here, it is interesting to consider the economic costs of lack of personal security for men and especially women. All the extra costs paid, opportunities missed etc.

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

#65

Post by koilke »

Having had experience in a company that acts as middleperson/outsourcing company, many of the employees where working for company A and then outsource to work for company B. They would be hired as full time employees at company A and let us say in my example start with a salary at around 30k USD per year and the company A would receive around 120k USD per year by letting that employee work for company B.

I thought it felt strange to know(although they tried to keep it secret) that one received about 25% of the work one did in terms of salary. This was a hugely profitable business model for a company and in a more competitive economy, such models would be difficult. Apparently, this gentleman realised that if you can cut off these middlepersons there are great opportunities for business, you could double and triple the salaries of the employees and probably still make a profit.

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

#67

Post by lotsofpulp »

ecpottinger wrote: post #49
rileymat2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 managem…

Equally important, when I work at Arby's the quality of some of the workers was questionable at best, but because of the pay rate the better workers soon found work elsewhere and most who were left clearly did not as good or fast of a job as they could. I only stayed since I only had to work in the early morning and the work was less than a block from my house. Also the other worker "Dave" was studying robotics at th…

> Looking back, if the store had more workers like myself and Dave, I bet we could have increased the sales 20-50%.

The fact that there are tens of thousands of restaurants not hiring workers like yourself or Dave to increase sales 20% to 50% means there must be something preventing that. Such as insufficient number of workers like yourself or Dave at the wages they can pay and also sell at a low enough price, or the inevitability of workers like yourself to leave for greener pastures, or maybe sales would not go up 20% to 50%.

Either way, the market data is very clear for some businesses that they aren’t able to necessarily differentiate themselves at scale to earn enough profit to offset the costs.

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

#68

Post by hardwaresofton »

nsonha wrote: post #62
hardwaresofton wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At many Japanese colleges, graduating with ~$40k/year at an office job is considered success after undergoing "seishoku katsudou" which the junior year college hunting process, as long as the company is of good repute. As japan is very homogenous culture wise relative to other countries, it's very common for people to generally start families before ~25/by the end of their 30s. $40k is a salary under which doing this…

> if engineers in America are ridiculously overpaid, or why do you only compare to Japan and EU? American engineers get paid more than anyone else (except for EU outliers). I make slightly above 100k in Australia, it's a bit tight with the housing situation and cost of living but it's liveable. Cost of living in the US is lower except for maybe healthcare but engineers get companies pay for them anyway. I don't have…

> why do you only compare to Japan and EU? American engineers get paid more than anyone else (except for EU outliers). I make slightly above 100k in Australia, it's a bit tight with the housing situation and cost of living but it's liveable. Cost of living in the US is lower except for maybe healthcare but engineers get companies pay for them anyway.

Well those are just the biggest/most relevant tech labor markets I could think of, roughly by GDP. I don't know much about Australia but couldn't comment there, thanks for the insight.

> I don't have insights into other engineering, but I think software engineers are overpaid. Would I enjoy being overpaid? Of course, but it's hard to say it's fair pay considering what people in other professions are making.

I don't think comparing pay across professions makes sense -- why compare a plumber or doctor to what a software engineer does? the outcomes are completely different, the risks are completely different, the upside/profit potential is completely different.

I lean towards considering software engineers as underpaid because the power of automation (whether software or hardware -- because you generally need some kind of soft/firmware to make robots move) is insane. If software engineers were ever paid a percentage of the revenue impact they generate (which is not how markets work, but I digress), software engineers would be paid much much more. I think it might be possible to compare across professions if you think of % of value creation captured let's say but it gets tenuous.

In the end the only "fair" determination is what supply and demand based markets dictate. They're not perfect, but they approximate other forces/influences decently enough. When those aren't enough, governments may need to step in to enact policy.

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

#69

Post by ridaj »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #58
wait_a_minute wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very interesting. So a person can raise a larger family on an engineer’s salary and be happy in Japan? An American expat.

At many Japanese colleges, graduating with ~$40k/year at an office job is considered success after undergoing "seishoku katsudou" which the junior year college hunting process, as long as the company is of good repute. As japan is very homogenous culture wise relative to other countries, it's very common for people to generally start families before ~25/by the end of their 30s. $40k is a salary under which doing this…

Software engineers in Europe aren't "underpaid," there just aren't enough highly successful European tech companies to make the job market there as tight as in the US. So they're paid less than what they'd be paid in the US, but that's just because that's what the market pays there IMO. There isn't a "fair" price other than the market's to judge whether someone is overpaid or underpaid, just offer and demand...

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

#70

Post by judge2020 »

nsonha wrote: post #62
hardwaresofton wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At many Japanese colleges, graduating with ~$40k/year at an office job is considered success after undergoing "seishoku katsudou" which the junior year college hunting process, as long as the company is of good repute. As japan is very homogenous culture wise relative to other countries, it's very common for people to generally start families before ~25/by the end of their 30s. $40k is a salary under which doing this…

> if engineers in America are ridiculously overpaid, or why do you only compare to Japan and EU? American engineers get paid more than anyone else (except for EU outliers). I make slightly above 100k in Australia, it's a bit tight with the housing situation and cost of living but it's liveable. Cost of living in the US is lower except for maybe healthcare but engineers get companies pay for them anyway. I don't have…

Simply looking at the number value might be too surface level for this. The bay area has high wages because of the cost of living - due to the housing crisis and overall pay required to live in the area, FAANG and non-FAANG alike pay more simply in order to have employees that can actually afford living somewhere within an hour of the city - and with remote work, companies are docking employee pay to more competitive rates if they move out of SF[0] (although, with Covid, every metropolitan area has began gravitating towards this issue[1]). While this might mean an overall higher standard of living and nicer cars, it isn't crazy and, after the mortgage, chances are it's closer to the SoL in other cities and possibly Australia.

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companies-cutting-salar...

1: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/ (12% YoY for two years is scary).

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