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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

#81

Post by hardwaresofton »

darren_ wrote: post #77
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…

Nitpick but you've repeated it in another comment so maybe worth correcting - 1 million yen is about $9k. 'Super salaryman' would probably be 10 million yen, I'd guess (haven't heard the term, but that doesn't mean much).

Thanks for pointing this out -- yup, 10 million yen is what I meant there, I corrected it in the original comment

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

#82

Post by JCharante »

xupybd wrote: post #52
devoutsalsa wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a 195cm tall, 120kg, non-Japanese, senior developer who has never been to Japan, I kind of want to get a job at a Japanese company and just see what happens.

Try Vietnam, they are the shortest in south east Asia. I'm 190 and couldn't fit in a seat at a restaurant outside of tourist spots.

There's tons of non-tourist spots where you'd fit. It's not super uncommon to find guys who are 180cm or taller, the tallest I've met is 194cm while waiting for the bus.

Even at 181cm you do have to watch your head though.. I've hit my head many times while going up stairs, and for those who don't know stairs are extremely common because many businesses are split up across multiple floors of a narrow building.

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

#83

Post by riffraff »

jppope wrote: post #8
o-__-o wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah! Casual copyright infringement! I guess the reasoning goes, gpt-3 will make journalism go the way of the dodo bird

I think we would all be happier if hacker news rejected sites that had a paywall... unfortunately, those companies keep posting articles on HN ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. And so it goes

I think we would be happier if people paid for quality journalism.

I myself bypass paywalls often, but I am very worried of the ultimate effects of not paying for news.

I wish we had more LWN-style "this article has been made public thanks to X".

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

#84

Post by hardwaresofton »

nsonha wrote: post #78
hardwaresofton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

fair enough, fyi my line of thought is a bit Marxist, you should get paid based on your labour, time, mental energy etc put in the work as much as the result. When you pay people according to only "impacts" you create an incentive to make "viral" things. In software these days even without such incentive taking full effect, over abstraction, one-size-fits-all, github star counting are becoming bigger problems. > you…

> fair enough, fyi my line of thought is a bit Marxist, you should get paid based on your labour, time, mental energy etc put in the work as much as the result. When you pay people according to only "impacts" you create an incentive to make "viral" things. In software these days even without such incentive taking full effect, over abstraction, one-size-fits-all, github star counting are becoming bigger problems.

Hmnn but doing it that way feels like it would devalue doing things smarter which seems to be more beneficial to society. Single-mindedly incentivizing labor seems like it would skewer efficiency -- I guess like most things the right answer is in the middle.

I'm not sure what you mean by "viral" things but I'm trying to discuss only about work output. If the work output is virality (let's say a social media manager), then it makes sense to measure that way, but usually businesses don't deal in that currency -- they deal in product shipped out or contracts landed, etc. That said, I'm well aware that systems that think themselves to be closest to the capitalist ideal are pretty brutal on the cogs in the machine.

As a side note, it's a red flag for me when I see github projects that are too concerned with stars/going viral, or even when I see presentations about projects that mention stars. Everyone thinks it's silly but everyone keeps doing it -- if only we'd stop then people would start judging projects on things other than adoption. Then again, adoption is the biggest metric for most people, because it generally is a proxy for "availability of free support/feature development", and in that sense I'm guilty of the same.

> The fact that you completely ignore the hardware is very telling. CPU has been improved according to Moore's law in the past few decades, if anything modern software engineering failed to live up to that potential and has been free riding on top of progress in hardware.

> It's insane to make robots move but software is a small part of that, there is also mechanical/electrical engineering, battery techs etc. Software sitting at the top of that stack shouldn't takes all the credit. It's very hard to innovate on the lower layers with all the lab work and physical constrains.

Agreed! There is more than enough value to go around to be shared between all those kinds of engineering -- just because I didn't mention lithography engineers or materials science engineers or people who smelt silicon doesn't mean they don't exist and don't deserve to be paid.

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

#85

Post by bobthepanda »

s17n wrote: post #76
judge2020 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is backwards, the high cost of living in the bay area is a result of the high salaries (and the barriers to expanding the housing supply).

It's not really backwards, it's a cycle that reinforces itself.

House expensive -> salaries jump -> people have more money to pay for house -> house becomes more expensive.

This is like arguing about the chicken or the egg. More housing supply would help to a point but it would take an order of magnitude change to make a dent in the current self-reinforcing cycle, and probably would need that level of increased production for a period of time.

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

#86

Post by sombremesa »

yocheckitdawg wrote: post #64
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.

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…

There's definitely 怪しい areas in Japan.

> This is all speculation and I don't live in Japan, don't speak Japanese, and have never even been to Japan.

So what did you base this speculation on?

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

#87

Post by pezezin »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #80
pezezin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are off by an order of magnitude, 1 million yen is ~9k USD. That's a ridiculously low salary here, fine for a college kid with a part time job ("arubaito") at your local konbini, but not much else. Maybe you got confused because China, Japan and Korea group numbers by powers of 10 000 ("man")? Now a 1000-man (10 million yen, around 90k USD or 75k EUR) salary would be amazing, the average Japanese salary is 3 mill…

Thanks for pointing this out -- > That's a ridiculously low salary here, fine for a college kid with a part time job ("arubaito") at your local konbini, but not much else. True -- min wage is 1000 yen, not hard to work out the lowest theoretical yearly salary would be with a 5 day work week. The usual exception of waiters that are below the min wage isn't here since the service sector generally doesn't do tipping. >…

You're welcome.

The worst part is trying to read out loud a number. It's fine when you see a number like 1億6432万4871 and you know exactly where the splits are, but most of the time they will just use commas as thousand separators and write numbers as 164,324,871, and then it becomes really difficult to parse numbers, even for them.

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

#88

Post by hardwaresofton »

bobthepanda wrote: post #85
s17n wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is backwards, the high cost of living in the bay area is a result of the high salaries (and the barriers to expanding the housing supply).

It's not really backwards, it's a cycle that reinforces itself. House expensive -> salaries jump -> people have more money to pay for house -> house becomes more expensive. This is like arguing about the chicken or the egg. More housing supply would help to a point but it would take an order of magnitude change to make a dent in the current self-reinforcing cycle, and probably would need that level of increased produ…

I'm no expert on the history of SV or your housing (I've never lived there, probably never will), but I thought the general story was something like this:

0. California existed

1. Government investment comes to the valley during the cold war in early SV companies

2. Innovation happens in leaps and bounds thanks to the government checkbook

3. Profit is made hand over fist by some people/groups/entities

4. People/groups/entities from (3) buy more of everything

5. More People & entities come in search of interesting ideas/cutting edge technology/profit/fame/etc

6. return to (3)

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

#89

Post by hardwaresofton »

pezezin wrote: post #87
hardwaresofton wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing this out -- > That's a ridiculously low salary here, fine for a college kid with a part time job ("arubaito") at your local konbini, but not much else. True -- min wage is 1000 yen, not hard to work out the lowest theoretical yearly salary would be with a 5 day work week. The usual exception of waiters that are below the min wage isn't here since the service sector generally doesn't do tipping. >…

You're welcome. The worst part is trying to read out loud a number. It's fine when you see a number like 1億6432万4871 and you know exactly where the splits are, but most of the time they will just use commas as thousand separators and write numbers as 164,324,871, and then it becomes really difficult to parse numbers, even for them.

> The worst part is trying to read out loud a number. It's fine when you see a number like 1億6432万4871 and you know exactly where the splits are, but most of the time they will just use commas as thousand separators and write numbers as 164,324,871, and then it becomes really difficult to parse numbers, even for them.

Yep, or trying to figure this out in front of someone you're making a deal with -- normally I'm all alone writing an estimate/invoice when I'm figuring out. Sales in japan is one part of the japanese business experience that I do not do, and avoid every time I can.

Most of the time I just do everything in dollars -- Americans have a reputation for thinking of everything in American terms, so why disappoint? On a serious note though, a lot of local counterparties are fine doing things in dollars here as well.

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

#90

Post by anovikov »

rurounijones wrote: post #46
NalNezumi wrote: post #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 eng…

As a further example: In my last full-on japanese company it was basically impossible to find any developer with more than 3 years experience by accidental design because: 1: No applicants studied computer science in university so they started learning when they joined the company and were assigned a development role. 2: After 3 years they they got promoted to a "manager" level role and stopped doing development. The…

So the real job is being done by Indian outsourcers then? I can't believe that someone who never coded before can get to build anything decent in only 3 years.
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