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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

#211

Post by jogjayr »

novok wrote: post #104
yocheckitdawg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In canada, most places are not 'bad' areas, but just lower income or higher income. The competitiveness to live a richer area to get better schools is not much of a thing, almost a foreign concept.

> The competitiveness to live a richer area to get better schools is not much of a thing, almost a foreign concept

Are you sure about that? A lot of real-estate listings I see here boast about having good schools.

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

#212

Post by peter_d_sherman »

>"Masaru Tange

says the strategy that turned his company into one of Japan’s best-performing stocks may be surprising: He buys smaller firms and boosts their workers’ pay.

Tange’s

Shift Inc., a software tester

, acquires other businesses

near the bottom of the industry supply chain

and

raises their engineers’ salaries.

He says he’s able to do this and still charge competitive prices by

cutting out layers of companies that serve as middlemen in the outsourcing process.

And having more workers leads to higher sales."

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

#213

Post by theshrike79 »

Tade0 wrote: post #147
jussij wrote: post #118

> Tange, 46, says his business model is an attempt to remove inefficiencies in Japan’s software industry, where layers of subcontractors take cuts on orders before passing the work to another company below. This reminds me of a role I once had back in the late nighties. I was hired on contract by a multi-national consultancy firm to help out on one of their projects. The need someone to come in with good C programmin…

This is still alive and well in eastern Europe - I worked for such companies. They would go a step further and lie that: -They can quickly expand that team of three mid-level developers to eleven, adding mostly seniors. -A team of junior to mid developers is comprised of seniors. -The team is working at FTE on this project and has no other responsibilities. Currently stakeholders often have to resort to requesting th…

Yup, this was a well-known (in the IT circles) working model for a prominent Finnish IT firm.

They brought out all of the most highly educated people front and center when bidding a project. People with masters and doctorates in the field. Dozens of them.

Of course they won every project bid.

Then the experienced people leave to front the next big project and the actual work is being done by people fresh out of school combined with outsourced teams.

The result was utter shit every single time, but their sales people had the magic touch and managed to get the clients to sign the weirdest contracts. All missing features and bugs were usually fixed at a hourly rate in a leisurely pace. Pure profit every second.

I worked for a small firm that managed to snag a few of those projects, mostly because of our legend of a salesman. The customers were astonished more than once when we delivered features in weeks, not in months or years. We consulted them during development instead of at end of a quarterly cycle. One time our caffeine-for-blood 10x coder actually coded a full proof-of-concept implementation during the sales meeting discussing the project =)

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

#214

Post by bluGill »

theshrike79 wrote: post #210
rurounijones wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the exact same problem we have with Indian outsourcing. You get that one who's really damn good at what they do. Just as they are up to speed on your project and working style, they get promoted to manage a group of 10+ engineers. And then you start again with the next one, hoping that they're as good as the previous one.

My company has found good luck in India by not outsourcing, instead we have a branch office. Gives us the ability to grow people to be what we need them to be. Looking at all the names on the buildings around ours, I don't think we are the only ones to figure this out.

There are good people everywhere. You just need to find them, and grow them to where they can shine.

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

#215

Post by bluGill »

hachari wrote: post #204
nicoburns wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but then the question arises: why is software treated differently to other engineering in Japan?

Because software is more an art than an engineering discipline?

Software is - or needs to be - an engineering discipline. It is very much less mature than the others, and the challenges are different too. You wouldn't expect a civil engineer to design a new chip without a lot of training in a completely new discipline.

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

#216

Post by geoduck14 »

markb139 wrote: post #125
JCharante wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm 200cm and been an ad-hoc tourist attraction in various places I've visited :) Except Hanover, where everybody seemed just as tall

I have a friend who is about that tall. Every time my 3 yo sees him, she asks for a ride on his shoulders. They wall around and touch ceiling fans.

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

#217

Post by xilni »

rkangel wrote: post #162
tralarpa wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not OP but I have noticed in several European countries that many companies see software engineering (and IT in general) as a "necessary evil". Even in SMEs selling automation solutions, the perception is that the "real" work is done by the mechanical/electrical engineers and the marketing department, while the software engineers are just...support people, aren't they? And everybody has learned a little bit of p…

I think this is common in the rest of the US/EU as well. The difference between how "tech" companies treat software engineers is very different from how "normal" companies treat software. Tech companies "get" that the difference between good and bad software is enormous and that it's worth doing the work to get good people to build it, other companies usually don't.

Can confirm this was the case in the US, made me promise myself to never take another software engineer role at a non “tech” company ever again which I’ve held to ever since.

They outsourced every possible role in software engineering and IT to India to the bare minimum where all that was left were the devs who worked on the firmware for gov related projects and regulatory concerns meant only US citizens could work on it. For the devs that were left, it was an uphill battle for resources and salaries while it felt like Sales and marketing were put on a pedestal when this company’s entire product was our work.

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

#218

Post by robotvert »

hattori31 wrote: post #158

Hello everyone, this is my company and in the newly created dev department we are looking for Japanese speaking full-stack engineers, designers, Project managers etc based in Japan. Japanese is almost definitely needed, but may make an exception for rockstar level engineers. Remote work (inside Japan), visa support, good salary, even 1 million yen present for joining are in the package. You can find more and contact…

A couple of times I spotted a Mercedes G class around Naka Meguro with a Shift sticker. Your ride?

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

#219

Post by ecpottinger »

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…

Sorry, I think some of them are stupid.

For example: One reason I said we could increase sales is that repeatedly we suggested putting a menu list further from the order window so people could see and decide what to order before we asked for their order. Management refused to even listen. Often someone would drive up and then spend time reading the menu before deciding what to order.

Compare this to my local Dairy Queen, they have two menu displays. One right beside the order intercom and another two car lengths earlier, I often see people when they drive to the order area give their order right away because they know what they want, they already had time to make up their minds.

The fact is, in most places management sucks at their job.

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

#220

Post by ehnto »

yulaow wrote: post #149
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…

Do we get respect as SWE in EU? In every eu state I have been, except maybe uk in some sector, there was the meme that we are "the new blue collar workers" and indeed in a lot of places salaries were pretty much aligned

I am a software developer, and I feel software developers expect a lot more than is reasonable if they consider themselves part of the same society as everyone else. It's just a job like any other, and it's only in certain bubbles that developers are treated like rockstar prodigies.

For the rest of the world, or even just the rest of the US, to expect exceptionally high compensation in order to feel respected is unreasonable in my opinion. Software is an incredible tool and I'm glad to still find ways to love it, but as a profession, it's just like any other.

I have felt this way for a while, because I feel we can do a lot more meaningful work within our communities with software than we currently do. But all the developers are instead busy building Nudity in Kettle Reflection algorithms for market place image uploaders while getting rained on by VC money.

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