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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

#141

Post by nsonha »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #108
nsonha wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viral or scalable in business/tech terms, means things that can be sold multiple times. Often times the value is already created and rewarded. In our economy we're not only incentivizing value creation but also building walls around innovations and gatekeeping the fruits of them, so that the innovators, the software developers like you wish, or whoever can earn royalty while no longer innovating.

Yeah, I get where you're coming from but I can't really agree that incentivizing raw labor is the way to get there (to a more equitable outcome for labor). The capital/labor struggle is a deep deep topic, but I think we can say at this point that with automation becoming increasingly common, labor is losing it's leg to stand on. We're going to get a lot farther by reining in capitalism than trying to return to piece…

> I can't really agree that incentivizing raw labor

I read history books, I'm not that stupid.

The reason I bring this up is a couple of comments up you said software creates tremendous value, I guess this is true for many other types of innovations too. You proceeded to say software developers need to be paid proportionate to that value and I disagree there.

If we look at salary as incentive I would say that software engineers get enough incentive to do our job. As long as we get paid better than most other professions, society/the economy don't need to pay us more.

While pay should not be based on labour, it should be capped, probably based on the labour. Otherwise every cog in the machine earns some royalty (infinitely, if the machine scales infinitely) and there is no money left for "non-machine".

The bad thing in this industry is work/life balance, we just need to fix that. Although the pay in some countries are atrocious, I'd say that software engineers in most western countries are fine.

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

#142

Post by Aeolun »

max_hammer wrote: post #129
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…

Its same in Indian IT. When I joined Infosys straight out of university, my salary was approx `$350` per month. They told client, I have 2 years of experience as Informatica developer and charged $50 per hour. Before joining the project, I had never seen the Informatica tool.

This explains a lot of my experience with our offshore engineers.

Glad to see I’m not crazy.

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

#143

Post by hardwaresofton »

concordDance wrote: post #137
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…

> 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's recommend you try doing some back of the envelope logic/math here. I think you'll find the personal…

I have to say I didn't see the the comment in this light, and now I'm wondering if I'm under attuned or if you (and others who posted similarly) are over-attuned.

There's a very real truth to japan's generally law abiding culture and it's the double edged sword of homogeneity. "good area"s didn't signify anything about race/culture difference to me (I wasn't even thinking of foreigners/non) in the negative, but more about how the basic "shared programming" of japanese culture is generally tilted away from crime/disobedience/singular action and towards law abidance/obedience/group action. If you take a look at how certain systems are set up (online security, in person security, how paperwork is done, etc), it can only exist in a country with very tight cohesion which comes from very tightly held shared values (or at least the appearance of that), whether that's a good or bad thing.

I didn't see that the commenter was implying that the heterogeneous portion was responsible for all the crime, but just that the dominant culture was on average more lawful than another might be, and that since that culture was so concentrated crime in general was lower than you might find in other places -- reducing the need to worry for everyone who lived there.

That said, Japan definitely has that kind of insidious/hard-to-demarcate racism/classism/etc. Japan as I've experienced it is just really good at 'other'-ing groups of people in some way or another and you could see it as a product of the culture, their historically generally xenophobic nature (also culture, I guess), or some other things.

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

#144

Post by flamble »

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…

I'm curious what you mean by "homogeneous". I've just had a quick Google and apparently the Gini coefficient in Japan is ~0.3 compared to ~0.48 in the US, which is one definition of "homogeneous". Another search turned up some suggestion that said coefficient correlates well with the percentage of people who have been victims of theft/assault or who feel unsafe walking home alone.

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

#145

Post by toxik »

rurounijones wrote: post #117
anovikov wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The stuff did get built in the company, usually half by contractors and half by the internal staff developers under guidance form the aforementioned managers. It was just build very slowly and it was held together by sticky tape and dreams. One manager spent 50% of his time keeping an old system he wrote as a developer years earlier from completely falling over because no one else could understand it, byzantine doesn…

This would be a pretty good short film.

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

#146

Post by hardwaresofton »

nsonha wrote: post #141
hardwaresofton wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I get where you're coming from but I can't really agree that incentivizing raw labor is the way to get there (to a more equitable outcome for labor). The capital/labor struggle is a deep deep topic, but I think we can say at this point that with automation becoming increasingly common, labor is losing it's leg to stand on. We're going to get a lot farther by reining in capitalism than trying to return to piece…

> I can't really agree that incentivizing raw labor I read history books, I'm not that stupid. The reason I bring this up is a couple of comments up you said software creates tremendous value, I guess this is true for many other types of innovations too. You proceeded to say software developers need to be paid proportionate to that value and I disagree there. If we look at salary as incentive I would say that softwar…

> I read history books, I'm not that stupid.

Didn't imply you were! I am assuming the best as people do here on HN.

> The reason I bring this up is a couple of comments up you said software creates tremendous value, I guess this is true for many other types of innovations too. You proceeded to say software developers need to be paid proportionate to that value and I disagree there.

> If we look at salary as incentive I would say that software engineers get enough incentive to do our job. As long as we get paid better than most other professions, society/the economy don't need to pay us more.

> While pay should not be based on labour, it should be capped, probably based on the labour. Otherwise every cog in the machine earns some royalty (infinitely, if the machine scales infinitely) and there is no money left for "non-machine".

So I still disagree with this point, but I want to point out that I am in favor of the idea that every cog in the machine earns a royalty on every piece of the process. I believe both machine and non-machine could win in that situation. If you have a new idea (and the funding to go after it, etc) then you get to decide the cap table essentially -- so it's up to you to set rates on the royalties and up to labor to agree/deny. How you'd work out royalties in relation to work done/etc is difficult, but it's something that feels like it can be worked out. Pensions used to be a thing, and they're kind of like that.

> The bad thing in this industry is work/life balance, we just need to fix that. Although the pay in some countries are atrocious, I'd say that software engineers in most western countries are fine.

Weird, I think that work/life balance for software is actually really good -- you're not going to find much work/life balance (or companies that even pretend to care about that) in the blue collar job market. The ability to up and move with transferable skills is really remarkable in tech as well... In short I agree with you that tech has it good, but I don't think it makes sense to restrict that "good" based on the "bad" of other fields -- we don't need to be equal. If workers are getting exploited outside of tech, let's make them less exploited and get them what they're worth -- if tech workers are exploited let's get them what they're worth.

The question of how to determine that worth is the big difference we're at loggerheads about I think, and I don't think it makes sense to judge by amount of "work" done. That very idea is rooted in some sort of moralistic argument that work/expenditure is good/virtuous/worth being paid for, and I don't think that's a shared value. Labor is given meaning by the fruit it produces, and that's how I'm trying to judge the value of labor -- the value it produces (whether immediately or down the line) -- royalties do that rather well compared to our current system.

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

#147

Post by Tade0 »

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 the CVs of all the people involved, but that doesn't shield them from that last trick.

Of course the client is billed $100+/h, while developers can count on around 25-30% of that.

A lot of people got rich like that around here.

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

#148

Post by imtringued »

anovikov wrote: post #90
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…

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.

3 years is enough time, but you will produce trash for your first year. The problem is that you just spent 3 years training someone and now you throw all that training into the trash and start from scratch with the next guy.

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

#149

Post by yulaow »

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

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

#150

Post by nsonha »

unishark wrote: post #91
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…

If pay is increased solely to compensate for house prices, then working in a higher cost of living area is still better because the job buys you a more valuable house. Imagine if house prices were a non-issue because companies just give you a free house when you start. Would you consider still the job in a cheap housing area equal? Anyway at the senior levels the pay is even more stupid high in SV, way more than anyt…

individual contributors top at around 140k (AUD180k package), but the 90% tops at 128k which is a "tech lead salary". I don't have the experience to tell how high tech leads go, but I'm guessing 200k.

Some outliers are Optiver (a prop trading firm) paying 160k (half of which is bonus) and Google paying (up to I heard) 125k to grads. However the number of companies like that in Australia you could count on one hand (Amazon, Atlassian, Canva), so there is nothing to drive average salary up like in SV.

RSU is way less common. There are also cases of double standards such as companies founded in Australia expanding to the US offers way better perks and RSU to US staff but stop offering RSU to new Australian hires.

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