251–260 of 266 posts
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Layers of middlemen The company itself is contracting, they just cut out a huge value-skimping set of middlemen, and the savings involved mean they can simultaneously undercut their competitors while pocketing more money, which is fed into employees' salaries.
Does middlemen here mean middle managers, or layers of contractor agencies?
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…
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How did you get to know what they told the client? Your bosses wanted you to know, so you didn't say the wrong things, if the client asked something? (eg so you knew to day yes if the client asked if you had two years experience)
My boss asked me to change my resume and show experience of 2 years in Informatica. Also, I had to lie to client about experience during introduction. My client was non technical person and we use to get work from Onsite coordinator
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In my experience it's the same with western/American consultancies.
Yeah, similar story from Western Europe - graduate consultancy gave me 3 months of Java programming material to essentially self-teach myself straight out of university with 0 programming experience. 3 months later I was starting a C# role at a bulge bracket investment bank where the team was expecting someone with at least some exp. seeing as I was costing 75kpa to them (I received 20k as salary). Only reason I didn…
The boss in the client company (the investment bank)? (Not in the agency that employed you?)
I wonder what your coworkers in the client company thought about you / your skills, in the beginning
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> 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. Have you used anything digital in Japan? I find the interfaces to be fast, user friendly, and energy dense. Far better quality than what most of the western software people put out. You migh…
I can see that you mean well but I really cannot agree with this statement.
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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.
I've heard that big, well-known consulting companies have refined this pattern into a business model that scales even better. Why do any sort of progression, when you can just have a bunch of skilled people visiting customers to secure contracts, and once projects are started, they can be substituted for an army of juniors? Meanwhile, the seniors go secure more contracts elsewhere.
Basically you get what you pay for. Large consulting companies offer peanuts compared to good software developer salaries. But compared to the salaries you can expect in other fields of engineering if you are an average student (considering the glut of mediocre engineering colleges here)- consulting salaries seem decent.
Create a branch office in India and offer the expected salaries for software engineers and you can find great developers.
It would be interesting to see how the company would have performed had he raised employees equity instead of salary? I think having equity incentivizes employees to focus more on the welfare of the company than a fixed salary. I may be wrong though
I think this is true, but all things being equal employees will value $1 in salary much more than $1 in equity. So to get the same impact of higher salary, you have to give a large amount of equity. There are pros and cons.
Increased equity = Push employees to work for company stock growth.
But yes, $1 equity is not same as $1 salary to the employees
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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…
You're right about paying people differently based on life circumstances - but this generally happens in the form of substantial tax cuts for couples with a non/part time working wife (e.g. [2]), rather than by paying them more (although there are some government benefits like a child allowance).
Mostly nitpicking here! Appreciate your contributions to this thread, you're right on the money for the most part
[1]: https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00759/ [2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-JRTB-17152
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> 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.
Americans really take the cake when it comes to creating exclusive "close the door behind you" communities which advantage the already relatively wealthy kids to hog the next generation of opportunity. Just think Silicon Valley.