Day 262 of writing every day.
I’ll focus my energy on the present and pick up on the half rant about the gaming industry another time. I have what’s basically a job interview tomorrow for a project that hopefully will lead to actual work rather than study time at home. As I mentioned before, I work for a system engineer service (SES) company, something that might be uniquely Japanese as an industry. I am employed by a company who pays me a salary and they basically act as the middleman charged with using their connections and sales to find projects in need of people with certain skills.
If my interview goes well and I find their work hours and whatnot agreeable, and they decide they’d like me on board for the duration they’re asking for my labor, a deal would be made. To my understanding, my company will make a profit by taking a cut of the fees the contracting project is paying for me, which I can assume is the remainder after deducting the salary they pay me. The project pays my employer, my employer pays me, and I go to work at the project. Subcontracting is what I’d sum up how things are done with a lot of tech jobs.
But this might be the result of the difficulty of laying off people after hiring them, at least in Japan. Unexpected layoffs might come with severance packages in the US but labor laws don’t seem to protect people from losing their jobs in the US unless part of a union. Interestingly labor unions seem to be quite rare in Japan and the protection given to workers from layoffs seems to be reminders from a time when the expectation that people would work for the same company until retirement.
The continuing transformation of Japanese society now seems to be leading towards an even bigger opening of the country to foreign workers, especially in tech. I think my shaky transition to my current employer will be for the better despite the setbacks and stress I experienced for the last few months trying to find a place that would hire me. I’m feeling positive and optimistic about the future if things go well, but I’m not going to get comfortable with my situation and need to push on with the learning.
After all, there’s a snobby attitude, in my opinion, in tech where most organizations expect people to come in at least self trained and many have shifted the responsibility of training needed to perform the job to the very people seeking employment and the workers have bear the costs themselves. On top of needing to teach yourself to code, many companies in Japan seem to expect that, even though they set the bar to get in quite high, the pay and hours rarely reflect the value of the skill they’re demanding from workers.
I’m getting paid less in my current contract than my last job even though I should learn to code on my own, whereas my last job really didn’t require anything besides English and native level Japanese, which anyone who’s lived in Japan long enough and bothered trying to integrate will be able to acquire without too much difficulty. I’m hoping that tomorrow will be the start of a new and exciting path forward as my jobs so far have been pretty much dead end jobs.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 