This is a post I made on LinkedIn that I’d like to share with a broader audience.
I read a lot about Japan facing a shortage in IT workers but no matter how many people you bring in, it’s not going to improve the situation unless the fundamental structure of how companies operate and the culture of needing to dedicate so much time and effort to ineffective and inefficient communication.
As a “foreign worker” who entered the Japanese IT industry with no previous experience, I will say that the work style is not appealing to foreigners.
1. Low pay in general unless you’re in the 1% in terms of skills, connections, and working for a nontraditional company.
2. Heavy use of time wasted on meetings and ineffective communication methods rooted in company “tradition” that’s not reflective of how the rest of Japanese operates in the modern day.
3. Poor interpersonal communication skills in general.
My story:
Japanese labor laws make it difficult to terminate full-time employees, which may be good for the workers but my belief is that it’s working against the interests of everyone. Not many workers actually want to work for the same company for the rest of their lives because there’s no incentive to stay long except for maintaining their current income.
The loophole to getting full-time employees that companies can let go off is to call on the services of IT staffing companies. I found my way into the industry as an employee at one of these staffing companies.
Despite their claim, IT staffing companies don’t need to have any expertise but just have to fill themselves up with chumps like myself who hear the IT industry is the place to be. We don’t need to have experience or skills to get hired as long as we’re willing to learn outside of work hours on our own. The success plan is to gain real experience via entry/junior level roles on projects and operations that need the extra help.
There are plenty of these types of staffing companies that will pay basically minimum wage salaries which will be enough to survive if living alone because they also include generally 20 hours of prepaid overtime. Prepaid overtime doesn’t force you to work overtime, it just means that you won’t be getting more than the cheap salary you’re getting unless you put in over two hours of overtime everyday.
People that sign up for work in the IT industry are willing to take these posts at staffing companies because we’re betting on a big jump in salary if we stick around long enough to get the necessary experience and skills to get a job elsewhere. You don’t really get to choose where you work though you can state your preferences to get the staffing company salesperson to look for anything that fits your preferences, but in the end you’re left with whatever you can get based on your (lack of) experience and taking the compromise or getting reduced pay (60%) that’s going to force you to use your savings.
I’m just past one year and things are far from looking up. I’m looking to get out of IT perhaps.
#japan #it
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