For a smaller company I can see how this might be a problem, but Sony is a sprawling tech company with tons of divisions. That they're paying 40 people to sit around in a room with nothing to do is simply a failure of management. It's pretty cool that Japan has such a strong social contract, that executives have responsibility to and for their workers. But the social contract isn't the problem there, it's a lack of imagination.
Exactly, large companies are going to get more than 5% turnover per year simply from people retiring / dying. If they cut back on hiring they can fairly quickly shrink and retraining is cheap when your willing to let a 50 year old worker sit in a room at full pay.
The real issue is older workers are expensive and companies want a cheap workforce not lower headcount. Society on the other hand benefits when older workers are employed and can't supply unlimited quantities of well trained and cheap workers.
In Japan, cutting back on hiring is a huge problem. If you don't get a job straight out of college, you're effectively a second-class citizen. There is no second chance, there is no plan B. The job for life cuts both ways in Japan.
If everyone else believes that second-round hires are also second-rate hires, you can't necessarily break the standard alone. First-round hires will see you as a bad company and pass, and business partners will doubt your work and look to your competitors.
Not all systemic inefficiencies are available to be fixed by individual companies; if the rest of society will punish you too badly for deviating then the inefficient solution is the "smart" one.
(Of course, there might be an opportunity to staff an American tech startup or something that doesn't need those social connections.)
Foreign language teaching in Japan is notoriously poor, which severely limits the opportunities for remote work. Remote work wouldn't provide many of the non-cash benefits of being a salaryman - social status, access to housing and credit and a multitude of other things.
Aha, that sounds reasonable. But still, can't help but think that there is some untapped potential here. Imagine someone from the outside learning Japanese and then hire a bunch of "second tier" japanese would-be-but-never-became salarymen. Is it unthinkable that this could foster a special loyalty to this hypothetical company?
One of the smart things my company has done in Japan is hire much higher than industry average number of women and be ahead of industry in support for maternity etc. Most Japanese companies don't really support career growth of women and so we've been lucky to access a lot of great talent.
I think being from the US you underestimate the scale and reach of the enormous vertically integrated corporations of Japan. The US has antitrust laws which allow for a lot more potential disruption. Japan does not.
This is gradually changing. I worked for a small Japanese company that eventually went under and if I look at my ex coworkers they are doing well. Some of them became freelancer/consultants and are being paid more than people I know who work at Sharp and have been hired directly out of university.
Freelancers generally get paid more on an hourly basis than full time in part because their hours aren't guaranteed. I think in Japan this also could be due to the implied longer term guarantees implied in the full time salaries that don't need to be paid to freelancers.
Yes, definitely and as I mentioned in another comment, people who are not employed with a full time position will have a lot of difficulties getting a loan from a bank.
But, in the case of my ex-coworkers, the difference is significant enough that they are in a much better situation in term of how much money they earn and how much hours they work than people working at let's say Sharp (and Sharp is still much better than a lot of places with full time employees because they limit overtime).
My understanding is that ending up as a Freelancer is really the worst possible outcome for a Japanese salaryman.
It's not surprising they earn more because salaryman salaries are very low but they have no social status, job security, benefits, or pension that their old job gave them.
They do have pensions and health care but they have to pay for it out of their salary (which also explains the difference in term of earnings).
However at least for Software Engineers (I don't have experience in other fields), the difference is big enough to more than make up for the price of health care and pension and the loss of benefits. The only real problem is the lack of social status which means that it's very hard for a freelancer to get a bank loan to buy an house or an apartment.
> If you don't get a job straight out of college, you're effectively a second-class citizen. There is no second chance, there is no plan B.
How is this any different here in the 'States? If I'm still looking for work after I graduate, any interviews will have an unanswerable question: "why haven't you done anything since (graduation date here)?"
There are plenty of answers that will be acceptable to many employers - "I've taken a gap year to go travelling", "I've been taking my time to find the best opportunity", "I've been working towards a Masters", "I've been looking after an elderly relative", "I've been doing charity work" or even "it's a tough economy, I haven't found anything yet".
A gap in your employment history isn't ideal, but it isn't a complete showstopper, especially if you have valuable STEM skills. It's possible to retrain and change careers, it's possible to get a job through pure gumption, it's possible to work your way up from sales clerk to area manager. Not easy, but possible.
To most Japanese companies, the idea of offering a salaried position to a 22 year old is simply inconceivable. Either you get hired out of college and become a salaryman, or you bear the black mark of the freeter for the rest of your life. If you're a freeter, your chances of prosperity and security are essentially nil.
The situation for young Americans is less than ideal, but the situation for young Japanese people is Kafkaesque.
To some degree, you can do something. Contribute to OSS, or work for a charity, while looking for paid work and you can use this question as an opening.
On the other hand, studies have shown that starting a career in a bad economy will damage your salary for life...
Yup, voluntary redundancy was jokingly called the 'muppet retention policy' in a previous job. You announce to your staff that the company has some trouble, and allow all the bright, motivated, and in-demand folks to jump ship with a redundancy package, then you get to soldier on with everyone who's left, but now thoroughly demotivated.
The side effects of labour laws (and, to be clear, I am a big supporter or social / economic justice) can be really difficult.
This is very true. Look at the large US companies that were reluctant to have formal layoffs. They generally had near-monopoly positions, that enabled them to be lazy. (Ma Bell, I'm looking at you!)
Notably, the usual reason to dismiss older, experienced workers is that they cost more. That's why you don't retrain them for entry-level work or some unrelated task.
At the point where you're paying them to do literally nothing, there's not much reason not to redirect employees internally.
>In February, just two years shy of Mrs. Sato’s retirement, a manager had blunt news: “Your job no longer exists.” She refused to quit, and was dispatched to the chase-out room.
Well of course there are going to be problems when you try and lay off someone just a few years before their retirement. I don't see any big cultural differences the article references here. This just sounds like a company trying to rip off their long term workers out of their full retirement package. I'm sure if these retirement packages referenced in the article were anywhere close to what the workers would get on full retirement, of course they would take it rather than going to boredom rooms. The author of this article seems to have simply taken Sonys word that the "retirement packages were generous."
'I heard a great line about this once, and unfortunately I cannot remember the source:
“Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.”
The best employees aren’t compensated with large option grants or eye popping bonuses — they’re simply anointed as “princes”, given their pick of projects to work on, receive plum assignments, and get their status acknowledged (in ways great and small) by the other employees.'
I mean, Chinese society also values social status quite a bit. But nowadays, being wealthy buys social status rather easily in China -- hence the almost gold rush mentality in trying to get wealthy.
I guess what I'm saying is that social status and wealth are two distinguishable things, and in some societies they correlate really well, but in others they don't, and they also have different relative values.
In the US, you can't really buy social status through money directly -- being an anonymous millionaire doesn't get you much more service or adulation than what you're willing to pay for directly.
This is not irrelevant to startups in Japan, either. If you attempt to fire someone who you (unwisely) brought on as a full-time employee, and they contest the firing, you will be brought before a local government functionary to make your case for it.
"They're incompetent at their job." is insufficient grounds for firing. (You need to add "And we spent substantial documented effort retraining them and moving them to other positions, but we have not been able to find one where it worked out.")
I have a tiny company (just me and my wife) in Japan and my accountant tells me never to hire a full time employee. What's the startup culture like in terms of hiring? Do people accept contract positions, or do you need to hire them full time?
Your accountant gives advice very similar to the advice of my accountant and the accountants of my friends.
Japan has, essentially, a bifurcated employment market [+]. There exist people that accept contract positions; contract positions appear to be widely used within e.g. Tokyo startups. There also exist people who would not countenance a contract position.
One of the key hiring challenges in Japanese startups is finding folks who are both a) productive and b) willing to participate in the half of the labor market that people-the-system-views-as-productive do not normally participate in. (One is not normally afforded huge flexibility in switching between these systems.)
There's also the fact that people accepting contract positions are at a significant disadvantage regarding banks if they want to get a loan to buy a house. It's considered lower status to not be a seishain.
But, on the other hand, when it comes to Software Engineering, salaries for contract positions tend to be higher and, in my experience, being a seishain or being a contract worker has no bearing on the competence of the person.
As a new (American) grad I briefly looked into working in Japan. The companies I was interested in were posting for Americans specifically, but they were still hiring people on as salarymen. The rates, even COLA-adjusted, were shockingly low. Like, top-flight companies offering bottom 10% salaries in American terms.
That whole experience has come to make way more sense as I've learned about the contractor divide, and the expectation that salaried workers will "start at the bottom".
Even at the top end, salaries in Japan are shockingly low AFAICT. Especially if you come out here to the countryside, most programmers are working for insurance companies, etc. I know people with 10 years of experience making in the 3-4 million yen (just over $30-40K USD) range. It's one of the reasons I do remote contracts.
Okay, but even from the Ebeneezer Scrooge perspective, wouldn't it still be better for the business to actually do that -- try to find something they can competently do, rather than just pay to idle them?
Or is the the Boring Room what they do with the genuinely hopeless cases?
I think you're underestimating some second-order terms here:
- You saddle a team with someone who is obviously 'unwanted', which can sap that team's morale (plus that person has no relationship with the team)
- Putting them in the boring room is really a punishment meant to let other people know that they should quietly go (the NY education department also had 'rubber rooms' for teachers in similar situations)
- If your intention is really to get rid of someone, any spent time training them in a new role is literally a waste of time -- you'd rather be training someone else who will be there long term
What counts as "full time"? Can you just hire everyone part-time at ~39 hrs/wk? (Which, I presume, is the strategy international chains like McDonalds would advise for their Japanese franchises.)
Run that one by a lawyer, but my understanding is that the bar is approximately "If we do not let them go, we will -- with night-follows-day-certainty -- go under."
If it's simply a matter that you hired a plumber and don't have any toilets that need plunging, well, Japanese labor law considers that Management Error and not something which rises to the exceptional bar required to consequence an employee. Hire three plumbers but only have two plumbers worth of toilets? Get better at math.
With the plumber analogy the bill usually breaks out parts and labor and labor is, well, 100% labor.
With a more Japanese-like job like salaryman at a car manufacturer, the cost of labor per car is extremely low, like $1K to $2K per car regardless of size or cost of the end product, so if you have to bury $100 somewhere in a $60K pickup truck nobody is going to notice, so you end up with "do nothing rooms".
Also don't forget "do nothing rooms" are not Exactly a wasted expense, they are purchasing an option on future labor. If labor demand increases 10% next year for whatever reason, and you fire a guy with 10 years experience, you have committed a major management error, whereas having 10% of your workforce do nothing means you bought an option that fundamentally only costs $100 per automobile sold, so that's pretty cheap insurance in case you have to ramp up or someone dies or unexpectedly retires or something.
I wonder if you could simply retain an external firm to act as the Beeminder kind of punishment-trust on a corporate level. Then you could say "if we aren't allowed to fire these employees, [this company who holds 99% of our money] is instructed and required to flush it down the toilet."
In practice the way to do things is to take a large firm and reconstruct it as a supply chain. Think like, say, a hypothetical car company. Instead of making your own engines, you source them from Engines R' Us. You might be ERU's sole customer but that is neither here nor there. If you have a bad year and need less production staff you just tell ERU "Hey, orders next quarter will be down by 60%. Plan accordingly."
ERU might have to take drastic measures. Ah, the lamentable if inevitable realities of being a small business. The car company, of course, the car company would never fire the full-time employees.
That's a fascinating account, thanks. Certainly not the first place I've heard of that restructures to avoid horizontal or vertical integration, and then funnels everything like it was one company.
In the first season of Silicon Valley, there's a part where (spoilers) a main character gets "unassigned" from a Google parody, and it's mentioned that it's inspired by some Japanese management technique.
This is also what happens to teachers in the New York City school system after they've been caught out reading the newspaper while their students spend all class gambling. They call it the "rubber room".
Technically these teachers are awaiting reassignment, pending arbitration. This is very slow, and I understand that there is a backlog from a long period of time where very little arbitration happened, because the school system was not paying their arbitrators. (Also, they may have decentralized the rubber room in recent years to inhibit visibility.)
Strong laws that aim to protect labour seem to end up being contra-productive. I've seen it in Germany, for example, where it's pretty difficult to fire full-time employees. Berlin startups therefore either force their workforce to be self-employed, or, routinely hire people with a 6-months probationary period just to fire them the week before.
History teaches us what happens without any labour protection, so that's not an option.
But a viable alternative to labour protection is a strong welfare system. That's the classic Denmark vs Germany comparison. Taxes are high in Denmark, but it's easy to hire and fire somebody. Which hurts business more?
Labor protection is much more than protection against firing.
A society needs a sane amount of labor protection. Too much and there won't be jobs (and the economy will suffer), too little and the people will have no power over their lives (and the economy will suffer).
Worse still, that optimum point will change all the time as an economy matures. And I don't think anybody has any good procedure for measuring it.
Income tax is high in Denmark, but the total tax wedge is much lower than in Germany (36.6% in of labour costs in Denmark vs. 49.4% in Germany for a single worker of average salary) [1]. The total employee contributions are similar - in Denmark 35.8% (as percent of labour cost), vs. 33.3% in Germany [2]. The rest is borne by the employer - 0.8% in Denmark vs 16.2% in Germany.
I don't know how this translates into differences in welfare spending (so it is possibly that Denmark spends more on welfare but that Germany just spends far more on other things - I haven't looked), or why the differences are so large, but of the OECD countries, Germany comes in only after Belgium (who always throne high above the rest on these lists) and Austria when it comes to the size of the tax wedge relative to total labour costs. Denmark meanwhile comes in near the OECD average, which was 35.9% in 2015.
Look at the US's GDP history. It started growing faster than Europe at the end of the 19th century. And you say it only enriched the top of our society? First look up what median means, then realize that the US's median income is 50% higher than Germany's. For a population several times larger and several times more diverse.
I thought it was a good point to bring up. Comparing raw income doesn't mean anything -- you need to at least take cost of living into account. 75k is barely livable in SF, but quite comfortable in the Midwest, etc.
If Germans are making less but are worth more... There's interesting things going on that probably need to be taken into consideration in such a conversation.
PPP (Price Purchasing Parity) is the definition of cost of living adjustments. If you see PPP, then that's already been factored in as well as the science can.
Assets minus liabilities doesn't capture the full picture.
If a poor person in the US has a $3000 car they might be poorer on paper than a middle class Singaporean who takes the bus but the latter would have to spend $100k to enjoy the same transportation lifestyle as the former.
Similar for things like detached houses and takeout food which are basic in the US but luxury items in most of the rest of the world.
> but the latter would have to spend $100k to enjoy the same transportation lifestyle as the former.
What exactly does it mean to "enjoy the same transportation lifestyle" and why would it cost them $100k? Singapore is a tiny island with fairly comprehensive public transport, and relatively inexpensive taxis. What exactly is this middle class person missing out on?
> takeout food ... luxury items in most of the rest of the world.
What makes you think that? Takeaway food is readily available in every developed country I've been in, and usually even cheaper in developing ones.
That was my source also and yes the actual difference is a mere 30% more - I was eyeballing it. My point wasn't to get into a pissing contest with who is richer, my point was that the US is no less equal than Germany and no one is bitching about how Germany's economy only enriches the top.
I also linked to statistics which show that most European countries have significantly higher median wealth than the US. (Although notably not Germany for some reason). The difference between the mean and median wealth is also notably high in the US, which suggests greater inequality.
You can't really use slavery or sweatshops as an argument one way or the other here. Sweatshops were by no means limited to the US.
Nor was slavery, for that matter. The main differences is that US slavery was domestic (and mostly contained to the south)[0]. Whereas European imperial powers (England, France, Belgium, etc.) outsourced their slavery, practicing forced relocation of people within their colonies and engaging those colonists in forced labor with the threat of violence[1]. That continued well into the 20th century.
[0] Though not as much as people like to think - the North was very happy to make money off of the slave trade, as long as they didn't permanently hold those slaves.
[1] One can try to engage in the abstract argument of, "well, is it philosophically better to enslave people within each others' native lands, rather than to bring them all to the seat of the empire and enslave them there", but that's a hair that's not worth splitting, and a far cry from the original statement.
> America became the richest, most powerful country
More accurately, this happened because every other power was laid to waste by two successive world wars. You'd have been hard pressed to find a standing factory in Germany, Britain, or Russia in June of 1945.
Further, the US has had several boom and bust cycles people only really hear about 'the great depression' but there have been plenty of major slumps in the US economy for example around the Civil War. So, a nominal lead in good times is not that meaningful.
So it was only during WWII that the US went from near parity to a massive and sustained lead. And it did not take that long before we gave that up to either China or the EU depending on how you want to slice it.
Uh the US is a far bigger place? The civil war kicked off our version of the second industrial revolution, and the frontier (see ailroads) acted as starter fluid.
Obviously US was looking great at that time, hence the immigration boom. (As Mark Twain went for in the name, the guilded age did have plenty of issues, but so did Europe. Class was strictly more palpable there, generally speaking.)
Then, as others with that firm foundation, we surfed tsunami of two world wars that swallowed everyone else. That seal Ed the deal (and the second got us out of the great depression).
I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but I think my point stands that the US had many more factories left after the war, not to mention working age men. The US also had the Marshall Plan to repurpose that capacity into making products for domestic and foreign consumption.
The sum of power or wealth is not a very sensible metric, unless you are a country and not a person. The per-capita median of power or wealth is a more sensible metric. A specific lower percentile may be even more sensible.
To be fair this happened during a period of high unionization and a top income tax rate approaching 80%, or more. I'm not saying those things caused the growth, but they didn't stop it obviously.
Also your comment is dismissive of things like income inequality, companies hoarding cash instead of investing it, healthcare access, quality of life, stagnant wages, etc and other things have the US hasn't solved but has been better addressed in more liberal nations. That high GDP is nice, but it doesn't stop poverty in the south side of Chicago nor does it create jobs in the rust belt. Maybe if we took these issues more seriously we wouldn't have elections where loud-mouth populists win due to electorate anger and instead have a system of government that reflects the needs of the people more than corporations.
Well, that's were one makes a conscious choice to live below their means, and save money for a while, in order to build enough capital to bankroll the new enterprise. Or one might go the "friends, fools, family" route. Or heck, even work a new thing as a nights and weekends project for some period of time, then go out and raise money from angels, or early stage VC's.
The point being, there are options and - to some extent - the onus is on individuals to take charge of their situation and improve if, if they're dissatisfied.
Ahh, the whole, "If your company is mistreating you, it's your fault" argument. So if I am forced to stay at a job due to having a family or not having a "Safety net" due to getting cancer or something, it's my fault for not being able to leave?
The US is one of the very few countries in the world where its possible to roll up a bankroll, quit your job, try to do a startup and fail, and subsequently still be able to get another good job.
And a huge part of that is how cheap and frictionless hiring and firing is (relative to other countries).
Not really. Not to mention that there are infinitely many ways to spend time in a more rewarding (and for many also more socially useful) way than TV or a dayjob.
Maybe. I've always enjoyed whatever corporate employment I have had, because I could build things using much (!) more expensive equipment than I could afford to set up on my own. Maybe I've been fortunate - or maybe I'm just wired differently.
The things I enjoy building don't require expensive equipment. Just a little bit of time - which is spent working a 9 to 5. Most people work their 9 to 5 to pay their various bills (Rent, Food, Utilities, Internet, Entertainment). I think it is important to enjoy your work or else you'll be unhappy. But I don't think it's uncommon to enjoy your hobbies more than your work.
For example - I love languages! I wanted to become a polyglot in high school and speak several languages well enough to hold small talk. Practicing a language to fluency without residing in a country it is spoken is a lot of effort and requires a lot of self-motivation and time dedication. I rarely study anymore and am no longer confident in my ability to hold small talk in German or Portuguese. It's extremely satisfying to learn about various cultures, their history, and being able to speak with natives! You learn so many things about the world when you expand your ability to explore other cultures. No work to me is more satisfying.
But cultural and linguistic anthropologists, after putting themselves into debt from college, hardly make more than a McDonald's Manager. Not to mention work is sparse and difficult to find - nearly impossible outside of academia. I went with a job with more job opportunities and a higher base salary so that I could afford my more expensive hobbies like playing video games and actually visiting other countries to learn about their cultures. Something I wouldn't be able to afford to do if I had my "dream job" instead of a "well paying job".
But that leaves with me less energy and less motivation to study the foreign languages I would like to learn. I had to cut it down from twelve languages to three languages and I'm still not fluent in the two I'm studying. It's just too mentally exhausting to go from my day job to studying foreign languages during my free time day in and day out.
That makes sense. And it resonates with me. When I was young, I was interested in both Japanese and Russian. When I graduated, my first job out of college was with a semiconductor company in Japan. My experience, like your observation, was that I'd never be able to achieve any level of fluency unless I resided in-country and conducted my daily affairs in the language.
In Germany It is also called "Katzentisch" (cat table). This practice got famous during the privatization of state enterprises. It was later supplemented by unsuitable tasks. For example woman had to handle heavy packages without proper equipment.
Those situations certainly happen; whether it's contra-productive depends on the overall effects, not just whether some cases exists.
That said, some of these are just a result of incompetence by the legislators and/or courts. It's been a few years, but I've seen organizations in my country trying that "self-employed" and the Labour Court straightened them pretty quickly when they tried to fire someone. If you have a boss, fixed place of work, working hours, etc, you won't fool anyone.
The six-month probationary period is mostly fixed by not allowing it to be constantly renewed. Replacing all your workflow twice a year (even if gradually) is a heavy tax.
As a European, I am always amazed to hear about the agility in the US job market. i.e. quitting/getting fired with < a week's notice, being used to a 3-6 month's notice. It's interesting to see that the other extreme also exists.
On the flip-side, it's described as a terrible, terrible risk to hire anyone in a European country, because you're signing up for so much responsibility for them. You'd better really need someone before you hire them. You'd better really vet them because getting rid of a bad egg is nigh impossible. (Or so the narrative goes.)
Also you may end up working at a place full of bad eggs. Prospective employees in Europe who have an interest in a productive life also have to vet the company to make sure they select employees carefully and put the effort to get rid of who shouldn't be there. And that's hard to do unless you know someone inside.
In the UK I sometimes feel like we get the worst of both worlds.
There's a perception that it's nigh impossible to fire someone and that jobs are very secure, which leads to fairly conservative hiring policies and quite low wages (in the tech sector anyway - definitely low relative to contracting here or the equivalent job in the USA).
In reality, jobs really aren't that secure after all. I personally worked for a rather cut-throat small company that fired at least 4 people during the short time I worked there. They'd all worked there for less than a year. I knew all of them personally, and none of them were terrible at their jobs or really deserved to be fired. I'm convinced one of them was fired just because his project came to an end and he was no longer required.
You can't make a claim for unfair dismissal until you've worked somewhere for at least 2 years, so if you're fired before that time you've got very few options legally.
I can't speak about after the 2 years has elapsed because I've got no experience of that. Maybe then it really does become very difficult to fire someone. But people move around more often these days, I'm sure a large percentage of most employers' workforces are under the 2 year mark at any time.
> IBM and all of their massive "redundancy" layoffs are a clear indication of how easy it is to get rid of people in the UK.
No, it's an indication that a massive company with lots of resources is able to cover its legal bases enough that it can lay off large numbers of people in batches. That doesn't mean it's easy by any means.
European countries differ, but the tales are alike.
At least for Germany, if you want to get rid of somebody (outside the public sector), you can. If you don't know about somebody's qualifications, you have 6 months of evaluation and can start with a limited contract for up to two years (and companies routinely do).
If people underperform (or are otherwise unfit for the job), you can get rid of them after a small number of written warnings to notify them, so they can try to improve (somewhat similar to a performance improvement plan).
But that tale is very useful to keep employees subservient: "Be grateful that we take the risk of employing you, so better don't stick your neck out by asking for something outrageous such as a higher salary!", and so employers keep telling it.
As a contractor I've come to appreciate more liquid labor markets. Jobs are not marriages. In an ideal environment people should be able to move between jobs easily.
The downside of making it hard to fire someone is that employers guard against that by making the hiring process more rigorous. The law of unintended consequences strikes again.
I'm excited about the trend towards a 1099 economy. The caveat being that doing that requires the development of better social safety nets for income and healthcare, which doesn't seem to be the happening...
The problem with this is that you need to live in a place where there's a lot of relevant jobs. Even in a big metro area if jobs are too far away (on the opposite side of the metro area) it means you need to pack up and move every time you get a new job.
It works out well for you if you're a contractor and are single and have no kids and enjoy having no more belongings than you can pack in a few boxes.
If the US job market is so "agile" then why are companies so conservative in hiring and obsessed with not making the wrong decision? I've heard it on the hiring side at multiple companies in the past: "He's a good candidate but I have this small concern. Let's play it safe and talk to the next guy!" WHY? If it's so easy to fire someone if they ended up a lemon?
Legally firing someone is easy, but the cost of bringing someone on, getting them up to speed, having them become part of a team only to discover you wasted all that money and time and need to start that process again months later with a now slightly demoralized team who has less confidence in the hiring process is very significant.
I'd be curious to see an itemized list of such costs and compare the total to the opportunity cost of waiting another 2 months for the ultra-perfect candidate.
I'd be astonished if it's less expensive than waiting 2 months. A new employee costs a hunch of time for existing employees and is a net negative at first, and that ignores the wasted salary and cost and delay of starting the process again months later.
Because hiring people that you think you'll probably fire is not a nice thing to do: people quit jobs or reject other offers based on it.
I was involved in a hiring decision once where we were on the fence but made the hire because we really needed to fill the position. The person didn't work out for all the reasons we expected, and we fired them ~3 months later. It was really shitty, and I will never do it again. It's counterproductive, and it's unethical.
I don't understand why this is so terrible. Having been rejected for new jobs after clearing a lengthy interview process many times, I would much rather an employer just give me a chance. Then if I fail, at least I'll know it's not for me.
Think about it again in terms of what the parent said in the second paragraph: You, tboyd47, are hired but the employer correctly anticipated during the interview process that you would not be able to succeed but needed a body and you were the closest match. Did you really fail if you never had a chance? That's why he said it was unproductive and unethical.
If I get a job, stay in it for 3 months, and still can't succeed in it, then I would consider that a fair chance no matter what the person really thought of me. Not being given the job at all (and, if they hire like most companies I know, not being given a reason why) would make me feel more like I haven't been given a chance.
> why are companies so conservative in hiring and obsessed with not making the wrong decision?
Given that you're here on HN, you're probably biasing towards high skills jobs like software where a bad hire can really screw up the productivity of the entire team and project for a long time.
With lower-skilled jobs, employers are happy to hire and dump as their demand changes over time. Look at how many cashiers and customer service folks get hired right before the holiday season and then get canned after Christmas.
> WHY? If it's so easy to fire someone if they ended up a lemon?
it still costs money to bring the person up to speed, not to mention the opportunity costs involved in not having the right person for that much longer.
and many employers even in the US are terrified they'll be sued for wrongful termination. or they just don't want to risk having to do something viewed as "mean".
its easy but there are still costs to the org to onboard an employee and it still reflects poorly on the hiring manager to have hired the wrong/bad candidate
With an aging population, how can you simultaneously have too many workers? Or how can you allow such misallocation of workers? These workers have a good 10 to 20 productive years left in them but instead they ate left to while away time rather than have them be productive for another company which is understaffed.
> With an aging population, how can you simultaneously have too many workers?
Automation.
> how can you allow such misallocation of workers?
Try telling a "sarariman" that from tomorrow he's supposed to be a janitor. "Workers" are people, and over a certain age most people simply don't like change, let alone change for the worse. It's not as simple as reallocating bodies.
I understand the implications but at the same time simply whiling away time unproductively has to take both a mental and physical toll. The companies are essentially saying "we don't need you/want you, but we're obliged to keep you, even though we'd rather not". How can you even socialize with productive workers who likely see you as a kind of parasite (parasites having currency in Japan as people who mot only don't contribute but take away).
>Mr. Tani’s managers at Sony are already upping the ante. Starting this month, the company has ordered him to work 12-hour shifts on an assembly line at a Sony plant in Toyosato, more than an hour’s drive away. He says he will comply.
Now might be a good time to take that 54 month severance pay offer.
I would love to be hired by Sony (even on commission) to figure out something valuable for those forty holdouts in the story to do. There is probably something you can do with that talent that is better than having them sit around.
Yup it's odd isn't it. I bet more than one of them has an idea for a Sony product or other start up idea, and the rest of them have all the time in the world to develop it -- on full pay, no less. And if they don't have the skills, well they also have plenty of time to learn.
A probably silly question from someone without any understanding of the relevant laws:
I'm assuming that it is ok to fire employees when a company goes bankrupt, even when that company is fully owned by another company that is still doing well. Would it be possible to create a new subsidiary for each new employee?
The subsidiary's CEO (only employee) would need to generate revenue as dictated by the company's chairman of the board, which would effectively be the employee's direct manager.
I imagine there would be tons of complications, but wonder whether that could work in theory.
I do think it's a balancing act though - we are incredibly lucky in tech where we can have infinite flexibility in what we do. If you are working at Walmart I actually think reasonable protections should be provided.
By the same logic, medical schools are counterproductive because by making getting a degree harder make giving healthcare advice harder. Ditto for law schools.
If you are going to throw your lot with an employer, you want to be very sure that said employer is willing to go the extra mile to bring you up and see you succeed; and yes, that will be harder that going to work for the first john that waves a $20USD bill in front of your nose.
Employment does not make sense otherwise. No regulation, or much relaxed regulation, would be the equivalent of owning a capital intensive company that signs a deal to work exclusively for one customer. No sane investor would want to put more than 5% of their networth there, and only in the case that said investment paid heads and shoulders above the next best option in the market. So why do you expect employees to invest 100% of their time and effort in such a Devil's deal?
> By the same logic, medical schools are counterproductive because by making getting a degree harder make giving healthcare advice harder. Ditto for law schools.
They do make healthcare and lawyers more expensive. It is a question of whether the government should force a minimum standard on buyers which removes cheaper sellers that do not conform to the standards.
> If you are going to throw your lot with an employer, you want to be very sure that said employer is willing to go the extra mile to bring you up and see you succeed; and yes, that will be harder that going to work for the first john that waves a $20USD bill in front of your nose.
That's your opinion and you are free to ask your employer a contract that makes it harder to fire you.
What I'm talking about is the government mandating this.
As a corollary of 2nd Celine Law: Freedom of association is only possible between equals.
What I am talking about is that it is good an proper to have employee friendly Labor Laws, because under ordinary circumpstances the asymetry of power between employers and employees is simply too great.
The Japan case is simply an excesive case, - more suitable for a medieval society that our current one, - but the contrary of a stupid idea is another stupid idea. US style "employment at will" is the bane of all free people's everywhere. You cannot possibly be concerned with the multiple civic duties of free citizenship if your means of life are held hostage by a plutocrat elite.
> As a corollary of 2nd Celine Law: Freedom of association is only possible between equals.
Why?
> What I am talking about is that it is good an proper to have employee friendly Labor Laws, because under ordinary circumpstances the asymetry of power between employers and employees is simply too great.
The asymmetry of power between a manager and an employee is not large. The asymmetry of power between a company and an employee is large because a company is composed of much more people than an employee.
Employees can negotiate for whatever conditions they want.
> You cannot possibly be concerned with the multiple civic duties of free citizenship if your means of life
As I said, such labor laws can make employment harder because the company doesn't want to hire the wrong person and be unable to fire that person.
I feel like I have worked with people in corporate who sought these situations out. A no-work job was their goal, and boy did they work hard trying to achieve it.
I've always found it surprising how easy it is to find yourself in a no-work situation like this at a large corporation, without even trying!
Projects will end, people and managers will get shuffled around and suddenly you have no direct work responsibilities for months and months. Sometimes years if you were to let it go on like that.
It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two. I'd hop on Hacker News only to find all the links were already visited. I would try to learn some new technologies but it didn't have the same impact that learning them out of necessity had.
Eventually you have to sound the alarm to people that you don't have work to do, sometimes repeatedly, before they will 'fix' the problem by assigning you somewhere else.
I honestly think that this is the default state that workers settle into at many large companies. There are some small percentage of highly productive workers doing a ton of work, and a lot of very low productivity workers making up the rest of the ranks.
I've never worked at a startup, but one of the things that I think I would find appealing about them is that there are so few people that everyone's function would be important and that situations like the above would be difficult to go unnoticed.
In retrospective, it was probably the best time I had in that company. That's how I got back into programming after spending several years "consulting" (sending emails, doing powerpoints and excel spreadsheets, doing meetings, blegh), which was a very good way to get my startup up and running when I was finally laid off.
The only bad part was when someone came looking for "someone unassigned". These were really dull tasks which literally anyone could make, like moving data from paper to spreadsheet.
Or that time when I had to "help" a this guy with a MS Access database that he had been working on for weeks. It was such an atrocious thing. I remember there was a column called "Money". Sometimes it had a number. Others it had a currency name. I redid the whole thing in an afternoon, with Excel. But the guy was someone's son and was impossible to let go.
So they let me go.
The severance package was great, a good safety net for my startup, so it was ok at the end :)
> It is something that sounds great, but if you have any drive at all it will drive you crazy after a month or two.
My laptop is being repaired since last week and I'm on a temporary desktop now, desperately trying to find things to do that won't cause merge conflicts with the unpushed work that's on my harddrive. Just got told the CPU fan that arrived was the wrong size and I'll have to wait another week to resume work on the tasks that I was doing before.
I feel like I'm going crazy already, and it's been just a week!
Ha this happened to me once when I was hired as a contractor to take over another employee's responsibility. The guy refused to train me (or talk to me) and I just sat around for 6 months with absolutely no work to do. I've had other instances where work was really light after a big release and we essentially did busy work until the next iteration was approved by the higher ups
Not to mention actively subverting people who want to achieve something, adding more load to the rest of the team and just being a motivation drain.
I've worked in a post socialist worker owned company where this culture existed - eg. a guy came to work doing nothing for 5 years because his role was obsolete, he was old and failed to retrain but was 5 years off retirement age, he was there all his life and family friends with middle management - so they covered for him. Coming in every day 8-4 doing nothing but web surfing in the corner of the office. Why should anyone else there do any work ? He wasn't the only one who got obsoleted with new tech, other people his age retrained successfully - he was a failure and he got rewarded.
Plenty of situations like that in that company made me hate social criteria in work environment - even if I was required to do very little work and paid relatively well - I quit on my own because I wasn't able to accomplish almost anything significant in two years there even tough there were plenty of opportunities if the incentive structure was right. Leave social security to social services, UBI or whatever - don't screw with incentives or create blocks for people who actually want to do work. They did eventually fall apart in a few years when the political connections and money infusions dried out during the financial crisis.
I have too, and I don't really begrudge them for it. A former boss was elated when he got to switch to a quiet, slow-moving department because he'd leave work at 5pm sharp every single day and get to spend more time with his kids.
It really just depends what your priorities in life are.
I almost automatically closed the tab because it looked like a paywall. Why do I have to click "Show full article" to see the article on the page for that article? O_O
I vaguely remember implementing this exact thing for at least two clients, and if remember correctly the reason is that such a 'show full article' button allows anything 'below the fold' (meaning the button) to be more prominently visible.
It's a rather ironic that I had to turn off my uMatrix filters to get the full 'experience' of that button.
>Not to mention stolen land via genocide, slave labor, accessible natural resources, huge geographic isolation from competition, and even a lucky point in time coinciding with the industrial revolution that began in Europe (and particularly Britain, which begat the U.S.).
Similar things could be said of all the once-great powers of Europe and Asia. Big deal.
(I really don't understand the self-loathing streak a lot of Americans seem to have. As a second-generation immigrant, I'm delighted and proud to be a citizen of a superpower and will fight to the last to keep it that way.)
> Similar things could be said of all the once-great powers of Europe and Asia.
They absolutely could but if two countries do X, it doesn't alter the fact that they both did X.
I'm from the UK and our colonial history was pretty grim, I fully accept it, I'm not ashamed of it (I wasn't around at the time) and I'm not proud of it (again not around at the time), if you don't understand where you come from then you miss out on a lot.
The US is a large, prosperous economy with a productive workforce, it's simply not possible to deny that and no sane person would but it's not perfect either.
The US benefited from a confluence of events (and some very smart leaders who created a pretty good system in aggregate) to capitalise on those events and drive an economy.
Europe and it's major powers destroying their economic bases with two catastrophic wars certainly aided in that, the US was largely untouched domestically by WWII and at the end it had a vast production capacity, a skilled workforce, abundant natural resources and a world that was crying out for it's products and it capitalised on it well, the thing was it also had comparitively weak workers protection but it didn't matter when you could charge a lot for your goods because you where the only game in town.
As someone from Britain while there is much I don't like about the US (primarily it's politicians but some other stuff as well), I have to give a huge amount of credit for what they did in the post war years, the Marshall plan and the rebuilding of Japan was an incredible thing for a country to do (even if it wasn't for altruistic reasons, it was still an impressive feat to bootstrap multiple savaged countries back to relative prosperity inside 20 years).
I am also proud to be an American and I could never live anywhere else (except perhaps with my extended family in Italy), but I am not unrealistic about the human costs that made the country what it is today.
But just because other people do bad things doesn't make it better to do them yourself. In fact it makes things much worse to excuse yourself and others in those ways. Is spitefulness really the the best that this species can do?
> Not to mention stolen land via genocide, slave labor, accessible natural resources, huge geographic isolation from competition, and even a lucky point in time coinciding with the industrial revolution that began in Europe
It's amazing how easily people forget about the long history of European imperial conquest, which continued well into the 20th century.
> I think a lot of the anger in America today is coming out of the realization that we coming to have to compete on a level playing field for the first time in our nation's history.
There is no level playing field. There isn't now, and there hasn't been for several centuries (if there ever even was).
