←back to thread

How Japanese black companies oppress workers (2014)

(www.tofugu.com)
178 points rawgabbit | 1 comments | 18 Nov 24 04:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
Show context
anovikov ◴[18 Nov 24 06:13 UTC] No.42170165[source]▶
Why don't they just emigrate? Work culture seems to be better just about everywhere and on top of that, salaries in Japan are shit, and anyone with half the Japanese work ethics will be a dream employee in U.S. or let alone Europe which is full of entitled, lazy slackers.
replies(2): >>42170232 #>>42171936 #
autumnstwilight ◴[18 Nov 24 06:28 UTC] No.42170232[source]▶
At least in IT, it's not even necessary to emigrate- foreign owned companies offer significantly better salaries and working conditions.

The sticking point is English ability. It's genuinely a very difficult thing to learn a second language to the point of being workplace-functional in it, and an additional level of daily stress and mental effort to do everything in your non-native language. The culture here doesn't exactly reward risk-taking and failing in public, and unfortunately becoming proficient in a language requires that you stumble through things a lot while you practice. Furthermore, most Japanese people have experienced fairly ineffective methods of teaching English in schools and ended up rather demoralized about their ability to learn it. (And if you're currently in a job that demands a lot of overtime, when do you study?)

replies(1): >>42170869 #
anovikov ◴[18 Nov 24 09:02 UTC] No.42170869[source]▶
But isn't it kinda mandatory for any IT person to speak usable English, worldwide? Even if super closed societies where language education sucks beyond imagination, like Russia, they mostly do.
replies(3): >>42170973 #>>42172077 #>>42178969 #
1. autumnstwilight ◴[19 Nov 24 00:42 UTC] No.42178969[source]▶
Well, it's true that most my my colleagues can read English well enough to get the gist of docs and Stack Overflow, but when it comes to speaking, they don't know how to pronounce a lot of the words, to the point of being very difficult for the listener to understand, and struggle to put together a coherent sentence (particularly in the short timeframe needed to have a smooth conversation). They also find speaking English to be highly stressful and generally avoid it as much as they can.