Whereas in the US: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...

(from HN a few days ago IIRC)

> Add that to the Japanese working culture where tenure is merit, and staying in the same company is valued by employers in general.

imo this is by far the biggest driver of “keeping talent”. japanese society and businesses don’t reward people that jump from job to job.

This can have negative effects too. While I don't think "society" (who's that?) rewards people who job-hop. However, being willing to move to the employer who values you the most every couple of years is bound to increase your salary, because you're optimising your match to the market. I wonder how Japanese businesses avoid recognising this value, unless they just frown on people moving around.

Western employers don't deliberately reward people who job-hop, but their actions actually encourage employees to job-hop.

- Not investing in people enough (e.g. training)

- Prefer outside candidates to internal promotions

- Not willing to give significant raises, but willing to hire new people at a higher salary

All those actions end up rewarding job-hoppers, even if it's probably not the intended goals behind this employers' behaviour.

> Western employers don't deliberately reward people who job-hop,

Don't techbro employers also deliberately reward people to job-hop to them, from where the person is currently, by knowingly providing a big pay bump over the person's current place?

Kinda yes and no.

The “no” part comes from understanding what’s happening. And what’s happening is that for every year you work there, the pay for the level you are at increases across all of them.

However, you wouldn’t be getting those increases (you would still get some, just not as significant). Talking about averages, it means that the person who got hired for the same level as you at the same company 3 years later would get paid noticeably more than you currently are (unless share prices skyrocketed, but we are talking about current compensation, not future or past; if shares tanked since you started, the new employee gets an even better deal).

Assuming no promotions or anything like that in the meantime (e.g., you are at your terminal level already or you just need more time for a promotion), you are SOL. It was almost comical at times. The mid-level dev i was working with was getting paid not that significantly more than me (an entry level dev at the time), and was only doing a little bit better mostly due to his old shares (or whatever was left of it, as he was diversifying heavily and selling the stock on vest and dumping it into etfs, so he missed out on his massive chest of old shares going 5x). He had been with the company for 6-7 years at that point. Every dev hired at his level at the time i was working with him would get paid about 50% more than him in total comp.

So yeah, the other employers would pay him more if he switched, but they aren’t “rewarding” him for job-hopping, it’s more like his current employer just not paying him as much as they would for a new hire at his level, because they are betting on the fact that he would just stay due to inertia or whatever other reasons. And guess what, they were right, as he is still there and the company saved a lot of money on him and others in a similar situation.

That’s where the good old boomerang trick of leaving, working for a bit elsewhere, and then coming back comes from. You get your salary “adjusted” twice, and then you come back.

Note: this usually only applies reliably up to senior level (aka the terminal level for the vast majority). Once you go higher or into management-type positions, things stop being this simple and work out rather differently.

> Western employers don't deliberately reward people who job-hop

I don't know of any employers who would admit to deliberately rewarding job-hopping outside the company[1], but I suspect that's out of concern for potential negative consequences of admitting to the practice, not because they don't do it intentionally.

Hiring skilled job-hoppers often makes a lot of sense. They bring in knowledge and experience of things that worked (or didn't) in other organizations. It can be a great way to avoid getting stuck in local maximums, and avoid repeating mistakes others have already made.

[1] At least one previous employer deliberately rewarded job-hopping between roles internally, because it gave people a much wider base of knowledge and promoted empathy between people in different parts of the company.

> Hiring skilled job-hoppers often makes a lot of sense. They bring in knowledge and experience of things that worked (or didn't) in other organizations. It can be a great way to avoid getting stuck in local maximums, and avoid repeating mistakes others have already made.

Understandable. A counter would be that you can't expect to retain someone who's really good if this is your habit, but the counter to that would be that you can make it up if you're really cultivating a culture of hiring high quality job-hoppers.

It's the difference between taking one extended-release medication or taking a new pill every hour for the same effect. With the ER, if you get a dud, you're in trouble all day. With short-lived medication, duds can be a big problem in the short term but overall you can still be getting better.

It can make sense, but serial job hoppers may also keep bouncing to the next thing before learning what the medium to longer term implications are of certain technologies or design decisions. For example operational issues and maintenance.

I’ve seen teams get screwed over by someone parachuting in to deliver v1 with shiny new tech and getting a pat on the back ($$) for a job well done. Fast forward 6-12 months and you realize the new tech debt is as bad or worse as the old tech debt.

That said, stagnation and sticking with Blub can also bring its own set of issues.

Currently dealing with this situation, shiny new architect declares Kafka as "the one true way" and forces all services to use it.

Fast forward 12 months and we have a terrible, complex, non-scalable, system, which should have just been a really simple REST service but instead we just have another point of failure.

Oh, and they quit so have no idea that their designs were trash.

> They bring in knowledge and experience of things that worked (or didn't) in other organizations.

They also bring in a lot of change for change sake because they don't know the current systems.

Naturally, unless your employer is the employer that most highly values your skills in the world, another employer will pay more for you. Changing job is a way of finding that employer who values your skills the most.

That's just what will happen in companies that value skills more. If other companies value loyalty more, then their employee profile will look different.

That involves a really unrealistically narrow and abstract idea of "skill", where they're just some characteristic of an individual that manifest independent of the environment. In practice, people perform differently in different environments, and a high-performer with deep collegial relationships at HyperBiz might have pretty unimpressive impact as a newbie at HoopaCorp. This is even true among engineers, if not especially true among them.

Most of us do better work around good, familiar colleagues (once we find them) than at the place with the biggest TCO budget, and many of us prefer to work somewhere that invites our best work more than one that let us buy the fancier trim line on our already-luxury car.

The cultural distinction isn't "valuing skill" vs "valuing loyalty" - it's a worldview of radical individualism vs interdependent pragmatism.

> That involves a really unrealistically narrow and abstract idea of "skill", where they're just some characteristic of an individual that manifest independent of the environment.

No it doesn't. This is about companies needing to hire a skill and valuing it more than your current employer values it. Companies don't hire people who are already performing well in their environment, because they're a new hire.

> Most of us do better work

I'm not talking about this. I'm saying, say, a web developer working for a scaleup with a global customer base is going to be worth paying more for than a web developer working for a company with a customer base of up to 1000 businesses.

> many of us prefer to work somewhere that invites our best work

This also irrelevant - I'm not saying what people should choose; I'm saying that moving for a raise is you finding somewhere that values your skills more right now.

> it's a worldview of radical individualism vs interdependent pragmatism

This is just silly biased phrasing. It's not about individualism at all. It's about hiring. Unless you think hiring individuals is radical individualism, and only complete teams should be hired, like the NFL.

> Naturally, unless your employer is the employer that most highly values your skills in the world, another employer will pay more for you. Changing job is a way of finding that employer who values your skills the most.

This sounds like the Peter principle.

Depends, in Portugal outside IT that usually means one isn't good enough keeping their job in first place, or is only working across low paying jobs.

Not really a good sell to have CVs with long list of employers.

The problem with raises and promotions is that it's slow, requires a lot more work from the manager, and doesn't increase the manager's number of reports. Thus hiring externally is a lot easier and more beneficial to the manager. Especially for those managers who are serial job hoppers themselves.

Another factor is the recruiting teams are assessed on conversion, how many passed phone screens, on sites, and offer accepts etc, but not on the performance of those employees after they join. So recruiters just spam anyone they think will have a remote chance of passing some stage of the interview process.

There have to be consequences to hiring a bad hire for the recruiting team and they have to be severe enough to make recruiting risk averse.

But this will never be the case if the organization is in growth mode where everything manager is trying to get as much headcount and hiring as fast as possible.

Would it be inaccurate to imply that the many western employers are prefer to maintain by the position and power over their employees rather than empowering them to compete against abundance of competitors in their respective countries and on the world stage?

true, but japanese society values stability more than anything. as such, the value of increasing salary by job-hopping is dwarfed by the unpredictability it generates.

but there are a lot of other negative effects. being stuck in a dead-end job is a common issue for example.

of course, i am heavily generalising here, so grain of salt and all of that.

Japan is basically socialism when it comes to values and the actions people take. Limited tolerance for big change or extreme competition, very static communities and low mobility. It used to work uptill the 80's, but in the age of innovation and change, it's backfiring.

That's not what socialism means.

Socialism is state-controlled means of production, IIRC.

Socialism is worker-controlled means of production. State-controlled means of production is socialism if the workers control the state (which is generally not the case for states that call themselves "socialist").

Youre kidding yourself if you think the average worker in Japan has much say in the company, or how those companies direct the state

they're conservative, in the sense they don't like change, but that ain't nothin to do w/ Karl M

I don't think Japan is socialist.

There's nothing in their answer that indicates this, you are confusing with the other person.

No, that's communism, or at least what communist propaganda say it is. In communism the means of production are controlled by the state (saying they're controlled by the workers, but it's false).

AFAIK, the means of production (large ones, not a one-man-tailor-shop) were never controlled by the workers, except maybe in the extremely short periods of anarchism.

No, that's communism.

Depends who you ask, but Marx used the two interchangeably. Lenin thought that Socialism was Communism stage 1.[0]

But I think it's pretty normal to see Socialism as State-owned means of production. Trust your bureaucrats!

[0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/communism/Marxian-communism

In any case, Japan and its history are very far away from Socialism / Communism. Meiji Era was pre-industrial Samurai. Meiji / Imperial Japan was Fascist but with the rise of independent companies like Mitsubishi (who had ties to the old Samurai families). Perhaps its best to use Japanese words: like Zaibatsu, to describe these concepts.

I don't know if Capitalist is the best word for Japan, because those weird centuries-old Samurai families / companies are just an alien concept to Western-language. Yes, Zaibatsu is kinda-sorta like a Western Company or Corporation, but not really.

If I were forced to put Japan on the Capitalist vs Communist axis, I'd say the proliferation of Zaibatsu clearly put them towards Capitalist slant (ie: private entities who control large sums of wealth). But its very different than Western societies or our concept of companies. The values system of a Zaibatsu / Japanese century-old company is very different from the values system of a traditional American mega-corp.

---------------

Going back to this topic: Nintendo itself was founded in 1889, during this rise of the Meiji Era and Zaibatsu (though I don't think Nintendo ever grew to the size large enough to be considered a Zaibatsu... it grew up and existed in the era of such beasts).

Due to the emphasis of longevity and company values, Japan has odd traditions. Such as the concept of adult-adoption, where some Fathers (often businessmen in charge of a 200, 300+ year old company) will adopt 20 to 30+ year olds with the expectation that these adults will take over a family business.

Does this make Japan more capitalist or socialist? Well, neither. Its just different and probably best to try to not bring Western axis (like Capitalism vs Socialism) to describe their society.

Japanese society from Meiji era onward was undoubtably influenced by the British (Japan studied the history of the other "industrialized island", and used Britain as the basis for their new government / theories). And later, when USA took over and occupied after WW2, Japan further was influenced by USA. As such, I really do think they're more capitalist if we had to pick capitalism vs socialism.

Japan's big deviation from what "capitalism" has meant since the 1980s, in the US and Britain, at least—which is to say, neoliberal economics—wasn't quite as weird to "westerners" at the time it was really at its height, I think, because we hadn't so entirely shifted our Overton window to put neoliberalism smack in the middle. But now, for sure, it doesn't look like what's usually promoted as healthy capitalism around here.

Instead of "my half-understanding of Ricardo means I'm sure this will make us all better off" free trade and laissez-faire domestic economic policies, they pursued lopsided (export-focused) trade, plus heavy government intervention and public-private partnerships aimed at accelerating technological development and reducing domestic technical competition among the zaibatsu, in order to make them more competitive in foreign markets. Their "miracle" economy spanning decades involved a ton of government guidance and spending and seemingly-weird shit like deliberately keeping domestic prices higher than they otherwise could have been—with the guidance part maybe being the most surprising bit, to those who've internalized certain limited ideas about what can and (surely!) cannot work well in economic policy.

It worked incredibly well and was the first draft of what would become the blueprint for the "Asian Tiger" economic strategy.

[EDIT] Big deviation in the postwar era and (kinda) up to today, I mean. Obviously it was doing some different stuff during and before WWII.

I'm talking about real-life meaning of the words. Real life communism and socialism is different from the books.

Then you're just describing your own experience. Unless you're saying your experience is the objective definition of a real life definition. Is there an objective definition you had in mind?

My experience is shared with millions of other people that lived in communism. To me (us), the difference between communism and the rest of socialist spectrum is that in communism, the state owns (100%, not just some shares) and runs (manages) the factories.

Japanese society is collectivism, not socialism. They have a long history and many traditions around keeping social harmony. This is has both good and bad effects.

This gets confused for socialism because when action happens, everyone is on the same page and working to support the action. Before that point, there are lots of meeting and discussions to create harmony and make sure that everyone agrees with the action. Sometimes this is lead bottom up, workers will get an idea and circulate it to get everyone's buy in but without the upper management's approval, no one will try an idea for fear of causing offense. Which leads me in to how they are very authoritarianism, if the boss tells you a poster is blue not green, everyone will agree that it is blue. Only after the boss is gone will people stand around and question the edict.

If you look at how Toyota reacted to electric vehicles, someone did not like the idea or their pet project was fuel cells and that is the direction they took for a long time, rather than hedge their bets and split focus that is what they were committed to and now they are late to the EV party where they had a large head start with the Prius.

> being stuck in a dead-end job is a common issue for example.

A job would look like a dead-end only if you hate it.

Hate has nothing to do with a job being a dead-end. A dead-end job just means that there is nowhere to go from there, your progressed as high as you possibly could in it, and staying there won’t help you with your future career elsewhere neither.

Kind of an extreme example, but it illustrates the point well: that one forgotten employee from the infamous reddit thread[0] who got hired, the company had a mismanagement shitshow, and he eventually ended up having no manager and no assignments/work for months. He realized they just forgot about him and continued showing up to work to just play games and relax by himself, all while collecting the paycheck for over a year. IIRC he mentioned enjoying this, but worrying about what could happen if they “unforget” about him. That situation was a classic example of a dead-end job, even though OP was having a good time at first.

P.S. The original threat wasn’t the most popular one, but the follow up to it with how he eventually got found out (about a year after the original post) was massive[1].

0. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/s/gUfaIZ65QI

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/s/vj71mPNGAw

> A dead-end job just means that there is nowhere to go from there, your progressed as high as you possibly could in it, and staying there won’t help you with your future career elsewhere neither.

If you love your job, you wouldn't want to go anywhere else or "progress" in your career. BTW, what is that "progress" in a career? Endless better pay? Longer job title? More work? More difficult work? Switch to management (that's a different career to me)?

The example is not relevant. That's not a dead-end job. If there's no work, then that's no longer a job at all.

> I wonder how Japanese businesses avoid recognising this value

Current employees are experts at the code base and processes. They have way higher value for the company than other equally good in general non-employees, who would have to spend alot of payed time to get into things.

Not just code base, but that's a big part.

But also processes -- a big one if you're in a large org -- subject matter, even simple stuff like getting a laptop setup and getting AD groups set up correctly for all roles and accesses can take a long time. I've been at multiple multinationals/F500s and it often took 3 months just to get me into things (part of that also being we don't give sudo/admin to the newly hired).

I've known PMs from aviation work that aren't deeply technical but know TONS about how to drive projects in that sector, who to contact, what's a priority, and that's not something you can easily put into a udemy course the way you can SAP or NodeJS.

This is often true. But some times the older programmers can't adapt to the new technology and we get technical disasters like the newer Pokemon games.

> can't adapt to

This is probably more appropriately said as "don't know". To give a past example, Final Fantasy 7 was pretty famous for having bad character models but it didn't take long for the same team to figure out how to make better ones. FF8 had much more real-looking models. Not many games today look significantly better than FF15 on standard console hardware.

Probably the "disaster" in the Pokemon game context is that Nintendo didn't feel the need to keep up rather than that they couldn't keep up. I get the feeling that the generation 10 games are going to be a strong counter statement to such comments. Likely in no small part because the people working on it are the same people who released the games which critics like to call a disaster.

Nintendo does not develop the Pokemon games for what it is worth. The quality of Game Freak's output is notably lower than Nintendo first party releases in general from a technical perspective. Even the original Pokemon games are some of the most famously buggy games of any prominence, so it is nothing new.

>Probably the "disaster" in the Pokemon game context is that Nintendo didn't feel the need to keep up rather than that they couldn't keep up.

Nintendo is the publisher of the Pokemon games and co-owner of the Pokemon IP. However, they do NOT develop the Pokemon games - that's Game Freak.

That was a team making gameboy games switching to making home console games, it will take a bit for them to adapt. But letting them adapt and learn new skills is probably better for the economy than firing them like we would do in the west.

I don't know about "can't adapt". As I get older my willingness to put up with programming fads has gone to zero though. I guess that is some form of can't adapt. Then again I have only worked for 8 years.

We fall back on the tried, tested and more reliable methods and fads seem to become glaringly obvious. This can easily be assumed as inadaptability. Maybe I am just old now.

> "society" (who's that?)

It's just the average of individual persons in relevant positions of power.

That is, if 80% of direct managers use indirect pressure to get employees to work more than they're contractually expected to, "society" expects people to be overworked. (totally random example, not sure if it applies to Nintendo)

(we could discuss deeper causes, there's no saying where those managers learned their behavior, but that's not what we're measuring)

I big part of that is Japanese shame / honour. This means the 'worst' employee is not as big a negative than in Western culture.

Once upon a time, things weren't so different here. Maybe there wasn't an explicit value judgement but you could expect to work 30 years in the same establishment.

> japanese society and businesses don’t reward people that jump from job to job.

I can see why this is good and bad, but honestly, I wish more places in the West were like this too. I've had the same job for 7 years as a programmer, and it baffles me how many people find that surprising/unusual.

I seriously rather not look for another job, but I due to some upcoming changes at my work, I think I may have to.

I think that Japanese attitudes towards work have somewhat shifted, especially as young Japanese eyes look a bit enviously to Western tech companies, with their inflated pay and fun culture. Really, the protracted recession they've had for a few decades has sown the idea that nothing is really guaranteed anymore like it was from postwar to about the 90s.

Nevertheless, given that the five developers in question started work in the 70s or 80s, when the Japanese work ethic of "bust your ass for a company all your life and they'll take care of you" was very much a thing, it doesn't surprise me that they've all stuck with Nintendo, which itself seems in it for the long haul like a traditional Japanese company. The company has been very good about knowledge transfer from older generations to younger, in ways some developers (e.g. Sega) haven't. Mario and Zelda, for instance, are not being spearheaded by Miyamoto anymore. He pops in on conference calls to offer guidance, but the developers who worked under him have now taken the helm of these franchises, driving them in new directions while preserving their essence... and Miyamoto is free to pursue passion projects like movies and theme parks (thus actually becoming "gaming's Walt Disney").

Nintendo has a pretty massive war chest though. Increasing salaries by 10% is not likely to significantly impact their expenses/income.

I don't know of many companies that increase salaries or have executives take pay cuts while sparing employees during downturns, irrespective of how large their war chests.

Much to the opposite, I am more used at seeing companies layoff employees while posting record profits.

The falling Yen prompted many Japanese employers to give raises across the board. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/03/15/business/econom...

Whereas US business execs make mass layoffs while cashing out hundreds of millions in equity. But at least they take “full responsibility”!

I feel like they are managing a tech company like you would manage a 300 old Japanese workshop and still be there for next 300 years.