Pros
- Good Pay - Generous Bonus Scheme - Private Healthcare - People (most people are generally nice, but some are antisocial and strange.) - Nice Company Vehicle (for sales staff) - Free Coffee and Tea - Good Entry into Career Path (stepping stone job) - Nice Offices (mostly) - Good, Interesting Products
Cons
- Stressy & Demanding: You will be abused for all your worth. There will never be enough staff on your team. - Cheap: The company will try to cut costs at every possibility. Now, this alone is not inherently a bad thing, but often it is to the detriment of staff satisfaction or efficiency. Sometimes it is better to pay a little extra for a better service or product. - Poor Work/Life Balance: There is a culture of overtime. Almost everyone stays late at least once a week but often way more. Each staff member has more work than can be realistically done comfortably in a standard work day. It is presented as a choice to do overtime but good luck completing your work without doing any. Perhaps poor work/life balance goes without saying for a Japanese company. - Obsession with Metrics & KPIs: Metrics for the sake of metrics. For instance, 'number of support calls taken'. An astute observer may realise that this metric is fundamentally uncontrollable by the people who it is being used to measure. - Boyish Sales Side Culture: The sales side are almost universally 'lads lads' and it is immediately obvious. The ratio of men to women is quite bad. Some female sales staff report feeling uncomfortable with the culture. - Terrible Turnover: The turnover rate is abysmal and embarrassing. Everybody knows it. It is terrible for morale when everyone you like just leaves within a couple of years (often less). They do not value staff as individuals, and why would they? Their current business model works and they have huge profit margins. Bring in a new set of naïve graduates each year to replace the ones who moved onto something better. I genuinely feel bad for the new starters every time, because they really have no idea what they are getting into, but they soon find out. Most people don't make it to 2 years. - Terrible Management: Your mileage may vary and I am sure there are at least a few decent managers, but most people hate their managers and for good reason. You may find them to be unkind, rude, insulting, unempathetic, immature, emotionally unregulated, unsupportive, unhelpful. Some of the managers would die for the company despite being disrespected by their superiors themselves (its quite embarrassing). - Career Ceiling: If you are not Japanese, good luck advancing past manager status. - Strict & Inflexible: Want to leave a tiny bit early from work so you are not travelling super late to another office? Forget about it. Want to go grab a coffee from a nearby café during work hours? Not happening. You will be a good little slave to your corporate Japanese overlords.
